The storm, which had been churning over Houston on Wednesday, slammed the area around Beaumont, Texas, overnight, adding to rainfall totals that are among the highest the region has faced since Hurricane Harvey in 2017.
As the chaotic scene unfolded on Thursday, the toll from Harvey was fresh in the communal memory in a part of the state that has been flooded again and again, where some residents who were devastated by the storm two years ago had only recently begun to fully recover.
Harvey battered a wider region, lingering for days as a tropical storm and dropping more than 50 inches of rain in some areas. Imelda’s heaviest rains have come in more isolated pockets, but have soaked areas southwest of Beaumont with up to 42 inches of rain this week, most of it in the last 24 hours, and many residents feared that the storm could do just as much damage.
“It’s bad,” Judge Jeff Branick of Jefferson County told The Beaumont Enterprise. “Homes that did not flood in Harvey are flooding now.”
Imelda, with maximum sustained winds of 25 mph, is the first named storm to hit the region since Harvey in 2017.
On Thursday, drivers in Beaumont were stuck in their cars as the flooding around them reached as high as their door handles. Exxon Mobil shut down its chemical plant there and was closely monitoring its refinery on the same site. The Beaumont Police Department said that it was overwhelmed with calls, fielding nearly 600 requests for assistance as of Thursday morning.
In the southwest part of the city, residents were reporting water as deep as 5 feet. Volunteers in boats were pushing their way into neighborhoods to rescue stranded people.
Forecasters predicted that the rain would continue, with an additional 10 inches of rain possible through Thursday night.
“What I’m sitting in right now makes Harvey look like a little thunderstorm,” Sheriff Brian Hawthorne of Chambers County told ABC13 in Houston. “It’s dire out here. I’m fearful for this community right now.”
This article originally appeared in
.