Just days into one of the biggest storms to hit the U.S. in decades, authorities have rescued thousands of people in Houston alone. And as floodwaters from Hurricane Harvey, now a tropical storm, continue to rise across southeast Texas and neighboring Louisiana, officials expect that still thousands more evacuees will need to be sheltered in the days to come.

"This is a landmark event," Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Brock Long said at a news conference Monday. In fact, it has been such a landmark event — with more than 3 feet of rain having already hit some regions — the National Weather Service has even had to revise its traditional methods of representing storms "in order to effectively map it."

So how does one respond to a catastrophe of such historic proportions?

For authorities, that has meant summoning a rescue and evacuation effort nearly as massive. "The goal is rescue," Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner told reporters Monday. "That's the major focus for the day."

Here's how that rescue effort is taking shape, sketched in a few telling — and staggering — numbers.



Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo told reporters Monday that officers have rescued roughly 2,000 people in the city — out of about 4,000 water-related calls for assistance — since the storm came ashore Friday evening.

... rescues over a 12-hour span since midnight on Monday. But that number does not include the 185 critical rescue requests in the city still outstanding as of midday.

Police hope to work through that backlog of requests by nightfall, because they say their boats are not properly equipped to conduct rescue operations in the dark.

Many of those people who required rescue will also require a place to stay — which brings us to ...



"Once we move them, we're able to extract them from different areas and rescue them, we've got to get them into shelters," Long said Monday. "This shelter mission is going to be a very heavy lift. We're anticipating over 30,000 people being placed in shelters temporarily."

Already 5,500 people are staying in shelters in Houston, and Turner only expects that number to rise in a greater metro area of some 6.5 million people.

Even in San Antonio, which was largely saved from the worst of the storm's impact, Mayor Ron Nirenberg told NPR more than 1,000 evacuees have been sheltered — a number he expects to "increase sharply," as well.

"No one will be turned away," he said. "We will do whatever is necessary. The capacity is whatever is needed."

Still, authorities have been struggling to supply those evacuees. The Red Cross initially was unable to get their trucks to one shelter, and those evacuees, without food, had McDonald's breakfast Sunday morning.

But there might not be such scarcity for long. Vice President Mike Pence told KTRH the federal government has shipped out more than 1.2 million meals and a million liters of water.



Texas Gov. Greg Abbott activated the state's entire National Guard on Monday, saying roughly 12,000 guard members will be deployed to respond to Harvey. Initially, about 3,000 national and state guard members had been deployed

"It is imperative that we do everything possible to protect the lives and safety of people across the state of Texas as we continue to face the aftermath of this storm," Abbott said in a statement.

The governor noted that the guardsmen will be collaborating with FEMA and federal troops to "assist in the efforts already underway."

The U.S. Coast Guard has also been active in the response, deploying at least eight helicopters — and requesting 11 more from across the country — to conduct rescues. They say they have already rescued 100 people from the air.

"Every Coast Guard asset available" is being used to respond, Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Paul Zukunft said. "But," he cautioned, "there are conditions where it is just not safe to fly."

All told, Pence said Monday there are more than 8,500 federal personnel on the ground in the area to help state and local officials, who are leading the rescue efforts.

Even officials with the Mexican government have offered Texas assistance in its recovery from the storm, Abbott said at a news conference Monday.

The extensive state and national response was motivated partly by the immense breadth of the storm's effects, apparent in the next number.



Long expects as many as 50 counties in Texas to be affected in some form by the storm's floodwaters, a situation that he says has demanded the agency "help bolster the efforts to do swift water rescue, search and rescue over a huge county jurisdiction."

Eighteen of those counties have been granted a federal disaster declaration, a move that triggers FEMA's support.

Harris County Judge Ed Emmett, the top administrator in the county home to Houston, noted just what the size of the storm means for local officials.

"One of the issues, of course, that makes this situation even worse is all of the surrounding counties are experiencing their own difficulties," he said at a news conference Monday, "so we're not in this alone, but we can't really help each other."

And the size of the storm means it's not just Texas that must bear its blows. Some 15-25 inches of rainfall are expected in southwest Louisiana, and President Trump declared an emergency in the state on Monday morning.



By the time the region emerges from Harvey's aftermath, Long expects nearly half a million people will have requested help. Pence said 22,000 have already registered for disaster assistance.

And it's unlikely that aftermath will lift anytime soon.

"You've got rivers and bayous that are going to be reaching crest stage later in the week in and around Houston," NPR's Debbie Elliott pointed out, citing the head of the National Weather Service. "The floodwaters are going to be slow to recede. They're going to persist."

"This is going to take us months, years to get back to normal," Emmett said, "and so any help that people can send, we would certainly appreciate that."</s>(CNN) The toll that Harvey is taking is staggering.

It dumped an estimated 27 trillion gallons of rain over Texas and Louisiana during a 6-day period, says Ryan Maue of WeatherBell, a weather analytics company.

The rainfall has set a record for the most ever from a landfalling tropical cyclone in the continental US. Estimates put eventual total losses at as much as $75 billion . And the death toll continues to climb everyday.

"The word catastrophic does not appropriately describe what we're facing," said Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, who represents much of Houston. "We just don't know when it's going to end."</s>The news out of Texas continues to worsen. Thousands have been rescued from inundated homes in Houston and surrounding towns and cities, but authorities have confirmed at least six flood-related deaths in America’s fourth-largest city and another in coastal Rockport as flood waters continue to rise.

Forecasters say the storm could pick up strength and hammer the Houston area again, as Dayton — which is less than 40 miles east of Texas’ most populous city — already is nearing 40 inches of rain since Friday.

“This is going to be a long haul,” Sen. John Cornyn, R-TX, said during an afternoon news conference from Corpus Christi. Added Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, “We need to recognize that there’s going to be a new normal — a new and different normal for this entire region.” He noted that the entire 12,000-strong Texas National Guard has been deployed.

The rain continues to fall in many parts of southeast Texas and into Louisiana as the center of the storm has moved less than 75 miles since it made landfall Friday as Category 4 Hurricane Harvey. Some 11 trillion gallons of water already has fallen in the area, 15-20 more inches expected as the storm continues to churn, at 2 mph for the next 48 hours. Many areas are or will be under multiple feet of water, prompting rescues by authorities and good Samaritans in private boats and other watercraft. The Army Corps of Engineers has begun releasing water from two local dams.

FEMA administrator Brock Long put the disaster into perspective with a single line during the presser: “We are going to be here for several years helping you guys recover.” The federal emergency agency said earlier today that more than 5,500 people already are in shelters, and it expects that number to reach 30,000 eventually. Long added that trucks already are arriving with 2 million meals and 2 million liters of water, along with other essential supplies.

“The most important thing we have is our lives,” said Abbott, who has made a state disaster declaration for 54 counties. “And to be able to get through the storm the way we did and save so many lives is nothing short of remarkable. … There is a reality we have to come to grips with, and that is we are just beginning the process of responding to this storm. We are still involved in the search-and-rescue process. Our No. 1 goal — from Corpus Christi all the way to east of Houston is still protecting and preserving life and rescuing every person that we can find.”

He added, “I would have to grade the federal government’s response as an A-plus. This is, if not the largest, it has to be categorized as one of the largest disasters America has ever faced, and to see the swift response from the federal government is pretty much unparalleled.”

Cornyn said earlier: “We’re trying to save people’s lives. We’re trying to make sure they have a place to live, safe water to drink, sewage, electricity and like. But this is going to be a long challenge.”

President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump will visit the region on Tuesday.</s>Just days into one of the biggest storms to hit the U.S. in decades, authorities have rescued thousands of people in Houston alone. And as floodwaters from Hurricane Harvey, now a tropical storm, continue to rise across southeast Texas and neighboring Louisiana, officials expect that still thousands more evacuees will need to be sheltered in the days to come.

"This is a landmark event," Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Brock Long said at a news conference Monday. In fact, it has been such a landmark event — with more than 3 feet of rain having already hit some regions — the National Weather Service has even had to revise its traditional methods of representing storms "in order to effectively map it."

So how does one respond to a catastrophe of such historic proportions?

For authorities, that has meant summoning a rescue and evacuation effort nearly as massive. "The goal is rescue," Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner told reporters Monday. "That's the major focus for the day."

Here's how that rescue effort is taking shape, sketched in a few telling — and staggering — numbers.



Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo told reporters Monday that officers have rescued roughly 2,000 people in the city — out of about 4,000 water-related calls for assistance — since the storm came ashore Friday evening.

... rescues over a 12-hour span since midnight on Monday. But that number does not include the 185 critical rescue requests in the city still outstanding as of midday.

Police hope to work through that backlog of requests by nightfall, because they say their boats are not properly equipped to conduct rescue operations in the dark.

Many of those people who required rescue will also require a place to stay — which brings us to ...



"Once we move them, we're able to extract them from different areas and rescue them, we've got to get them into shelters," Long said Monday. "This shelter mission is going to be a very heavy lift. We're anticipating over 30,000 people being placed in shelters temporarily."

Already 5,500 people are staying in shelters in Houston, and Turner only expects that number to rise in a greater metro area of some 6.5 million people.

Even in San Antonio, which was largely saved from the worst of the storm's impact, Mayor Ron Nirenberg told NPR more than 1,000 evacuees have been sheltered — a number he expects to "increase sharply," as well.

"No one will be turned away," he said. "We will do whatever is necessary. The capacity is whatever is needed."

Still, authorities have been struggling to supply those evacuees. The Red Cross initially was unable to get their trucks to one shelter, and those evacuees, without food, had McDonald's breakfast Sunday morning.

But there might not be such scarcity for long. Vice President Mike Pence told KTRH the federal government has shipped out more than 1.2 million meals and a million liters of water.



Texas Gov. Greg Abbott activated the state's entire National Guard on Monday, saying roughly 12,000 guard members will be deployed to respond to Harvey. Initially, about 3,000 national and state guard members had been deployed

"It is imperative that we do everything possible to protect the lives and safety of people across the state of Texas as we continue to face the aftermath of this storm," Abbott said in a statement.

The governor noted that the guardsmen will be collaborating with FEMA and federal troops to "assist in the efforts already underway."

The U.S. Coast Guard has also been active in the response, deploying at least eight helicopters — and requesting 11 more from across the country — to conduct rescues. They say they have already rescued 100 people from the air.

"Every Coast Guard asset available" is being used to respond, Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Paul Zukunft said. "But," he cautioned, "there are conditions where it is just not safe to fly."

All told, Pence said Monday there are more than 8,500 federal personnel on the ground in the area to help state and local officials, who are leading the rescue efforts.

Even officials with the Mexican government have offered Texas assistance in its recovery from the storm, Abbott said at a news conference Monday.

The extensive state and national response was motivated partly by the immense breadth of the storm's effects, apparent in the next number.



Long expects as many as 50 counties in Texas to be affected in some form by the storm's floodwaters, a situation that he says has demanded the agency "help bolster the efforts to do swift water rescue, search and rescue over a huge county jurisdiction."

Eighteen of those counties have been granted a federal disaster declaration, a move that triggers FEMA's support.

Harris County Judge Ed Emmett, the top administrator in the county home to Houston, noted just what the size of the storm means for local officials.

"One of the issues, of course, that makes this situation even worse is all of the surrounding counties are experiencing their own difficulties," he said at a news conference Monday, "so we're not in this alone, but we can't really help each other."

And the size of the storm means it's not just Texas that must bear its blows. Some 15-25 inches of rainfall are expected in southwest Louisiana, and President Trump declared an emergency in the state on Monday morning.



By the time the region emerges from Harvey's aftermath, Long expects nearly half a million people will have requested help. Pence said 22,000 have already registered for disaster assistance.

And it's unlikely that aftermath will lift anytime soon.

"You've got rivers and bayous that are going to be reaching crest stage later in the week in and around Houston," NPR's Debbie Elliott pointed out, citing the head of the National Weather Service. "The floodwaters are going to be slow to recede. They're going to persist."

"This is going to take us months, years to get back to normal," Emmett said, "and so any help that people can send, we would certainly appreciate that."</s>Just days into one of the biggest storms to hit the U.S. in decades, authorities have rescued thousands of people in Houston alone. And as floodwaters from Hurricane Harvey, now a tropical storm, continue to rise across southeast Texas and neighboring Louisiana, officials expect that still thousands more evacuees will need to be sheltered in the days to come.

"This is a landmark event," Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Brock Long said at a news conference Monday. In fact, it has been such a landmark event — with more than 3 feet of rain having already hit some regions — the National Weather Service has even had to revise its traditional methods of representing storms "in order to effectively map it."

So how does one respond to a catastrophe of such historic proportions?

For authorities, that has meant summoning a rescue and evacuation effort nearly as massive. "The goal is rescue," Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner told reporters Monday. "That's the major focus for the day."

Here's how that rescue effort is taking shape, sketched in a few telling — and staggering — numbers.



Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo told reporters Monday that officers have rescued roughly 2,000 people in the city — out of about 4,000 water-related calls for assistance — since the storm came ashore Friday evening.

... rescues over a 12-hour span since midnight on Monday. But that number does not include the 185 critical rescue requests in the city still outstanding as of midday.

Police hope to work through that backlog of requests by nightfall, because they say their boats are not properly equipped to conduct rescue operations in the dark.

Many of those people who required rescue will also require a place to stay — which brings us to ...



"Once we move them, we're able to extract them from different areas and rescue them, we've got to get them into shelters," Long said Monday. "This shelter mission is going to be a very heavy lift. We're anticipating over 30,000 people being placed in shelters temporarily."

Already 5,500 people are staying in shelters in Houston, and Turner only expects that number to rise in a greater metro area of some 6.5 million people.

Even in San Antonio, which was largely saved from the worst of the storm's impact, Mayor Ron Nirenberg told NPR more than 1,000 evacuees have been sheltered — a number he expects to "increase sharply," as well.

"No one will be turned away," he said. "We will do whatever is necessary. The capacity is whatever is needed."

Still, authorities have been struggling to supply those evacuees. The Red Cross initially was unable to get their trucks to one shelter, and those evacuees, without food, had McDonald's breakfast Sunday morning.

But there might not be such scarcity for long. Vice President Mike Pence told KTRH the federal government has shipped out more than 1.2 million meals and a million liters of water.



Texas Gov. Greg Abbott activated the state's entire National Guard on Monday, saying roughly 12,000 guard members will be deployed to respond to Harvey. Initially, about 3,000 national and state guard members had been deployed

"It is imperative that we do everything possible to protect the lives and safety of people across the state of Texas as we continue to face the aftermath of this storm," Abbott said in a statement.

The governor noted that the guardsmen will be collaborating with FEMA and federal troops to "assist in the efforts already underway."

The U.S. Coast Guard has also been active in the response, deploying at least eight helicopters — and requesting 11 more from across the country — to conduct rescues. They say they have already rescued 100 people from the air.

"Every Coast Guard asset available" is being used to respond, Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Paul Zukunft said. "But," he cautioned, "there are conditions where it is just not safe to fly."

All told, Pence said Monday there are more than 8,500 federal personnel on the ground in the area to help state and local officials, who are leading the rescue efforts.

Even officials with the Mexican government have offered Texas assistance in its recovery from the storm, Abbott said at a news conference Monday.

The extensive state and national response was motivated partly by the immense breadth of the storm's effects, apparent in the next number.



Long expects as many as 50 counties in Texas to be affected in some form by the storm's floodwaters, a situation that he says has demanded the agency "help bolster the efforts to do swift water rescue, search and rescue over a huge county jurisdiction."

Eighteen of those counties have been granted a federal disaster declaration, a move that triggers FEMA's support.

Harris County Judge Ed Emmett, the top administrator in the county home to Houston, noted just what the size of the storm means for local officials.

"One of the issues, of course, that makes this situation even worse is all of the surrounding counties are experiencing their own difficulties," he said at a news conference Monday, "so we're not in this alone, but we can't really help each other."

And the size of the storm means it's not just Texas that must bear its blows. Some 15-25 inches of rainfall are expected in southwest Louisiana, and President Trump declared an emergency in the state on Monday morning.



By the time the region emerges from Harvey's aftermath, Long expects nearly half a million people will have requested help. Pence said 22,000 have already registered for disaster assistance.

And it's unlikely that aftermath will lift anytime soon.

"You've got rivers and bayous that are going to be reaching crest stage later in the week in and around Houston," NPR's Debbie Elliott pointed out, citing the head of the National Weather Service. "The floodwaters are going to be slow to recede. They're going to persist."

"This is going to take us months, years to get back to normal," Emmett said, "and so any help that people can send, we would certainly appreciate that."</s>Gov. Greg Abbott ordered more than 2,000 members of the Texas Military Department's Army National Guard, Air National Guard and Texas State Guard to assist in recovery efforts following Hurricane Harvey.

Soldiers and Airmen are currently providing support to flooding regions of Houston and the Texas Gulf Coast.

Guardsmen are assisting in search and rescue operations, swift water rescues and evacuations of flooding areas.

Members of the Texas State Guard are mobilized to provide local shelter operations and provide a tracking system that helps evacuees locate loved ones checking into shelters.

Additional Guardsmen are on standby and will join operations as requested by the Texas Department of Emergency Management.

Hurricane Harvey is the first hurricane to make a direct landfall on the Texas coast since 2008.</s>HOUSTON — Gov. Greg Abbott activated the entire Texas National Guard in response to Harvey, bringing the total number of deployed guardsmen to roughly 12,000, he said Monday.

Previously, he had mobilized about 4,000 troops.

Swollen rivers in east Texas aren’t expected to crest until later this week, but federal officials are already predicting tropical storm Harvey will drive 30,000 people into shelters and spur 450,000 victims to seek some sort of disaster assistance.

And yet, forecasters say, more rain is coming. Lots more.

RELATED: How to help Hurricane Harvey victims

Several locations have already received 2 feet or more of rain, and forecasters say a reprieve won’t arrive till week’s end at the earliest.

By then, rain totals could reach another 2 feet — with isolated instances of 40 to 50 more inches — along the upper Texas coast.

“This is a landmark event for Texas,” FEMA administrator Brock Long said. “Texas has never seen an event like this.”

But, Long warned, Harvey presents a dynamic situation, and “every number we put out right now is going to change in 30 minutes.”

Harvey will likely surpass 2008’s Hurricane Ike and 2001’s tropical storm Allison, two of the most destructive storms to hit the Gulf Coast in recent memory, he said.

Around 13 million people from Corpus Christi to New Orleans were under flood watches and warnings as of Monday morning as Harvey’s storm bands repeatedly pummel the same areas.

For state and federal officials working to mitigate Harvey’s devastation, one of the more frustrating aspects of the storm is uncertainty.

“The word catastrophic does not appropriately describe what we’re facing,” said U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas. “We just don’t know when it’s going to end.”

Early Monday, Harvey was just barely clinging to tropical storm status, but the danger is far from over.

The storm is forecast to head southeast toward the Matagorda Bay and the Gulf of Mexico where it will pick up additional moisture before sliding back over Galveston and Houston, cities it’s already hammered.

Even when the rain is gone, dangers will persist, said National Weather Service Director Louis Uccellini, because “the flooding will be very slow to recede.”</s>Texas Gov. Greg Abbott discusses impacts of the upcoming forecast and outlines relief efforts for areas affected by flooding and damage from catastrophic storm Harvey.</s>Undocumented Texans in Hurricane Harvey’s path face a horrifying choice: deportation or risk of death.

The United States Border Patrol is going to keep its Rio Grande Valley checkpoints active in Texas through the duration of Hurricane Harvey “unless there is a danger to the safety of the traveling public and our agents,” according to a statement from the agency. “We’re not going to impede anybody getting out of here, but at the same time we’re a law enforcement agency, so we still have to conduct our duties,” a Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) official elaborated. As the agency later clarified, so long as highways are open checkpoints will be too.

Widespread evacuations have been issued in several East Texas counties in advance of the now Category 3 storm, which could bring a year’s worth of rain to the Gulf of Mexico over the course of just three or four days. The mayor of Corpus Christi is strongly encouraging residents of his city to leave the area. A state of disaster has already been declared in 30 counties by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, and the National Weather Service in Texas has said that large parts of Southeast Texas could be “uninhabitable for weeks or months.” Many—including Federal Emergency Management Agency administrator Brock Long—predict this could be the most damaging hurricane the United States has dealt with since 2005.

Given all this, thousands of undocumented immigrants who live in Harvey’s path may now be faced with a horrifying choice: Stay put and risk death, or evacuate and risk deportation.

In a statement, Lorella Praeli, the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) director of immigration policy and campaigns, called the decision a “disgusting move.” ACLU of Texas policy strategist Astrid Dominguez said, “It is unconscionable that the Border Patrol is sending a dangerous, wrong message to our community by refusing to temporarily suspend immigration enforcement during an evacuation, as they did in 2016 and 2012,” referencing the agency’s actions in advance of Hurricanes Matthew and Isaac. (Hurricane shelters in Texas, meanwhile, won’t be asking about the immigration status of those seeking refuge.)

The CBP announcement—and Harvey itself—come roughly a week before Texas is set to crack down on “Sanctuary Cities” through the September 1 implementation of Senate Bill 4, which gives police officers the authority to ask about immigration status during routine stops for traffic violations and other minor infractions. Under the same measure, law enforcement officials can face criminal charges for non-compliance with federal immigration authorities. SB 4 was signed into law by Abbott in May amid massive protests. Since then, several cities around the state have signed onto a lawsuit challenging the bill’s legality.

Whatever the ultimate fate of SB 4, the juncture of extreme weather and extreme immigration policy likely to play out in Texas over the coming weeks highlights one of the more unsettling realities of climate change. The hellish nature of that crisis means tides and temperatures will rise as storms grow more extreme. All of the above could happen in a political reality where borders are militarized, wealth inequality is at historic highs and the economy is harshly stratified along racial lines.

Climbing temperatures, in other words, stand to make everything that’s already bad even worse. Hurricane Harvey may just be a small sign of what’s to come.</s>Just days into one of the biggest storms to hit the U.S. in decades, authorities have rescued thousands of people in Houston alone. And as floodwaters from Hurricane Harvey, now a tropical storm, continue to rise across southeast Texas and neighboring Louisiana, officials expect that still thousands more evacuees will need to be sheltered in the days to come.

"This is a landmark event," Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Brock Long said at a news conference Monday. In fact, it has been such a landmark event — with more than 3 feet of rain having already hit some regions — the National Weather Service has even had to revise its traditional methods of representing storms "in order to effectively map it."

So how does one respond to a catastrophe of such historic proportions?

For authorities, that has meant summoning a rescue and evacuation effort nearly as massive. "The goal is rescue," Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner told reporters Monday. "That's the major focus for the day."

Here's how that rescue effort is taking shape, sketched in a few telling — and staggering — numbers.



Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo told reporters Monday that officers have rescued roughly 2,000 people in the city — out of about 4,000 water-related calls for assistance — since the storm came ashore Friday evening.

... rescues over a 12-hour span since midnight on Monday. But that number does not include the 185 critical rescue requests in the city still outstanding as of midday.

Police hope to work through that backlog of requests by nightfall, because they say their boats are not properly equipped to conduct rescue operations in the dark.

Many of those people who required rescue will also require a place to stay — which brings us to ...



"Once we move them, we're able to extract them from different areas and rescue them, we've got to get them into shelters," Long said Monday. "This shelter mission is going to be a very heavy lift. We're anticipating over 30,000 people being placed in shelters temporarily."

Already 5,500 people are staying in shelters in Houston, and Turner only expects that number to rise in a greater metro area of some 6.5 million people.

Even in San Antonio, which was largely saved from the worst of the storm's impact, Mayor Ron Nirenberg told NPR more than 1,000 evacuees have been sheltered — a number he expects to "increase sharply," as well.

"No one will be turned away," he said. "We will do whatever is necessary. The capacity is whatever is needed."

Still, authorities have been struggling to supply those evacuees. The Red Cross initially was unable to get their trucks to one shelter, and those evacuees, without food, had McDonald's breakfast Sunday morning.

But there might not be such scarcity for long. Vice President Mike Pence told KTRH the federal government has shipped out more than 1.2 million meals and a million liters of water.



Texas Gov. Greg Abbott activated the state's entire National Guard on Monday, saying roughly 12,000 guard members will be deployed to respond to Harvey. Initially, about 3,000 national and state guard members had been deployed

"It is imperative that we do everything possible to protect the lives and safety of people across the state of Texas as we continue to face the aftermath of this storm," Abbott said in a statement.

The governor noted that the guardsmen will be collaborating with FEMA and federal troops to "assist in the efforts already underway."

The U.S. Coast Guard has also been active in the response, deploying at least eight helicopters — and requesting 11 more from across the country — to conduct rescues. They say they have already rescued 100 people from the air.

"Every Coast Guard asset available" is being used to respond, Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Paul Zukunft said. "But," he cautioned, "there are conditions where it is just not safe to fly."

All told, Pence said Monday there are more than 8,500 federal personnel on the ground in the area to help state and local officials, who are leading the rescue efforts.

The extensive state and national response was motivated partly by the immense breadth of the storm's effects, apparent in the next number.



Long expects as many as 50 counties in Texas to be affected in some form by the storm's floodwaters, a situation that he says has demanded the agency "help bolster the efforts to do swift water rescue, search and rescue over a huge county jurisdiction."

Harris County Judge Ed Emmett, the top administrator in the county home to Houston, noted just what the size of the storm means for local officials.

"One of the issues, of course, that makes this situation even worse is all of the surrounding counties are experiencing their own difficulties," he said at a news conference Monday, "so we're not in this alone, but we can't really help each other."

And the size of the storm means it's not just Texas that must bear its blows. Some 15-25 inches of rainfall are expected in southwest Louisiana, and President Trump declared an emergency in the state on Monday morning.



By the time the region emerges from Harvey's aftermath, Long expects nearly half a million people will have requested help. Pence said 22,000 have already registered for disaster assistance.

And it's unlikely that aftermath will lift anytime soon.

"You've got rivers and bayous that are going to be reaching crest stage later in the week in and around Houston," NPR's Debbie Elliott pointed out, citing the head of the National Weather Service. "The floodwaters are going to be slow to recede. They're going to persist."

"This is going to take us months, years to get back to normal," Emmett said, "and so any help that people can send, we would certainly appreciate that."
The entire Texas National Guard is activated by Texas Governor Greg Abbott for search and rescue operations, as weather forecasters stated that Harvey would move back over the Gulf of Mexico and restrengthen.