Around 1 o’clock on Saturday morning, 61-year-old Joan Groth noted water seeping through the bottom edges of the door in her one-story house. By 4 am, it was waist high, so she and her husband William, like other Houston area residents that night, climbed into the attic. Water would rise 7 feet inside her house. 

“We flooded before, but never this bad,” Groth said after climbing off a city truck in downtown Houston. “I was afraid we’d get flooded in the attic.” Indeed, the National Weather Service was warning people to wait on their roofs rather than in their attics for rescue.

Groth arrived Sunday evening at the George R. Brown Convention Center in downtown Houston with her husband and about a dozen neighbors who’d been rescued by boat from their flooded homes. She, like others filing into the convention center Sunday, was plucked from her home by a boat driven by the National Guard, the Houston Fire Department, or just a friendly neighbor. 

Houston residents arrive at the shelter happy to be dry and alive, but as the shock of their water rescue fades, attention turns to the future. Thousands of people in Houston are homeless now, all their possession claimed by the floods. Even those with salvageable houses will need to wait months for repairs. Although the most urgent rescue efforts are ending in Houston, a years-long problem is just getting started. 

George Snow, 68, was dazed to be vying for a cot in a city shelter, his south Houston house in ruin. 

“It had never flooded there before, so we were just going to ride it out,” he said. “We didn’t have any idea it was going to be this bad.”

His neighborhood, Scarsdale, sits in an area near Clear Creek and Dickinson Bayou, where water rose above the second story in some neighborhoods, and where boat owners flocked Sunday to join first responders in the rescue effort. Snow and his wife were picked up by a volunteer boat owner. 

In the stress of unexpected catastrophe, Snow said, he and his wife were unable to pick the valuable belonging from their three-story house. 

Many of the evacuees filling the center carry all their dry possessions with them. 

Ariel Wadler, 21, marveled that everything she owned she carried in her purse: mostly dry clothes, shampoo, and conditioner. She and her family had waded across a street to a neighbor’s two-story home when water began to overtake their ground floor. The floods that followed swallowed her bedroom, and she was rescued the next morning by a National Guard boat. 

“I can’t even feel anything,” she said. “That’s why I’m not crying.”

Authorities, still absorbed in the rescue effort, haven’t yet produced a clear figure on the extent of the damage or how many people are left without a home. Evacuees throughout the shelter told of their own rescue by boat. Congress is sure to take up a relief bill when it returns from August recess, and how and whether flood victims will be able to rebuild their lives will depend on the outcome of that bill.

When Ricky Harris realized the storm had brought disaster, he drove toward his 91-year-old grandmother Clara’s house northeast of downtown, parked at the edge of the flooded street, and walked for 45 minutes through knee-high water find her. He helped her from the house and walked her back to the edge of the flood, where dump trucks waited to move evacuees to the shelter. 

“This is unbelievable,” he said as he waited for officials to help him lower his grandmother off the back of the truck. 

Oscar Santos, 54, left his apartment near Buffalo Bayou without knowing what condition he’d find it on his return. Police came through midday Sunday, just as water crept over first-floor door stoops, telling residents to head toward an evacuation pickup point before water got too high. 

“The bayou is still rising; that’s why we’re here,” he said. 

A neighbor who didn’t leave has been sending Santos videos showing the bayou slowly overtaking his apartment. 

The city’s homeless have also flocked to the convention center. Many spent Saturday night trapped in pounding rain, and then were trapped Sunday by the shutdown of public transportation.

Gordon Miles, 51, had been in Houston for just nine days when, sleeping under an overpass of I-45, he saw the dark, misty cloud, bursting with lightning and rolling toward him. He immediately knew trouble approached. 

“Scared the hell out of me when I saw it coming,” he said. “Everybody left but me; I didn’t know where to go.”

At one point in the night, he braced himself in the corner of a fence to keep from drifting away in the water. 

In the morning, he walked two hours to the shelter. 

There, on Sunday evening, thousands registered and filed in to wait in line for dry clothes, towels, and food. Many watch the weather forecast on TV or wrap up in towels and stare ahead, dazed and tired from a wet, sleepless night. 

The convention center will be open for a few more days. After that, while Houston flooding refugees’ homes are repaired or demolished, they’ll need to find elsewhere to go. 

HOUSTON — Susan Dickson, 71, stood on her driveway on Sunday with her husband, Russell, marveling at the flow of water along Bissonnet Street. She rattled off the other great floods she’d seen since moving here in 1968: Alicia, Allison, Ike. “This is the worst because it’s not stopping,” she said. “I’ve not seen it go on and on like this before.”

People in Houston awoke bewildered Sunday to the most catastrophic floods the city has ever seen. High water on neighborhood streets and major highways pinned the population in places, while first responders evacuated neighborhoods accessible only by boat.

Dickson’s street was not draining like it normally does, she said, an ominous sign for the fate of the folks who live near the channels into which these streets flow. High water was still standing far downstream on Clear Creek in Friendwood and League City. 

To help his street drain, Klaus Thoma, 72, used a plastic rake to scrape debris from the storm sewer inlets, but he said it wasn’t working.

“We are lucky,” he said, gesturing to the neighbors who’d turned out to see the flood. “When you think of other people getting rescued by boat, it’s horrible.” 

FEMA issued a disaster declaration for Harris County Sunday morning, opening the effort to federal resources, funding, and personnel. The National Weather Service reported five people had died. The Houston Fire Department on Sunday morning posted that it responded to 2,000 calls overnight and had a backlog of 1,000 more. 

The city knows the scourge of high water: Storms have swamped neighborhoods here repeatedly through the decades, so the people are familiar with the pains of owning a previously submerged property.

This is the reality that so many of those homeowners will confront as the waters recede.

The home will be uninhabitable for weeks or months or more. All the flooring must be removed. The sheet rock and beams in the wall must be cut at the water line and replaced. The soaked furniture is trashed, along with many possessions and memories stored at ground level.

If the house goes under, often so do the cars. The financial damage can be crippling, especially for homeowners without flood insurance. Some may choose to walk away and sell the house at a great loss.  

Families that repair their houses need to find somewhere else to live in the meantime, yet owe property taxes for the uninhabitable home.  

What’s worse, some areas that flooded overnight this weekend were also submerged in 2015 and 2016, creating crushing liabilities and repeat trauma for homeowners there. 

“Sadly as of 0200 water entered my house for the third time in three and a half years,” one such homeowner posted early Sunday morning in a Facebook support group for victims of a 2015 flood. “I have relocated to higher ground. I am at a loss for words.”

As the waters recede, a clearer picture of the damage will emerge. Authorities haven’t yet released an estimate of the number of damaged or destroyed homes and the cost to repair it all. Many homes will need to be torn down. 

For now the city has opened its convention center as a shelter for the flood refugees, and other aid groups operate shelters throughout the area. The involvement of FEMA in the recovery effort typically means a supply of temporary housing for those displaced. 

HOUSTON — Tyner Little, a public information officer with the Nueces County Sheriff’s Office, drove back late Saturday afternoon to his Corpus Christi home, which he hadn’t seen since he holed up in a trembling courthouse with an emergency team, to prepare for Hurricane Harvey’s arrival.

As he steered through still pouring rain, he feared what he’d find.

“Nothing too bad,” he said by phone as he arrived: Downed trees and fences. With Harvey still a tropical storm, the rain fell too heavily for him to survey the house’s exterior, but Little was content.

The storm that spared his house toppled others along the South Texas coast, and it continues to to inundate a region nearly 300 miles wide as it swirls in place. It inflicted severe damage in communities on the coast, destroying homes, toppling trees and leaving at least one person dead.

Flooding is still a serious concern, even as the storm’s been downgraded to a tropical storm. The next few days could result in more damage or further harm to residents.

But despite Harvey’s coastal devastation, the first 24 hours of the storm, at least, has not come close to matching forecasters’ worst fears.

Damage from the storm generally stopped far short of the catastrophe some administrators feared, leaving response planners with a situation less grave than they’d prepared for.

“Everybody is real relieved,” said Goliad County judge Pat Calhoun. “Now we’re just looking at the cleanup thinking damn, this is going to get ugly.”

But the damage is not all done yet. The National Weather Service expects the remnants of Harvey to swirl around Texas, drifting southeast for the next two or three days, likely destroying homes and causing flooding on its way.

Local, state, and federal resources have been deployed to help Texas recover.

President Donald Trump approved a disaster declaration for Texas before Harvey made landfall Friday night. FEMA has stationed rescue teams to Texas and opened bases in Seguin, Texas and Camp Beauregard, Louisiana with food, water and resources ready for possible displaced people.

The base in Seguin holds 306,00 meals, 96,000 liters of water, 4,500 tarps and 33 generators, FEMA said.

The response is an example of FEMA’s modern approach to disaster relief. After a federal response to Hurricane Katrina lagged for days in 2005, agency rules were changed to allow disaster declarations before landfall. In recent hurricanes like Ike in 2008 and Sandy in 2012, FEMA also mobilized an emergency response before the storms finished raining.

“This is possible due to the quick response of Governor Abbott declaring Nueces County a disaster area, even before landfall,” Nueces County said in a press release. “In addition, President Trump also acted quickly to assist our county.”

Federal disaster declarations cover six coastal Texas counties: Nueces, Bee, Goliad, San Patricio and Refugio. Residents in those counties are now able to apply for individual federal assistance, possibly claiming federal compensation for property lost to the storm.

A FEMA spokeswoman in Texas said the agency was too stretched by immediate lifesaving operations to discuss the compensation program.

Harvey will heap more strain on the National Flood Insurance Program, which FEMA administers to help rebuild flood-damaged homes. More than $24 billion in debt, the program expires Sept. 31, and federal lawmakers aim to reform the nation’s approach to public assistance for disaster victims.

Those strains could still intensify in the week to come. The rain is expected to persist for days, and trillions of gallons of storm runoff will continue to cause problems as they consolidate in creeks, bayous and riverways.

“The flooding rivers will be an issue,” said Lt. Craig Cummings, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety. “That’s going to be in a couple days though.”

Forecasters expect that Texas rivers from the Nueces to the Trinity could swell to record levels by mid week.

In that time, the storm system is expected to drift towards Houston, the nation’s fourth largest city, which has anxiously prepared for a bout of severe flooding.

As of Saturday night the city had largely been spared, except for a few hurricanes that touched down in its west, on the fringe of Harvey’s swirl.

Neighbors labored to clear rubble from one suburban street near Houston where a cyclone had struck the night before.

Monty Ray was in bed when he heard a funnel cloud rolling his way. He and his wife darted from their bedroom just as the storm burst through his wall, lodging bricks on the drywall across the room, he said.

The storm also left a hole in his roof, along with several others on his street. By morning, about 50 neighbors hard turned out to aid the recovery effort, chopping downed trees, heaping shattered fences and gathering debris.

“We’re just helping people out like we’d want them to help us,” said Brad Howell, a 44-year-old attorney who brought his wife and two daughters out to clean. “It’s a community, it’s what we do.”

HOUSTON — For a brief moment, a quiet descended here on Friday afternoon, as Texans prepared for an onslaught. And then frightened residents picked grocery store shelves clean of water, bread, and canned soup. They filled their bathtubs with water and, in many cases, headed out of town. Many service stations ran out of gas.

“I think people are preoccupied trying to prepare for the unknown,” said Lou Brucculeri, an attorney in downtown Houston with Blank Rome LLP, which closed at noon. “When these events happen lots of people have their lives washed away in water, and it’s sad.”

And the battering has begun. Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Texas late on Friday night as a Category 4 hurricane, with sustained winds reaching 130 mph. It immediately began to soak the state. And the National Weather Service forecasts it will dump between 15 to 40 inches of rain over areas of southeastern coastal Texas, including Houston, as the storm lingers for days.

By Saturday morning, winds had subdued, to 80 mph, and the storm had been downgraded to a Category 1. It’s expected to further weaken to a tropical storm later today. Still, officials warned of potentially massive flooding in the days to come, as Harvey spills a projected 15 trillion gallons of water on the coastal plain.

Texans have seen their share of storms — but they haven’t seen anything like this in a while.

This is what it was like on the ground, waiting for the hurricane to blow into Houston.

Life slowed down, local officials ramped up

Mandatory evacuations forced thousands from their homes as the edge of Harvey blew ashore across more than 300 miles of Gulf coast. The state and national guards deployed about 700 members to man Blackhawk helicopters and high clearance vehicles, or to man shelters for hurricane evacuees and likely refugees.

“We got to worry about all the folks who moved here in the last years and haven’t seen a hurricane yet,” said Jennifer Cantrell, a 37-year-old social worker in Houston as she loaded up on cigarettes for the storm at a Citgo station in Houston on Friday. “You’ve just got to be prepared to be indoors for days with no electricity, no water.”

Cantrell had just bought four 40-pound bags of dirt to lean against her door, hoping to keep the water out. 

Across Houston, residents left town or made preparations for a long weekend indoors. Business people sauntered out early on Friday afternoon, as many workplaces closed after lunch. 

“Real quiet today. Phones aren’t ringing,” said Mike Niebruegge, an attorney who works downtown. “A lot of people didn’t come in.”

Khoa Nguyen, a 32-year-old banker, booked a room with his wife in a Hill Country town 250 miles away, but still took precautions. He filled his bath tubs with water and bought a generator for his house. 

“In case we can’t get out of town,” he said as he filled up two 2-gallon gas cans.

Many gas stations in Houston ran out of gas after a mad rush on Thursday night. Most refueled and some questioned how long their supply would last. 

More severe gas shortages happened in routes leading out of Nueces County, which took the first and most direct hit from Harvey. State emergency planners coordinated delivery of gasoline to dry stations, helping traffic to move out of the danger zone. 

Local governments prepared to respond to the storm — and see what federal help they might need

As the storm’s edge made first contact in Corpus Christi early Friday afternoon, authorities there announced: “The evacuation period has ended. It is now time to shelter in place.”

But for areas hundreds of miles inland and up the coast, the threat still loomed. Torrential rains are forecasted to settle over the state for two to five days. 

“We’ll still have a tropical storm over Galveston Bay on Wednesday morning,” said Jeff Lindner, a meteorologist with the Harris County Flood Control District. “Obviously with that type of rainfall we’re looking at very significant flooding.”

The Harris County Emergency Operation Center in Houston, a facility which is brought online during times of need, is at its highest alert stage. Ninety-eight representatives from various agencies and organizations fill every desk at the facility, gazing at a matrix of flat panel screens and planning a response as the situation unfolds. Representatives from local, state, and federal agencies caucus with folks from utility companies, hospital systems, weather authorities, and first responders.

The group is determining how and to what extent the Federal Emergency Management Agency or the National Guard should plan to get involved with the recovery effort once hurricane-force winds subside. 

“This is going to be a very powerful flooding event,” said Francisco Sanchez, a spokesman for the Harris County office of homeland security and emergency management, who was at the operation center. 

“This area hasn’t seen one of these storms in 47 years,” said Tyner Little, a spokesman for the Nueces County Sheriff’s Office, recalling Hurricane Celia, a category five storm that destroyed much of Corpus Christi in 1970. 

Brazoria County sheriff Charles Wagner told local media that first responders won’t risk their lives to rescue folks who ignored the mandatory evacuation. Across all of the damage zone, rescue operations will begin when the hurricane-force winds subside. 

Meanwhile, emergency planners will be coordinating a response and assessing the need for federal backup — in what looms as the first big disaster-response test for the Trump administration.