Trent Fleece has been through three big storms since moving to Houston, Texas, in 2003. Hurricane Harvey hit closest to home, which is why he and his family left theirs on Tuesday.

Though the worst of the rains had let up, the Addicks Reservoir near their house had literally filled to the brim. It can hold 248 million cubic metres of water.

“Normally (the floodplain is) dry, green grasses, golf courses, football and soccer fields, baseball fields,” said Fleece, who grew up in Regina and studied engineering at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon.

“I drive through Addicks Reservoir to get to work; there’s roadways. For flooding events, it fills up,” as water from nearby rivers, creeks and bayous runs into it.

“Water started coming out of the storm drains and flooding our streets, and so at that point we decided to get out of the neighbourhood while we still could and try to find dry ground,” added Fleece.

Until that point, the family hunkered down in their Lakes on Eldridge North home in northwest Houston, as instructed by local officials.

On Sunday, Mayor Sylvester Turner told media that ordering Houston’s 2.3 million residents to leave would have created “a nightmare,” and said the city had learned its lessons, alluding to Hurricane Rita in 2005.

Fleece recalled a previous storm requiring evacuation to Dallas, the usual 3.5-hour drive taking 12 hours in heavy traffic.

Fleece and his wife Joanna moved their valuables to the second floor of their house before packing up on Tuesday and heading west to stay with friends in Katy, about 40 kilometres further inland.

They brought the essentials: their three young daughters, their dog, some electronics and chargers, a few days’ clothes and some food.

On Wednesday, neighbours updated Fleece on the situation from their homes further back from the floodplain.

He was cautiously optimistic that the water wouldn’t rise higher than his driveway.

“It seems to be holding steading at 109.2, so we’ve got another foot or two before it would flood our house,” said Fleece, who recognizes that, in the scheme of things, his family is lucky.

“We are by far the fortunate side of this. There’s way worse that is happening all over the city. … There’s tens of thousands of people who have lost homes and are living in temporary shelters throughout the city.”

News outlets say the storm has killed anywhere from 21 to 30 people so far — including a carload of four children and their great-grandparents.

Volunteer crews, including some of Fleece’s friends and colleagues, as well as the National Guard have used boats to navigate the streets and rescue people who were housebound.

According to the Associated Press, Moody’s Analytics estimates at least $51 billion in storm-related damage.

Further, oil refineries’ ceasing operation has cut off at least one-fifth of the nation’s capacity.

As Houston’s two airports planned to gradually resume service on Wednesday, more than 1,600 flights had been cancelled.

The Harris County Flood Control District says rainfall in most places ranged from 68 to 89 centimetres.

A rain gauge near Mont Belvieu, east of Houston, recorded 132 centimetres of rainfall between Friday and Tuesday, according to the U.S. National Weather Service.

That would equate about 17 metres of snow, per the National Severe Storms Laboratory’s estimation that one centimetre of rain equals 13 centimetres of snow on average.

Like most Houstonians, Fleece doesn’t have flood insurance. As his house was safe after last April’s Tax Day flood, he didn’t think he needed it.

“We would have thought it would be impossible for us to flood, and they’re calling this a 1,000-year storm now. Had our house flooded, we would have lost everything and not been covered,” he said.

In 2015 in Houston, a Memorial Day flash flood killed seven people.

Despite three epic floods three years in a row, Fleece doesn’t believe this is the new normal.

“I’m of the (view that) it’s a statistical anomaly, and the worst is behind us,” he said.</s>AT least one Bahamian woman was displaced from her home due to flooding in Texas from Hurricane Harvey, Minister of Foreign Affairs Darren Henfield said yesterday.

He added officials in the capital have been notified that all Bahamians, reported to be in Houston during the passage of Hurricane Harvey, are "safe and accounted for".

As a massive category-four storm, Harvey made landfall in southern Texas on Friday night, slamming the state's coastal areas with 15 to 25 inches of rainfall, and up to 50 inches further inland.

Up to press time on Monday, at least five deaths and more than a dozen injuries were reported in the aftermath of the weather system, which is now a tropical storm.

Mr Henfield told The Tribune that he had been in contact with Lynden Rose, honorary counsel in Houston, throughout the weekend and received reports that all 100 students in the city during Harvey are doing well after the storm.

"We have received the best news possible," he stated. "We've heard from our students here, from Texas Southern, the University of Houston and Prairie View (A&M University), and all is well.

"One Bahamian female was displaced and is now being looked after by her family and friends, all, we've been told, Bahamian."

Mr Henfield continued: "Our prayers and thoughts are with the people of the Houston area and all of America, in this, a time of natural disaster."

According to reports in the Texas area, the effects associated with Harvey are "unprecedented", and "beyond anything experienced".

USA Today yesterday reported that more than 5,500 persons are expected to seek refuge in Houston's convention centre as a result of Harvey's fury.

The US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has also suggested that the number could grow to as many as 30,000 persons if rainfall associated with the storm doesn't relent in the coming days.

Harvey is the fifth named storm of the 2017 Atlantic Hurricane season.</s>The Texas communities of Beaumont and Port Arthur struggled with rising floodwaters and worked to evacuate residents after Harvey rolled ashore early Wednesday for the second time in six days, hitting southwestern Louisiana as a tropical storm with winds of 45 mph and heavy rain.

For much of the rest of the Houston area, forecasters said the rain is pretty much over and the water is already back within its channels in some places. Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said the city's two major airports would reopen late in the afternoon.

"We have good news," said Jeff Lindner, a meteorologist with the Harris County Flood Control District. "The water levels are going down. And that's for the first time in several days."

Nevertheless, many thousands of homes in and around the nation's fourth-largest city were still swamped by the record-breaking deluge of 122 centimetres of rain and could stay that way for days or weeks. And officials said 911 call centres in the Houston area were still getting more than 1,000 calls an hour from people seeking help.

The scale of the catastrophe in Texas began to come into sharper focus: Emergency authorities said more than 1,000 homes were destroyed and close to 50,000 damaged, and over 32,000 people were in shelters across the state.

About 195,000 people have filed for financial assistance, and about $35 million in direct aid has been distributed — numbers expected to climb dramatically in the coming days and weeks, the chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency said.

"This is going to be an incredibly large disaster," Brock Long said in Washington. "We're not going to know the true cost for years to come. ... But it's going to be huge."

Harvey itself was "spinning down" and expected to weaken sometime Wednesday into a tropical depression, meaning winds of 38 mph or less, National Hurricane Center meteorologist Dennis Feltgen said.

Forecasters said the remnants of the hurricane will move from Louisiana into Mississippi, Tennessee and Kentucky in the next few days, with flooding possible in those states.

"Once we get this thing inland during the day, it's the end of the beginning," Feltgen said. "Texas is going to get a chance to finally dry out as this system pulls out."

Eugene Rideaux, a 42-year-old mechanic who showed up at evangelist Joel Osteen's Houston megachurch to sort donations for evacuees, welcomed the reprieve from the rain.

He said he had not been able to work or do much since the storm hit, so he was eager to get out of his dark house and help.

"It's been so dark for days now, I'm just ready to see some light. Some sunshine. I'm tired of the darkness," Rideaux said. "But it's a tough city, and we're going to make this into a positive and come together."

When Harvey paid its return visit to land overnight, it hit near Cameron, Louisiana, about 45 miles from Port Arthur.

Port Arthur found itself increasingly isolated as floodwaters swamped most major roads out of the city and spilled into a storm shelter with about 100 people inside. Motiva Enterprises closed its Port Arthur refinery, the largest in the nation, because of flooding.

Port Arthur Mayor Derrick Freeman posted on his Facebook page: "city is underwater right now but we are coming!" He urged residents to move to higher ground and avoid getting trapped in attics.

Harvey initially came ashore as a Category 4 hurricane in Texas on Friday, then made a U-turn and lingered off the coast as a tropical storm for days, inundating flood-prone Houston.

Harvey's five straight days of rain totalled close to 132 centimetres, the heaviest tropical downpour ever recorded in the continental United States.</s>HOUSTON (AP) — Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner confirmed that police Sgt. Steve Perez has died after he became trapped in his patrol car as he was driving to work.

The Houston Chronicle has reported that the 30-year officer was heading to work Sunday when he became trapped in high water on Interstate 45 in north Harris County and then couldn’t get himself out of his car.</s>HOUSTON, Tex. (AP) – Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner confirmed that police Sgt. Steve Perez has died after he became trapped in his patrol car as he was driving to work.

The Houston Chronicle has reported that the 30-year officer was heading to work Sunday when he became trapped in high water on Interstate 45 in north Harris County and then couldn’t get himself out of his car.</s>Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner confirmed that police Sgt. Steve Perez has died after he became trapped in his patrol car as he was driving to work.

The Houston Chronicle has reported that the 30-year officer was heading to work Sunday when he became trapped in high water on Interstate 45 in north Harris County and then couldn't get himself out of his car.</s>Houston’s mayor kept facing questions Tuesday about his decision not to order an evacuation of the notoriously flood-prone city ahead of Harvey’s arrival, even as overflowing reservoirs led several suburbs to move people out.

Instead, Mayor Sylvester Turner remained resolute in his advice to residents since the storm made landfall on Friday: hunker down at home.

Massive flooding from Harvey forced thousands of rescues that overwhelmed emergency responders. The George R. Brown Convention Center nearly doubled its expected capacity of 5,000, with people seeking refuge from the waist-deep waters that had neighborhoods resembling lakes.

“I want to say this again, because I guess it’s been missed, but you cannot evacuate 6.5 million people within two days,” Turner said Tuesday, referring to both the city and its surrounding areas. “That would be chaotic. We would be putting people in more harm’s way.”

The situation is reminiscent of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco both drew criticism for not ordering an evacuation sooner. Nagin did so one day before landfall, and levee failures led to disastrous flooding that plunged the city into chaos for days.

Experts said evacuating during a hurricane is a complicated decision with major ramifications, and none who spoke to the Associated Press second-guessed Turner. Harvey intensified quickly into a Category 4 hurricane on Friday, leaving the mayor and others a tight timeframe to safely move out a large number of people.

“This is all the information that’s coming into the mayor, and he’s got to go, ‘Oh my God, what am I going to do?'” said Susan Cutter, the director of the Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute at the University of South Carolina. “They’re damned if they do, damned if they don’t.”

Questions started Friday when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott suggested Houston residents get out while they could. At the time, Harvey was a powerful hurricane hours from landfall about 175 miles to the south near Corpus Christi. But the sprawling storm’s outer bands promised heavy rains for Houston, long susceptible to flooding because of its flat terrain and runaway development that has paved over water-absorbing wetlands.

Hours after Abbott’s remarks, Turner and other local leaders cautioned people to think twice before fleeing unnecessarily, especially when other communities more directly in the path of Harvey needed the same routes.

Once Harvey’s rains turned torrential in Houston over the weekend and made conditions too dangerous for leaving, some residents began doubting Turner’s decision.

Experts said Harvey presented a uniquely difficult decision for Houston officials because evacuations aren’t typically done for flash-flooding from rains, but rather from storm surge concerns in less populated areas closest to the shore.

A study by the state of South Carolina this year estimated that the time needed to evacuate the Charleston area ahead of a similarly sized hurricane would be 27 to 30 hours at its fastest, if traffic lanes in both directions were used.

Moving people from an inland urban center like Houston — the city alone is about three times larger than Charleston — would require at least 36 to 48 hours, experts said. But Harvey took only 56 hours to intensify to a Category 4 hurricane.

Harvey strengthened into a hurricane by noon Thursday. Hours later, the National Hurricane Center predicted “devastating flooding” from the strengthening storm. The center started warning of “catastrophic flooding” across southern and southeastern Texas Friday morning, and the storm made landfall by 10 p.m.

“The problem with evacuations is, when do you call them?” said George Haddow, a former deputy chief of staff at the Federal Emergency Management Agency who rode out hurricanes with his family in New Orleans. “You don’t want to call an evacuation so early and the storms take a left and hits Galveston.”

Ordering an evacuation, experts said, would’ve come with its own risks, such as highways clogged with motorists caught in severe thunderstorms or, worse, tornadoes that Harvey’s outer bands might cause.

“I don’t think they ever would have imagined having to evacuate the whole community in that amount of time,” said Joe Myers, a former top emergency management director in North Carolina and Florida. “I think they did the best they could do under the situation.”

In defending his decision, Turner has repeatedly invoked grim memories of Hurricane Rita in 2005, when problems from an evacuation of 3 million — roughly half of greater Houston — were blamed in many of the more than 100 deaths reported.

Massive traffic congestion toward Austin, San Antonio and Dallas caused delays of as long as 20 hours and even stranded out-of-gas motorists as Rita approached the Gulf Coast. In the worst incident, 23 nursing home patients were killed when the bus transporting them to North Texas exploded.

The region overhauled its evacuation plan after Rita and there was far less trouble when a quarter-million people were ordered out ahead of Hurricane Ike in 2008. Even so, Turner said he characterized a mass evacuation as a greater danger, especially the city wasn’t in Harvey’s direct path.

“You cannot put 6.5 million people on the road two days before a storm that you don’t know where it is going,” he said Tuesday. “It is absurd.”

But, some experts said, the option didn’t need to be binary between the entire metro area staying or going.

A brief summary of the emergency operations plan for the county that is home to Houston covers evacuation of “all or any part,” if that is determined the most effective way “for protecting the population.” A full copy of the plan was not immediately available, and officials did not respond to requests.

The county’s plan raises questions about whether targeted evacuations of susceptible neighborhoods were considered, even if only to higher ground in multi-story buildings, and possible to execute.

“It’s really an impossible dilemma he was put into,” said Shirley Laska, past director of the Center for Hazards Assessment, Response and Technology at the University of New Orleans. “But it shouldn’t have to be groundless, and in the future, it won’t be because of how horrible the event is to Houston.”

Associated Press writers Kevin McGill in New Orleans, Seth Borenstein in Washington and Will Weissert in Austin, Texas, contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2017 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, written or redistributed.</s>HOUSTON - After receiving an overwhelming number of inquiries from citizens and corporations who would like to help, Mayor Sylvester Turner has established the Hurricane Harvey Relief Fund that will accept tax deductible flood relief donations. The fund is administered by the Greater Houston Community Foundation.

“We are getting calls from across the country and right here in our hometown, and the generosity of people who understand this disaster is truly amazing,” said Mayor Turner. “Together we can make a difference to those who will need extensive help to get back on their feet once this storm is over.”

Online Credit Card Donations: Visit www.ghcf.org. Online credit card donations will be assessed a small fee, typically 3%, by the credit card companies. Donors have the option of increasing their credit card donations to cover this fee.

Transfer Cash by Wire: Wire To: JP Morgan Chase Bank, N.A.

 Houston, TX

 ABA # 021000021

 For credit to: Greater Houston Community Foundation

 A/C#: 849170287

 For further credit to: Hurricane Harvey Relief Fund

For stocks, corporate bonds and other marketable securities, please contact: donorservices@ghcf.org

Thank you for your consideration. Your support means a great deal to our fellow Houstonians.</s>Over the past week we have seen two major tropical storms devastate different parts of the world. First Typhoon Hato struck Hong Kong and Southern China, killing at least a dozen people. And over the weekend Hurricane Harvey made landfall from the Gulf of Mexico, bringing extremely heavy rain to southern Texas and causing devastating floods in Houston.

Tropical cyclones are, of course, a natural feature of our climate. But the extreme impacts of these recent storms, especially in Houston, has understandably led to questions over whether climate change is to blame.

Read: Harvey expected to dump ‘unprecedented’ 50 inches of rain on Houston area

Tropical cyclones, called typhoons in the Northwest Pacific and hurricanes in the North Atlantic, are major storm systems that initiate near the equator and can hit locations in the tropics and subtropics around the world.

When we look at the Atlantic Basin we see increases in tropical storm numbers over the past century, although there is high year-to-year variability. The year 2005, when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, marks the high point.

We can be confident that we’re seeing more severe tropical cyclones in the North Atlantic than we did a few decades ago. It is likely that climate change has contributed to this trend, although there is low statistical confidence associated with this statement. What that means is that this observed increase in hurricane frequency is more likely than not linked with climate change, but the increase may also be linked to decadal variability.

Has Harvey been enhanced by climate change?

Unlike other types of extreme weather such as heat waves, the influence of climate change on tropical cyclones is hard to pin down. This is because tropical cyclones form as a result of many factors coming together, including high sea surface temperatures, and weak changes in wind strength through the depth of the atmosphere.

These storms are also difficult to simulate using climate models. To study changes in tropical cyclones we need to run our models at high resolution and with interactions between the atmosphere and the ocean being represented.

It’s much easier to study heat extremes, because we can do this by looking at a single, continuous variable: temperature. Tropical cyclones, on the other hand, aren’t a continuous variable; they either form or they don’t. This makes them much harder to model and study.

Tropical cyclones also have many different characteristics that might change in unpredictable ways as they develop, including their track, their overall size, and their strength. Different aspects of the cyclones are likely to change in different ways, and no two cyclones are the same. Compare that with a heat wave, which often have similar spatial features.

For all these reasons, it is very hard to say exactly how climate change has affected Hurricane Harvey.

So what can we say?

While it’s hard to pin the blame for Hurricane Harvey directly on climate change, we can say this: human-caused climate change has enhanced some of the impacts of the storm.

Fortunately, in Harvey’s case, the storm surge hasn’t been too bad, unlike for Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, for example. This is because Harvey didn’t travel as far, and weakened rapidly when it made landfall.

We know that storm surges due to tropical cyclones have been enhanced by climate change. This is because the background sea level has increased, making it more likely that storm surges will inundate larger unprotected coastal regions.

Building levees and sea walls can alleviate some of these impacts, although these barriers will need to be higher (and therefore more expensive) in the future to keep out the rising seas.

Harvey’s biggest effect is through its intense and prolonged rainfall. A low pressure system to the north is keeping Harvey over southern Texas, resulting in greater rainfall totals.

The rainfall totals are already remarkable and are only going to get worse.

We know that climate change is enhancing extreme rainfall. As the atmosphere is getting warmer, it can hold more moisture (roughly 7% more for every 1 degree Celsius℃ rise in temperature). This means that when we get the right circumstances for very extreme rainfall to occur, climate change is likely to make these events even worse than they would have been otherwise. Without a full analysis, it is hard to put exact numbers on this effect, but on a basic level, wetter skies mean more intense rain.

There are other factors that are making this storm worse than others in terms of its impact. Houston is the second-fastest growing city in the U.S., and the fourth most populous overall.

As the region’s population grows, more and more of southern Texas is being paved with impermeable surfaces. This means that when there is extreme rainfall the water takes longer to drain away, prolonging and intensifying the floods.

Hurricane Harvey is likely to end up being one of the most costly disasters in U.S. history. It is also likely that climate change and population growth in the region have worsened the effects of this major storm.

Andrew King is a Climate Extremes Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne. This first appeared on The Conversation — Is Hurricane Harvey a harbinger for Houston’s future?</s>WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — Damages from Hurricane Harvey in the US state of Texas may lead up $90 billion in economic losses, the global risk modeling firm RMS said in a press release on Wednesday.

"Analysis by RMS, a global risk modeling and analytics firm, has found that economic losses caused by wind, storm surge, and inland flood from Hurricane Harvey could be as high as US $70-$90 billion," the release stated.

RMS Head of Americas Climate Risk Modeling stated in the release that the economic losses in Texas are still uncertain because of the ongoing rain fall and flooding.

On Friday, Hurricane Harvey hit Texas as a category four storm. The hurricane has affected mainly southeastern Texas, including the city of Houston, in addition to southwestern Louisiana. According to media reports, up to 30 people have been killed as of Wednesday morning.
The death toll from Hurricane Harvey reaches 30 as Sylvester Turner, the mayor of Houston, Texas, introduces a curfew to deter looters.