Houston: The devastating path of Harvey made landfall Wednesday for a second time since it roared ashore last week, as the biggest rainstorm in the history of the continental United States finally began to move away from Houston and carried its fury to Louisiana.
Now a tropical storm, Harvey's immediate effects are not expected as devastating as a Category 4 hurricane that first blasted Houston and other parts of Texas beginning last Friday. But it still packed potentially deadly and disastrous torrents of rain that have left Texas with a punishing toll: at least 22 people known dead and possibly more, tens of thousands left homeless and storm-ravaged areas that could take months or longer to bounce back.
Forecasters predict another five to 10 inches of rain could fall in western Louisiana, where rivers and bayous were already swollen with near-record downpours.
Coastal lowlands also faced a double threat. A storm surge warning for the coast from Holly Beach to Morgan City, La., said water levels could rise another two to four feet, The Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang reported. To the east, New Orleans was under a flash flood warning. Meanwhile, authorities up the Mississippi Delta — as far away as Tennessee — prepared to feel the brunt of Harvey as it began to chart northward.
Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards said in a news conference Tuesday to "prepare and pray" as Harvey arced again over the Gulf of Mexico to pick up more rainfall potential. The storm made landfall before dawn Wednesday near Cameron, La., a marshy port about 20 miles east of the Texas border.
In Beaumont, Tex., 85 miles east of Houston, at least 10 inches of rain fell on Tuesday afternoon alone. In the deluge, a mother and child got out of their car on a flooded freeway service road and were swept away. The child clung to her mother for half a mile. Police and firefighters got to them just before they went under a trestle and were lost for good. Only the child survived, police said.
After more than 50 inches of rain over four days, Houston was less of a city and more of an archipelago: a chain of urbanized islands in a muddy brown sea. All around it, flat-bottomed boats and helicopters were still plucking victims from rooftops, and water was still pouring in from overfilled reservoirs and swollen rivers.
Between 25 and 30 percent of Harris County — home to 4.5 million people in Houston and its near suburbs — was flooded by Tuesday afternoon, according to an estimate from Jeff Lindner, a meteorologist with the county flood control district. That's at least 444 square miles, an area six times the size of the District of Columbia.
Across Houston on Tuesday, there were some new reasons for hope: the rain turned from sheets into mere drops. Fast-food outlets reopened. When a downtown convention center became a shelter for the displaced, volunteers lined up around the block to help.
But there was a realization that the storm's most awful damage was still unknown — scattered out in those disconnected islands, or hidden under the water. Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner imposed a curfew starting Tuesday from midnight to 5 am Central Time to deter looting of abandoned homes.
"There are some who might want to take advantage of this situation, so even before it gets a foothold in the city, we just need to hold things in check," Turner said at a news conference.
Authorities added that there had been reports of people impersonating law enforcement officers in communities such as Kingwood, falsely telling people they needed to evacuate.
On Tuesday morning authorities discovered the body of a Houston police officer who had drowned in his patrol car two days earlier, at the storm's height.