South Texas is drowning.
It began when dallying Hurricane Harvey and his storm surge made landfall halfway between Galveston and Corpus Christi, then pirouetted in slow motion just south of San Antonio before heading back out to the Gulf of Mexico for another slurp of heat energy. From there, Harvey is expected to turn back toward Texas and make an even straighter aim at Houston and the rest of the Gulf Coast.
Forecasters don’t expect the storm to regain hurricane strength again, but its plodding, easterly track means as much as 25 more inches of rain could fall on the Houston area – on top of the 30 inches of recent days.
Imagine 50 inches of rain in less than a week – that’s about as much rain as normally falls in Chattanooga in an entire year. In Houston, the nation’s fourth largest metropolitan area, roads have become rivers and thousands of people are stranded, waiting for rescue.
Near Galveston, social media helped rescue a number of elderly women sitting in waist-deep flood waters in the swamped La Vita Bella Nursing Home of Dickinson, Texas. Timothy McIntosh, a dividends manager, posted the photo and an urgent plea for help – sent to him by his mother-in-law who owns the home.