NEW ORLEANS — Harvey was taking aim at Texas again Tuesday and forecast to make landfall later somewhere along the Lone Star state’s border with Louisiana after swamping the Houston area with record rainfall and deadly flooding.
Among the latest confirmed victims of the now tropical storm was veteran Houston Police Officer Steve Perez, 60, who drowned while driving to work on Sunday, the city’s police chief, Art Acevedo, confirmed just hours after his body was found earlier Tuesday.
“The wife told me she asked him not to go in,” Acevedo said, his voice choking with emotion. “His response was, ‘We’ve got work to do.'”
As it makes landfall again, Harvey was expected to pack winds of up to 45 mph and drench the upper Texas coast and southwestern Louisiana with anywhere from six to 12 inches of rain before heading deeper into Dixie, the National Weather Service warned.
Louisiana Gov. Jon Bel Edwards said they expect to get even more rain and warned there could be power outages and hundreds of trees could topple because the ground is already saturated.
“It is not going to turn back into a hurricane or anything of the sort, but the winds are picking up a bit,” Edwards said. “We do anticipate over the next 24 hours that southwest Louisiana will see an additional 10 to 24 inches of rain.”
Some 500 people were evacuated from the Gulf Coast near the Texas-Louisiana border where Harvey is expected to make landfall around midday Wednesday, Edwards said.
More than 250 were already bunking in Louisiana shelters, more than a dozen government offices were closed, and 671 members of the Louisiana National Guard were “working on Harvey operations,” the governor said.
“This storm is going to play out over the next 48 to 72 hours,” Edwards said. “It has tremendous potential to continue to drop heavy amounts of water and to prevent people from going about their normal business in a safe manner.”
In New Orleans, Mayor Mitch Landrieu marked the 12th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated his city — and sparked an exodus to residents to new lives in Houston.
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“We lost 1,800 fellow Americans, and the devastation we experienced was great,” said Landrieu. “No city welcomed more New Orleanians following Katrina than Houston, and our hearts break for them as Hurricane Harvey displaces so many of their citizens.”
Later, when it appeared that the Crescent City was not directly in Harvey’s sights, Landrieu announced that schools and public buildings would be open Wednesday. He said the forecast called for three to five inches of rain.
“We believe we can handle this,” the mayor said. “We are prepared for whatever comes our way.”
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But Landrieu warned New Orleans residents to remain vigilant. “Things can change on a dime,” he said.
There had been fears that New Orleans would not be able to withstand a huge storm because a large number of the pumps and turbines that keep the low-lying city from being swamped by rainwater were not working.
President Donald Trump has already declared a disaster in five Louisiana parishes ahead of the storm’s arrival, authorizing FEMA to coordinate relief efforts there and allowing the federal government to cover some emergency costs.
Harvey slammed into Texas on Friday as a Category 4 hurricane and then stalled over the nation’s fourth largest city and the surrounding suburbs, turning highways into rivers and doing billions of dollars in damage.
Five people were confirmed dead and Houston Police Chief Acevedo warned that number could rise dramatically once the waters that have hampered rescue efforts finally recede. Among the likely but unconfirmed victims were six members of the Saldivar family who were feared dead after their van was swept into Houston’s Greens Bayou.
The Weather Channel warned that “localized storm-total rain amounts of up to 50 inches are not out of the question” by later this week because of the additional 10 to 20 inches expected. “This may end up being one of the worst flood disasters in U.S. history,” it added.
It’s already one for the record books. The record for tropical cyclone rainfall in the continental U.S. was smashed Tuesday when 51.88 inches was recorded 35 miles east of Houston in Mont Belvieu, Texas, according to the National Weather Service.
Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner reported more than 3,500 people have been rescued since the weekend and 150 remained in “critical” situations.
The city’s 911 operators were struggling to answer the numerous desperate calls for help. And the George R. Brown Convention Center, which has a capacity for about 5,000 people, was filled way past capacity with people seeking shelter from the storm.
The Department of Homeland Security said it was sending reinforcements to Texas to help bolster security forces while Gov. Greg Abbott ordered the entire Texas National Guard — about 12,000 members — to report for duty.
Fourteen people have, so far, been arrested for looting, the Harris County District Attorney’s office reported.
Trump arrived in Texas later Tuesday and praised the ongoing recovery efforts from the “epic” storm.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Coast Guard said it was taking more than 1,000 calls per hour and dispatching helicopters and boats from as far away as Maine and California to Texas to help with rescues.
Coast Guard officials said they’d rescued more than 3,100 people and 113 pets.
People were rescued from “pretty much everywhere,” said Cmdr. Jim Spitler, commanding officer of Air Station Houston. “Most of them are rooftops, but they’ve been on top of cars, they’ve been on bridges, they’ve been in their attics.”
Phil McCausland reported from New Orleans, Corky Siemaszko reported from New York City