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 / Updated By Kalhan Rosenblatt 
 
 As another death was blamed on Hurricane Harvey on Monday, Texas officials defended their decision not to order a mandatory evacuation for millions of Houston-area residents. 
 
 A 60-year-old woman in east Montgomery County, north of Houston, died when a tree fell on her while she slept, the sheriff's office said, raising the confirmed number of deaths to three as historic flooding and unrelenting rains continued to cripple the region. 
 
 Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said at a news conference Monday that he had activated the entire 12,000-member Texas National Guard to help respond to recovery efforts in the disaster, which is potentially affecting more than 50 counties. 
 
 The "biggest challenge, first, is making sure we get everyone to a safe place," Abbott told reporters before touring the coastal community of Rockport, where Harvey made landfall as a powerful Category 4 hurricane Friday. 
 
 Mandatory evacuations were ordered for several counties along Texas' Gulf coast just hours before the hurricane made landfall. 
 
 But further inland, in cities like Houston, which is in Harris County, evacuation orders were never given. This is because of the uncertainty of the storm and the narrow window given to move millions of people, Harris County Judge Ed Emmett said on NBC's TODAY. 
 
 Emmett, the chief executive officer of Harris County, coordinates four county commissioners while overseeing local government actions. 
 
 Related: Life-Threatening Rain Hammers Houston 
 
 "When a hurricane comes, you know to get people out of harm's way, you know where the storm surge is going to hit. So we have a very defined process for moving people out of storm surge," Emmett said. 
 
 "With a rain event over a county of 4½ million people, you don't know exactly where the rain is going to fall, you don't know which neighborhoods are going to flood, so if we had gone out three days before and said we want 4 million people to leave Harris County, that would have been a totally nonsensical thing to do." 
 
 Related: 'Cajun Navy' Rushes to Rescue Strangers From Harvey 
 
 But that sentiment wasn't fully echoed by Abbott, who said at a news conference Friday, as the storm was bearing down, that residents needed to listen to their instincts, even if no official had given an order to evacuate. 
 
 A Texas National Guardsman carries a woman from her flooded home in Houston on Sunday following Hurricane Harvey. Lt. Zachary West / Army National Guard via Getty Images 
 
 "Even if an evacuation order hasn't been issued by your local official, if you're in an area between Corpus Christi and Houston, you need to strongly consider evacuating. What you don't know, and what nobody else knows right now, is the magnitude of flooding that will be coming," Abbott said Friday. 
 
 Abbott warned that if residents didn't leave, they could be putting themselves in harm's way. Voluntary evacuation orders have since been issued for small parts of the greater Houston area. 
 
 About 20 inches of rain fell on parts of Houston, causing widespread flooding, and more than 2,000 rescues have been performed. Helicopters landed on highways to get people out of the affected areas, while good Samaritans used kayaks and canoes to free people from the flooding. 
 
 But Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner stood by his decision not to order the evacuation, saying it was impossible to put millions of people on the road. 
 
 Turner said at a news conference on Sunday that he had no regrets about telling people to stay put. 
 
 "One, if you can recall, there was a lot of conversation about the direction in which Hurricane Harvey was going to go," Turner said. "No one knew which direction it was going to go. So it's kind of difficult to send people away from danger when you don't know where the danger is. Number two, that kind of evacuation in a couple days — the logistics would have been crazy." 
 
 Emmett agreed with Turner's decision, saying it would have been foolish to send people away when the storm's path was unclear. 
 
 "We didn't know where it was going to flood. We didn't know what neighborhoods were going to flood, and the truth is, if we had told people to do that, they probably would have either laughed at us or ignored it," Emmett said. 
 
 Related: Everything You Need to Know About Hurricane Harvey 
 
 Turner's decision not to issue a sweeping evacuation of Houston was partly based on the chaos caused by a mandatory evacuation that was ordered in 2005 as Category 5 Hurricane Rita barreled toward Texas. 
 
 "Chaotic 2005 traffic with Hurricane Rita lurking was tragic. No official has issued evac order for Houston now. Calm and care! #Harvey," Turner tweeted on Friday. 
 
 As 2.5 million Houstonians fled, gridlock lasting nearly 24 hours trapped residents on highways and roads. The evacuation killed nearly as many people as the storm itself, which caused an estimated $12 billion in damage, according to The Houston Chronicle. Rita killed 120 people, according to HurricaneScience.org, an educational resource developed by the University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography. ||||| This 2014 photo provided by Virginia Saldivar shows her grandchildren Daisy, from left, Xavier and Dominic Saldivar, three of the four children presumed dead after their van sank into Greens Bayou on... (Associated Press) 
 
 HOUSTON (AP) — Now that the sun is finally shining and the murky, brown floodwaters are slowly receding in much of the Houston area, grim reality is setting in. 
 
 Harvey is about to release its dead. 
 
 In Texas, the official death toll surpassed 30 on Wednesday and was expected to climb as authorities investigated several other deaths to determine whether they were storm-related. Officials fear that the number of fatalities will climb sharply in coming days as neighbors, emergency workers and family members search for the missing — and discover the bodies of people trapped in waterlogged homes or encased in underwater graves inside cars. And the death toll might rise even further in the recovery phase, from car crashes, carbon monoxide poisoning or other accidents during cleanup. 
 
 "Historically all estimates of deaths are wrong in the beginning," said Craig Fugate, who was the Federal Emergency Management Agency director from 2009 until earlier this year. 
 
 Already, the nation is shocked by the horrors revealed as the storm moves out of the area and east toward Louisiana and points north. 
 
 The first confirmed fatality came early: A man in the Gulf coastal city of Rockport was killed in a fire late Friday as the storm raged ashore. 
 
 On Wednesday, officials located a submerged van that seven members of a Houston family had been traveling in when it was swept off a bridge and into a storm-ravaged bayou. Samuel Saldivar told police he was trying to bring his elderly parents and his brother's four grandchildren to safety from their flooded home on Sunday when the van he was driving was tossed by a strong current into the bayou as it crossed the bridge. He escaped through a window but the six others were trapped when the van's partially submerged sliding door wouldn't open. 
 
 Also Wednesday, authorities said 65-year-old Donald Rogers and his 58-year-old wife, Rochelle, drowned when they were swept away by a current after driving their pickup truck into floodwaters in a rural area southwest of Houston. Fort Bend County Sheriff's Maj. Chad Norvell said the couple was on the phone with 911 asking for help when the line went silent. When officers found the truck, it was completely submerged. 
 
 On Tuesday afternoon, a 3-year-old girl was found alive in a rain-swollen canal, clinging to the body of her drowned mother in Beaumont, Texas. A second woman was confirmed dead in Beaumont on Wednesday. 
 
 Earlier Tuesday, the body of 61-year-old Houston Police Sgt. Steve Perez was found in his car. He'd been swept down a flooded road as he drove to his precinct, determined to serve his community. 
 
 Eleven other confirmed deaths, some of which were listed on a Harris County database, showed people were found floating in waters — some in homes or businesses, others near cars. Among those victims was Ruben Jordan, a high school basketball coach, who was last seen late Saturday helping people through floodwaters. His family was informed on Monday that he had died in the floods. 
 
 "The sad thing is, of the deaths we've seen, we're going to see more, unfortunately," said Jeff Schlegelmilch, the deputy director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University. "That number doesn't stop moving up until we're well into the recovery phase." 
 
 No official number of the missing has been released, and a spokesman for the Harris County Sheriff's Office, where Houston is located, said there isn't a specific strategy in place to look for additional bodies. 
 
 "We are going to go out and try to find any potential victims that may be there," said the spokesman, Jake Smith. "We are also encouraging the public if they come across anything, we strongly urge them to call 911 if they find a body or a potential victim." 
 
 Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo said the department had received 47 missing persons reports since Harvey inundated the city and 27 of those individuals have been located. 
 
 Photos with pleas for help have been posted on social media, cut-and-pasted and retweeted by thousands of people as desperate family members seek loved ones they fear may be dead — but who may only have a cellphone without power. The uncertainty is terrifying. 
 
 One of the worries, said Schlegelmilch, is that many of the severely flooded neighborhoods weren't in evacuation areas. 
 
 Additionally, the people most likely to be found dead are the elderly, the infirm and the people who were isolated from others — along with folks who didn't have the means or wherewithal to flee. Sometimes it's a matter of having the strength to wade through floodwaters a few blocks to safety, or to pull one's self up onto a roof. 
 
 "Those who are the most vulnerable when the sky is blue, they are also the most vulnerable when the sky is gray," Schleglemilch said. 
 
 Fugate, the former FEMA head, said it's also common for people to die during the recovery phase, when stress levels are high and people aren't making clear-headed decisions. 
 
 "Stay safe, stay home, stay off the roads if you can. Don't go sightseeing," he warned. 
 
 Still, experts say there is some good news: They don't expect the death toll from Harvey to come anywhere close to that of Katrina, when 1,800 people died. Many of those flood-related fatalities came when a levee broke and water inundated New Orleans. People were stranded in extreme heat and the federal response was slow. Emergency managers learned painful lessons during Katrina, and have put those lessons to use in this storm. 
 
 Residents of New Orleans during Katrina saw top-to-bottom failures at every level, experts said. 
 
 During Harvey, "state and local officials and FEMA were mobilizing, water rescue teams were prepared, in anticipation of this," said Fugate, adding that safe shelters were almost immediately in place for Texas residents, unlike New Orleans. "That provided faster rescues." 
 
 One other thing seems to have helped Houston in its time of need: the residents themselves. 
 
 "Neighbors helping neighbors," Fugate said. "That will keep the death toll down." 
 
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 Follow Tamara Lush on Twitter at Http://twitter.com/tamaralush
– One of the most widely circulated images to come out of the Texas flooding on Sunday showed several elderly residents of a nursing home sitting in waist-deep water. "Need help asap emergency services please RETWEET," tweeted Timothy McIntosh. That's exactly what people did, and Galveston County Daily News reports that 15 elderly residents and three others from the La Vita Bella nursing home in Dickinson were rescued from the facility within hours. "We were air-lifting grandmothers and grandfathers," says the chief of emergency management in Dickinson. The New York Daily News provides background on the tweet. McIntosh lives in Tampa, Florida, but his mother-in-law in Texas, Trudy Lampson, owns the nursing home and sent the image to him and his wife. He quickly put it online. "Thanks to all the true believers that re-tweeted and got the news organizations involved," McIntosh wrote in a follow-up tweet after the rescue. "It pushed La Vita Bella to #1 on the priority list." The myth-busting site Snopes looked into the veracity of the image and reports nothing fishy about it.