The Latest on Tropical Storm Harvey (all times local) :
HOUSTON (AP) – The Latest on Tropical Storm Harvey (all times local) :
2: 45 p.m.
Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez says the bodies of six members of a Houston family have been recovered from a van that was swept off a Houston bridge and into a storm-ravaged bayou.
Gonzales says relatives returned to the scene Wednesday to look for signs of the van and notified authorities after spotting part of it poking above the water and seeing two bodies in the front seat.
The van was recovered from about 10 feet (3 meters) of muddy water in Green’s Bayou in northeast Houston.
Gonzalez says bodies of two adults were recovered from the front seat and the four children were found in the back. He said it appeared the van was a work truck and the back section was separated by a steel screen partition.
Samuel Saldivar told deputies he was in his brother’s van rescuing his parents and relatives from their flooded home Sunday when the van was tossed by a strong current into the bayou as it crossed a bridge. He escaped through a window but the others were trapped. The victims included his parents and their four great-grandchildren ranging in age from 6 to 16.
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2: 40 p.m.
Authorities in the Houston-area say they are investigating 17 more deaths to see whether they qualify as storm-related.
Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences spokeswoman Tricia Bentley says that the medical examiner is doing autopsies Wednesday and the agency will update its storm-related death toll in the evening.
She says authorities expect to find more bodies in homes and cars as the waters from Harvey begin to recede. The 17 bodies at the morgue do not include the bodies of six relatives found in a van in Houston on Wednesday.
The overall death toll from Harvey is at least 21.
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2: 25 p.m.
Some motorists have been stranded along Interstate 10 in southeast Texas for nearly 24 hours after they pulled off the freeway but couldn’t re-enter.
More than two dozen vehicles, including a TV news crew’s, remained clustered Wednesday afternoon around a closed convenience store in Orange, Texas.
I-10 is elevated and passable between Orange and Lake Charles, Louisiana, about 35 miles to the east. But many on- and off-ramps are too flooded from Harvey’s rains to allow vehicles to pass.
Erin Gaudet of Beaumont, Texas, is among those stranded at the store. She said she left her house Tuesday to pick up a kitten, then had to spend the night with it in her SUV. She says she’s planning to name it Harvey.
Harvey made landfall again Wednesday near the Texas-Louisiana border.
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2: 20
About 10,000 additional National Guard troops from around the U. S. are being deployed to Texas as Harvey continues dumping rain on the region.
Gov. Greg Abbott said Wednesday that « the worst is not over » for southeastern Texas as widespread flooding continues.
The Republican says the arrival of additional Guard members from around the country will bring the total number of deployments to about 24,000. Abbott earlier this week activated all available members of the Texas National Guard.
Abbott says the Guard has conducted more than 8,500 rescues and more than 1,400 shelter-in-place and welfare checks.
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2 p.m.
A woman whose body was found floating in floodwaters near a residential area in southeast Texas is believed to be at least the 21st person to have died in Harvey’s path.
Beaumont police say the woman’s body was discovered Wednesday morning. Authorities have not released her name and are not certain of the circumstances that led to her death.
The woman is the second person to have died in Beaumont this week.
Authorities found a shivering 3-year-old clinging to the body of her drowned mother in a rain-swollen canal Tuesday after the woman tried to carry her child to safety.
Beaumont police on Wednesday identified the mother as 41-year-old Colette Sulcer and said her daughter was being treated for hypothermia but doing well.
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1: 45 p.m.
Forecasters are looking at a weather system off the Mexican coast just south of Texas that they say has a one-in-five chance of developing into something tropical in the next five days.
Dennis Feltgen, a meteorologist at the National Hurricane Center, says if it does develop, it would do so slowly and that it shouldn’t be seen as an imminent threat. He says it wouldn’t necessarily hit Harvey-flooded areas, but there’s a chance.
The system is so far out that forecasters can’t say how much more rain it would bring.
Hurricane Harvey has weakened to a minimal tropical storm, with maximum sustained winds of 40 mph (64 kph) , down from 45 mph (72 kph) . Warnings and watches have been dropped for nearly all of Texas, except Sabine Pass.
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1: 40 p.m.
A 36-year-old inmate scheduled for execution in Texas next week has been granted a temporary reprieve because of Harvey.
Bexar County prosecutors cited « extraordinary circumstances » in asking to move Juan Castillo’s execution to Dec. 14 because some of his legal team is based in Harris County, which has been slammed by the tropical storm. On Wednesday, a state judge agreed.
Gov. Greg Abbott has designated Harris County – which includes Houston – a disaster area along with dozens of other Texas counties after the tropical storm submerged Southeast Texas with torrential rain.
Castillo had been scheduled for lethal injection Sept. 7 in Huntsville for the slaying of 19-year-old Tommy Garcia Jr. during a 2003 robbery in San Antonio.
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1: 35 p.m.
Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards says the threat of flooding in the state’s southwest appears to be diminishing as Harvey pulls away from the region.
He says Louisiana remains committed to assisting officials in Texas, where another overnight round of torrential rains stranded many residents in flooded homes.
Edwards says 330 people were staying at a Lake Charles shelter as of Wednesday afternoon. He expects that number to grow as more people are rescued from floodwaters in eastern Texas, just across the state line.
He says a shelter in Shreveport is ready to accommodate up to 3,400 flood victims from Texas if officials accept the state’s offer to shelter them in northern Louisiana.
Edwards planned to travel to southwest Louisiana on Wednesday afternoon to meet with local officials there.
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1: 10 p.m.
Residents along the Texas-Louisiana border are feeling Harvey’s second punch as flash flooding inundates homes and overwhelms first responders trying to pluck people from the water.
Police in Beaumont, Texas, have been recruiting anyone people with boats Wednesday to help check neighborhoods for potential rescues. Police said many were not calling 911, instead calling for help on social media, adding to the chaos.
Twenty-five miles west in Orange, Texas, Anna McKay says she tried calling 911 for help, but nobody answered. Neighbors helped bring her and 12 other people who had sought refuge at her home to dry ground. They gathered at a Baptist church where people were planning to cook food to offer comfort.
Harvey made its second landfall Wednesday as a tropical storm after roaring ashore last week as a hurricane.
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1: 05 p.m.
The Texas Department of Public Safety says more than 48,700 homes have been affected by flooding and other damage brought by Harvey since it first came ashore Friday.
A report released Wednesday shows more than 1,000 homes have been destroyed while about another 17,000 have sustained major damage. Approximately 32,000 have damage described by state authorities as minor.
In Harris County, one of the state’s largest and home to Houston, about 43,700 homes have been damaged, with some 11,600 receiving major damage and another 770 destroyed.
Harvey has also damaged nearly 700 businesses in the state.
DPS says its report will be updated each day so the number of damaged structures is expected to rise, particularly with expanding floodwaters in Southeast Texas as Harvey moves into Louisiana.
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1 p.m.
Downtown Houston business district officials say the city’s center has survived Harvey in relatively good shape, though flooding has damaged several buildings, including City Hall and the city’s main performing arts centers.
Officials said Wednesday that flooding damaged the ground floor or basements of more than two dozen buildings or businesses downtown, primarily along Buffalo Bayou, a river-like waterway that meanders west to east through the city.
Among the damaged buildings are the Alley Theatre, Wortham Theater Center, Hobby Center and Jones Hall, home of the Houston Symphony.
Streets to and within downtown are open, although some freeway exit ramps leading into downtown remain impassable. There are some scattered power outages and some traffic signals are out.
There is isolated flooding in the pedestrian tunnels what wind through downtown.
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12: 50 p.m.
The federal Department of Education is easing financial aid rules and procedures for those affected by Harvey.
The department is encouraging students whose financial needs have been altered by the storm to contact their school’s financial aid office. The agency says in a statement that colleges and career schools will be allowed to use « professional judgment » to adjust a student’s financial information in the aftermath of Harvey.
A school may even be able to waive certain paperwork requirements if documents were destroyed in the flooding.
The department says borrowers struggling to pay off loans because of Harvey should inform their loan servicers – and they’ve been directed to give borrowers flexibility in managing loan payments.
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12: 45 p.m.
All students in the largest district in Texas will be eligible to receive three free meals per day at school as the state recovers from Harvey.
The Houston Independent School District on Wednesday announced the plan promising free meals on campus to 216,000 students during the 2017-2018 school year.
An HISD statement says federal and state agriculture departments have waived the usual required application process, part of the National School Lunch/Breakfast Program, to help with Harvey recovery.
Superintendent Richard Carranza says the waiver will give families one less concern as they begin the process of restoring their lives.
Thousands of people have been forced from their homes in Houston since Harvey struck, submerging the city with torrential rain.
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12: 40 p.m.
There are more than 32,000 people in shelters across Texas as Harvey continues drenching the state’s Gulf Coast.
Gov. Greg Abbott says Texas also has an additional 30,000 beds « available as needed » for those who fled or are still fleeing floodwaters associated with the storm.
At a news conference in Austin, Abbott said there are still about 107,000 power outages statewide, down from nearly 140,000 over the weekend. Harvey roared ashore as a hurricane Friday, then triggered deadly floods as a tropical storm.
Abbott refused to speculate on the final costs of the storm in terms of property damage. But he suggested that the scope of destruction far exceeded that of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 or 2012’s Superstorm Sandy, meaning the financial impact will likely be far greater than both.
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12: 25 p.m.
Officers have located a submerged van in which six members of a Houston family were traveling when it was swept off a Houston bridge and into a storm-ravaged bayou.
Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez says the van is in about 10 feet (3 meters) of muddy water in Green’s Bayou in northeast Houston. He says the bodies of two adults can be seen in the front seat but that if the four children’s bodies are inside they are obscured because of the water conditions and the angle of the vehicle.
Authorities are trying to decide whether dive team members will retrieve the bodies or if it would be safer to pull the van from the treacherous water first.
Samuel Saldivar told deputies he was in his brother’s van rescuing his parents and relatives from their flooded home Sunday when the van was tossed by a strong current into the bayou as it crossed a bridge. He escaped through a window but the others were trapped.
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12: 05 p.m.
Authorities say a 3-year-old girl who was found clinging to the body of her drowned mother in a rain-swollen canal in Southeast Texas is doing well and should be released from the hospital soon.
Beaumont police on Wednesday identified the girl’s mother as 41-year-old Colette Sulcer.
Officer Carol Riley says the toddler, who was suffering from hypothermia when she was rescued Tuesday afternoon, has now been reunited with her family. Riley says the girl is in stable condition and should be released from the hospital on Wednesday.
Authorities have said the mother’s vehicle got stuck in a flooded parking lot of an office park just off Interstate 10. A witness saw the woman take her daughter and try to walk to safety when the swift current of a flooded drainage canal next to the parking lot swept them both away.
