More survivors of huricane-ravaged southeast Texas made their way home Monday even as the tragedy of the strom kept mounting. Sixty deaths have been…
More survivors of huricane-ravaged southeast Texas made their way home Monday even as the tragedy of the strom kept mounting.
At least 60 deaths have been reported as storms continued to inundate several counties in South Texas.
In addition to people lost to flash floods and swamped roads, other victims died from indirect complications of the storm — crushed by trees loosened by rainfall or left without life-sustaining medical equipment because of power outages.
Flooding also prevented medical responders from reaching people in distress, resulting in more deaths.
But amid such adversity, recovery was underway.
In Beaumont, where officials are struggling to restore water supplies, families struggled to get other basics, including food. With shelves emptied as quickly as they are stocked, some stores have capped how many shoppers can be inside at once.
Wal-Mart has reopened all but five of its stores in the Gulf region affected by Harvey, and the Bentonville, Arkansas-based corporation and its foundation have pledged up to $20 million for relief efforts.
The company has also stepped up deliveries of staples such as dairy products and cleaning supplies and installed pharmacy services at multiple shelters.
Just southwest of Beaumont, 95-year old Floyd Crum confronted the wreckage of his son Richard’s home in Fannett.
Clad in cloth masks, Crum, his son Ricard and two daughters-in-law cleared out carpet, moldy furniture and stacks of old magazines.
Daughter-in-law Renee Crum emerged from one room, carrying a sealed box of tax returns. “Something salvageable, ” she said.
Richard said the documents would be the necessary proof of ownership to receive relief money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Closer to the coast in Port Arthur, homeowners carted ruined furniture to curbs outside homes still filled with standing water. But already the streets sounded with clanging hammers and whirring machines as the long drying-out process began.
Elizabeth Revuelta and her family began digging through their old lives over the weekend. Discarding her grandchildren’s beds was hardest, she said.
In the backyard, near the pool, she set out two photo albums with four-by-six prints of memories from through the years — birthdays, family gatherings and football games at Prairie View A&M, where her sons played on a championship team. The edges of the photos were water-worn and bent, and the pages of the album stuck together, still soaked through.
“All these are memories from Lord knows everywhere. All of my life, my life history is right here, ” Revuelta said. “And now it’s ruined.”
In Crosby, northeast of Houston, residents of the area around the Arkema chemical plant were being allowed to return home after highly unstable compounds exploded Tuesday, causing an immense blaze whose black plumes could be seen for miles.
Several Texas politicians, including Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, met with evacuees in Houston, promising relief as they helped hand out supplies.
The White House has requested a $7.9 billion down payment toward recovery efforts that have been predicted to cost as much as $180 billion.
In Dallas, about 3,000 evacuees are settled in at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center, with as many as a thousand more expected in the coming days as operations are consolidated into the so-called “mega-shelter.”
While some shelters in Texas have seen their numbers drop because of such consolidations, others, like Houston’s George R. Brown Convention Center, are seeing evacuees move on with the help of FEMA’s transitional housing assistance. The American Red Cross counted 1,400 evacuees at the center as of Sunday evening, a dramatic drop from the 10,000 recorded several days after the storm.
In addition, more than 53,000 displaced Texas residents from nearly 19,000 households are camped in government-funded hotel rooms as a result of the storm, according to FEMA. The agency is also eyeing options like mobile homes if necessary.
West of Houston in Katy, scores of pets were being processed at a pop-up animal rescue operation at a local mall, one of numerous ongoing efforts to save animals displaced or injured because of the storm. Many were surrendered by owners uncertain about their own fates after being rendered homeless by Harvey.
Staff writers Marc Ramirez, Charlie Scudder, Tristan Hallman, Corbett Smith and Eva-Marie Ayala and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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The president’s choices appear to be variations on what’s been tried before – and failed.
WASHINGTON — Sanctions on North Korea have been tried, and failed. Serious negotiations seem like a pipedream. And any military strike would almost surely bring mass devastation and horrific civilian casualties.
The Trump administration’s options are going from bad to worse as Kim Jong Un’s military marches ever closer to being able to strike the U. S. mainland with nuclear weapons. Just as President Trump seeks to show global resolve after the North’s most powerful nuclear test, his leverage is limited even further by new tensions he’s stoked with South Korea, plus continued opposition from China and Russia.
With South Korea, the country most directly threatened, Trump has taken the unusual step of highlighting disagreements between the U. S. and its treaty ally, including by floating the possibility he could pull out of a trade deal with South Korea to protest trade imbalances. He also suggested on Twitter the two countries lacked unanimity on North Korea, faulting new South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who has been more conciliatory to the North, for his government’s “talk of appeasement.”
It’s an inopportune time for grievances to be aired, and Monday the two leaders sought to show they were confronting North Korea together – and with might. The White House said that in a phone call with Moon, Trump gave approval “in principle” to lifting restrictions on South Korean missile payloads and to approving “many billions” in weapons sales to South Korea. Though no details were released, the idea was to show the countries were collaborating to bolster defenses against Kim’s government.
“He is begging for war, ” U. S. Ambassador to the U. N. Nikki Haley said of the North Korean leader Monday at the U. N. Security Council, where diplomats were called into emergency session despite the Labor Day holiday in the U. S.
Haley called for exhausting “all diplomatic means to end this crisis.” But to those who tried and failed over a decade-plus to resolve it, there appear to be few such means that haven’ t already been tried – and tried again.
What has changed is the sense of urgency, and the growing view among national security analysts that it may be time to abandon “denuclearization” and accept North Korea into the nuclear club. The North claimed Sunday’s test, its sixth since 2006, was a hydrogen bomb designed to be mounted on its new intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Short of allowing Pyongyang’s weapons programs to advance, Trump’s options all appear to be variations on what’s been considered before:
The U. S. military for years has had a full range of contingency plans prepared for potential strikes on the North to try to disrupt its nuclear program or dissuade it from developing further. On Sunday, Trump dispatched Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to warn of a “massive military response if the North keeps threatening the U. S., while Trump hinted in a call with Japan’s leader that the U. S. could even deploy its own nuclear arsenal.
But over the years, the military options have consistently been viewed as unworkable, owing to the sheer horror that would ensue if North Korea retaliated – as would be expected – by striking South Korea. The North Koreans have massive military assets stockpiled on what is the world’s most heavily fortified border.
The U. S. has roughly 28,000 troops in South Korea, and there are hundreds of thousands more American citizens just in Seoul, the capital, with a metro area population of 25 million. Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said if war broke out, there would be heavy civilian casualties in the first few days before the U. S. could mitigate the North’s ability to strike Seoul.
Trump on Saturday declared on Twitter that the U. S. was considering “stopping all trade with any country doing business with North Korea.” That would be a dramatic escalation of the longstanding U. S. strategy: increasing economic pressure on North Korea by restricting its access to funds needed for its weapons programs.
But many countries do business with North Korea – especially China, a top U. S. trading partner and economic behemoth. Cutting off trade with China, not to mention the others, would devastate the U. S. economy and be incredibly difficult to enforce. Countless American businesses would be shuttered or hard hit, eliminating jobs along with them.
A total trade shutdown aside, the U. S. has worked for years to squeeze Pyongyang financially and encouraged others to do the same – especially China. In a diplomatic victory for the Trump administration, the U. N. last month approved sweeping new sanctions targeting roughly one-third of the North’s economy, with China’s support.
But the latest nuclear test and recent missile tests suggest Kim is undeterred by those sanctions. And there’s strong reluctance from countries including China and Russia, both permanent Security Council members, to do more sanctioning.
Advocates for more sanctions say there’s still room to up the pressure. Anthony Ruggiero, a sanctions expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said the next logical step is for the U. S. to impose “secondary sanctions” targeting banks or businesses in China that do business with North Korea, a tactic the U. S. used effectively to push Iran to the table over its nuclear program several years ago.
“The chance for sanctions to work is that playbook, ” Ruggiero said.
China, backed by Russia, has been urging an immediate return to talks, predicated on the U. S. halting joint military exercises with South Korea and the North suspending its weapons development.
But few in the U. S. government have advocated direct talks with the North Koreans until their behavior significantly changes. In the past, talks with the North have failed to prevent it from advancing its weapons program for long, and the U. S. has accused Pyongyang of cheating on an earlier agreement.
The Trump administration has left the door open to talks with the North, and has tried to coax Kim into abstaining from provocative tests long enough to justify a U. S. return to the table.
So far, that coaxing hasn’ t worked.
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