The New York Times

MICHIGAN

In a huge upset, President Donald Trump won Michigan by a mere 10,700 votes in 2016.

Chokwe Pitchford, 20

Benton Harbor, Michigan

Political candidate

“I don’t see the evidence that has mounted that he should be impeached right now. Of course, this inquiry is going to go further, we’ll get more testimony, more testimony is going to come. But I think we just need to let the process play out, and the right people will make this decision.”

Steve Wiborn, 63

Portage, Michigan

Car sales manager

“This is just a ploy to try to keep him from getting reelected, which is backfiring on them because it’s making more Republicans madder and madder. So they’re going to come out and vote for him in droves and vote for him because he’s doing the right thing for the country, and quite frankly, it’s refreshing.”

Gloria Weiberg, 97

St. Joseph, Michigan

Retired social worker

“Because I am a liberal person I want to see both sides, I want to hear them, I want to feel them, and so I am just going to hold off until that time.”

— TIM GRUBER

PENNSYLVANIA

After backing the Democratic presidential nominee in every election since 1992, Pennsylvania narrowly went for Trump in 2016.

Alberto Boulos, 83

South Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

“The Democrats, with my respect to them, and the Republicans, my respect to them, too, they go up one against another, and later on they shake up and they sit and take coffee together and go in the dining room together. So, politics works this way.”

Peter Elsbeck, 37

Philadelphia

Architect

“I don’t particularly like Trump as a president, but I think that taking a president out of office and turning over an election is a really, really serious, significant thing, and if it’s not done properly and carefully, it could be really bad for the country.”

— DESIREE RIOS

——

FLORIDA

The most populous swing state, Florida in recent years has increasingly seen razor-thin election margins and Republican victories in key races.

Elizabeth Daly, 70

The Villages, Florida

Retired

“I get annoyed because I think it’s a horrible thing that they’re doing. I don’t believe a word they’re saying about him. He’s done so much. He’s got better jobs, more jobs, he’s done a lot for our country, and he’s for our troops, which is very good.”

Korey Hoger, 42

Valrico, Florida

Realtor

“I think that he should be impeached. You know, 1 million percent. Although, I love the economy. I love the way things are booming right now. But I mean, I think we’re still feeling the aftershock of Obama.”

Nancy Fair, 68

Retired university administrator

“I think this is a witch hunt. I think he hasn’t done anything anybody else has done, and they’ve been after him since he won the election. And I think this thing should be dropped. I think Congress should be doing the job they were voted in to do, because in three years I haven’t seen them accomplish anything. So I’m furious.”

Malcolm Goodman, 31

Brooksville, Florida

Entrepreneur

“As far as I know, the only thing he’s done since he’s been in the chair for me is open up opportunities for jobs. So just off that judgment right there, I really don’t want to judge the guy, you know?”

— EVE EDELHEIT

ARIZONA

Once reliably Republican, Arizona is now a state that both parties view as highly competitive.

Leticia Ochoa, 24

Phoenix

Hairstylist

“It’s just really scary, what’s happening. But I hope everything happens for a reason and he does get impeached and somebody that comes into office wants to actually help the people, not try to hurt them in any way.”

Rachel Johnson, 51

Attorney

“I don’t know if we’re at a place to say that impeachment for certain or removal from office is appropriate, but I do want to hear more information, and I was alarmed by the testimony I did hear yesterday.”

— CAITLIN O’HARA

WISCONSIN

With a large percentage of white working-class voters, Wisconsin is viewed as one of the states most likely to decide the 2020 election.

Nafla Poff, 30

Madison, Wisconsin

Public health consultant

“At this point, I do think that it should move forward. I’d still like more information, but I am pro-impeachment at this point.”

Maury Malanaphy, 52

Hudson, Wisconsin

Territory manager

“The rules are pretty clearly written. Everything he said is recorded. The intent was clear. It’s kind of black and white.”

— LAUREN JUSTICE

NORTH CAROLINA

Despite an electorate roughly split between Democrats and Republicans, Barack Obama in 2008 was the only Democrat to win North Carolina since Jimmy Carter in 1976.

Angela Jones, 53

Charlotte, North Carolina

Retired banker

“It was important that we went down this path, so I think we have to see the process through. And if at the end the decision is that he has violated the Constitution or his oath, then, yeah, absolutely he should be impeached, and he should be removed from office. That’s my vote.”

Jake Cummings, 38

Mount Holly, North Carolina

Pipe former

“I think it’s a witch hunt. They’re really going to be disappointed when nothing comes of it, and he’s gonna get reelected.”

Tex Lindsey, 21

Student

“I do think the proceedings should move forward, and I think he should be removed from office. It’s just a little frightening to me to think about when he goes from office who is going to take his place. So, I guess Pence would be rather a scary alternative to the current situation.”

— TRAVIS DOVE

This article originally appeared in

How Swing State Voters Feel About Impeachment

We went to six swing states to sample opinion on impeachment the day after public testimony began in Washington. We found the nation’s divisions on stark display.

— Kentucky and Mississippi will elect governors , with Democrats looking for upset victories in those two solidly Republican states.

— In Virginia, voters will decide control of the state legislature, where Republicans have slim majorities in each chamber. If the GOP loses, Virginia state government will be under full Democratic control.

— Polls are open from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. in Virginia; 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. in Kentucky, depending on the location; and 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Central time in Mississippi.

— There are also political offices and referendums on the ballot in Maine, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Colorado.

The Big Picture

The Republican candidates for governor in Kentucky and Mississippi have aggressively linked themselves to Trump and sought to tie their rivals to the national Democrats pursuing the impeachment inquiry against the president. Trump, who comfortably carried both states in 2016, has put his political capital on the line: He rallied voters in Mississippi on Friday and was in Kentucky on Monday night.

The president has not appeared on the campaign trail in Virginia, where Democrats are hoping Trump’s deep unpopularity in the suburbs is enough for them to flip control of both chambers of the state Legislature. Virginia is the only Southern state the president lost in 2016, and Republicans are facing a series of difficult races in metropolitan districts.

The 2019 election season does not end Tuesday, however. On Saturday, Nov. 16, Louisiana voters will choose between Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, and his challenger, the businessman Eddie Rispone. It’s another race where the Republicans are trying to harness Trump’s standing with conservative voters and their dismay over his looming impeachment to nationalize a state election. Trump, who has already been to Louisiana once for Republicans this fall, is headed back there later this week to stump for Rispone.

The Battle for Virginia’s Suburbs

Virginians will decide whether to hand power to Democrats for the first time in a generation or maintain divided government. Major policy issues like gun safety are at stake, as well as control over drawing new voting districts in 2021. All 140 seats in both chambers are on the ballot. Republicans hold slim majorities of 20-19 in the Senate and 51-48 in the House of Delegates, with one vacancy in each.

If you’re watching the election returns Tuesday night, here are some of the most closely contested races to follow that will help determine which party controls the Legislature:

— Senate District 13: Loudon and Prince William counties in the Washington suburbs. This open seat, vacated by a Republican in a region rapidly becoming a blue enclave, is likely the best pickup chance for Democrats. John Bell, a Democratic state delegate, faces Geary Higgins, a Loudon supervisor.

— Senate District 10: suburbia west of Richmond. Glen Sturtevant, a Republican, may be the most threatened incumbent statewide in a district that Hillary Clinton carried by 11 points. His Democratic challenger, Ghazala Hashmi, would be the first Muslim woman in the Senate.

— Senate District 12: suburbia north of Richmond. Siobhan Dunnavant, the Republican incumbent, won her seat easily in 2015. Since then she took an unpopular vote opposing Medicaid expansion. Her Democratic challenger, Debra Rodman, is a freshman member of the House of Delegates who first ran for office in the blue wave year of 2017. Rodman says her internal polls show a tied race.

— Senate District 7: Virginia Beach. An open seat following a Republican retirement. Cheryl Turpin, the Democrat, is a delegate first elected in the 2017 wave. Her Republican opponent, Jen Kiggans, is a former Navy pilot. The district went for Trump in 2016 but swung to Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, in 2017.

— House District 94: Newport News. The 2017 race here made national headlines when it resulted in a tie and the winner was chosen by drawing. This year the two candidates are in a rematch: David Yancey, the Republican incumbent, versus Shelly Simonds.

— House District 66: Richmond suburbs. A court-ordered redistricting forced Kirk Cox, the speaker of the House, into a district that now favors Democrats. He faces Sheila Bynum-Coleman, a member of the state Board of Contractors. Cox is Virginia’s most powerful Republican.

— House District 83: Virginia Beach. Chris Stolle, the Republican incumbent, was redrawn into a seat that is more Democratic. He faces Nancy Guy, a former school board member.

— House District 85: Virginia Beach. An open seat that Republicans believe they can flip. The Democratic winner in 2017, who prevailed by just 389 votes, is running for state Senate. Alex Askew, the Democratic nominee, faces Rocky Holcomb, a sheriff’s deputy who narrowly lost the same race two years ago.

— House District 73: Henrico County outside of Richmond. Another open seat whose Democratic occupant is running for the state Senate. That has given Republicans hope in a district that used to be reliably red. Both the Democrat, Rodney Willett, a lawyer, and the Republican, Mary Margaret Kastelberg, a banker, are first-time candidates.

Who Is Less Unpopular in Kentucky?

Voters in Kentucky will decide whether Matt Bevin will be the first Republican governor in the state’s history to win a second term. The partisan gravity, in a red state that is still quite fond of Trump, would seem to favor him heavily.

But Bevin’s broad personal unpopularity has made this a tossup.

Drawing support from schoolteachers and others who have felt insulted or bullied by the governor, Andy Beshear, the Democratic state attorney general and the son of Bevin’s immediate predecessor, entered the general election with a lead. But a summer of ads drawing attention to Beshear’s (or his party’s) positions on abortion, immigration and the president steadily dragged down that early edge.

The impeachment inquiry against Trump is energizing Republicans while Beshear has sought to focus on local issues. One question Tuesday is whether an aversion to a particular politician, Bevin, is greater than an aversion to a particular political party, i.e., the Democrats.

Woodford County, just outside of Lexington, is one of the city’s growing suburban communities and a destination for bourbon tourists. In the 2011 governor’s race, Woodford voted for the Democrat, Steve Beshear, by a more than 2-to-1 margin. In 2015, the county narrowly elected Bevin.

Welby Southerland, who was getting into his car Tuesday after voting downstairs at the county courthouse, isn’t sure that was a good decision.

“I want a new governor,” said Southerland, 76, who spent his life working on farms and in feed mills. “The one we have lies quite a bit.”

His thoughts were echoed by Missy Rogers, 67, who could not understand the way Bevin has treated teachers. Rogers is not a teacher herself — she manages stores in the Lexington area that sell homemade dollhouses. But she was furious about the governor’s treatment of them, even baffled by it. “It’s just insane to hurt teachers,” she said. And so she voted straight-ticket Democrat to send Bevin a message.

“I just think Trump is evil,” she said. “He just wants to hurt so many people.”

A vote against Bevin was, for her, also a vote against Trump. That was the calculus. Beshear’s name hardly came up.

Murphy Smith, 64, walking out of the courthouse shortly after Rogers, saw the same sort of connection. “He’s like Trump,” Smith said of Bevin. But for him this worked in the opposite direction. “And I’m a Trump man,” he said.

A Competitive Race in Mississippi

In a strongly Republican state, the Mississippi governor’s race pits Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves, a Republican who has been endorsed by the outgoing Republican governor, against Attorney General Jim Hood, an anti-abortion, pro-gun Democrat.

The race has been competitive, but Mississippi is an uphill climb for any Democrat.

Hood will need strong turnout from black voters and will be closely watching turnout and returns in the state capital, Jackson, which is predominantly black, as well as other urban areas and the Mississippi Delta region.

Reeves, who won the Republican nomination after a runoff, will be looking to bring dissenting Republicans into his fold. His supporters will likely be keeping an eye on the Jackson suburbs, particularly the vote-rich Republican redoubt of Rankin County, for signs of defections to Hood, who has trumpeted his good-old-boy bona fides (truck, dog, guns) in his TV ads.

If the race is close, a Jim Crow-era provision of the Constitution expressly devised to limit black political power may come into play. It mandates that candidates for state-level office must win not only a majority of the popular vote but also a majority of the 122 state House districts. If that does not happen, the winner will be picked by the state House of Representatives, which is controlled by Republicans.

Few Issues at the Polls, So Far

Election Day began smoothly for the most part, with scattered reports of problems at polling places but no evidence of any systemic disruption of voting. Some polls opened late in Texas, and in Pennsylvania, where voting machines are particularly antiquated, some breakdowns were reported, according to poll monitors and callers to a hotline run by Election Protection, a consortium of groups promoting voting rights. Pennsylvanians at polls with broken machines cast their votes on paper ballots.

In Revere, near Philadelphia, a Democratic candidate for mayor complained online that his supporters were being challenged as they sought to vote, but the report could not be immediately verified.

In North Carolina, a state website that helps voters find their polling place was briefly out of commission at midmorning. And in Richmond, Virginia, one precinct was reported to have run out of ballots by 8 a.m.

Erroneous voting instructions and other disinformation began popping up on a handful of Twitter accounts Monday, including one post encouraging Kentucky supporters of Bevin to vote Wednesday.

That and other posts were removed and some accounts were closed after being reported, according to David Vance, a spokesman for Common Cause, a member of the Election Protection alliance. None appeared to have spread widely.

Ranked-Choice Voting on the Ballot in New York City

In New York state, voters have been casting ballots for a week under a newly implemented early voting process.

In Democratic-heavy New York City, two Democrats are easily expected to defeat their Republican opposition: Jumaane Williams, of Brooklyn, is seeking reelection for public advocate. Melinda Katz, the Queens borough president, is running for district attorney.

City voters also faced five ballot questions, including whether to create ranked-choice in future elections (the next mayor’s race is in 2021). To fit all the questions in English and Spanish on one ballot sheet, election officials used tiny 7-point font.

L. Joy Williams, president of the Brooklyn chapter of the NAACP, voted Tuesday morning in Bushwick, Brooklyn. She said she voted against ranked-choice voting because supporters had not shown how it would work in a crowded election season. “What does the ballot look like?” she asked.

Voting was quick. “I double parked and had my flashes on in front of a school,” Williams recalled. “It was maybe less than five minutes.” Christina Greer, an associate professor of political science at Fordham University, voted Thursday in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. “It was not busy at all, but it was disorganized,” she said.

In Monroe County, George Soros, the billionaire philanthropist, spent more than $800,000 to support Shani Curry Mitchell, a Democratic candidate challenging the incumbent Republican. Despite the attention that caused, turnout was on par with prior elections, according to Colleen Anderson, the Democratic commissioner of the Monroe County Board of Elections.

Election Day 2019: Which Races to Watch and What Time Voting Ends

Tuesday’s election results will offer insights on two crucial political dynamics heading into the 2020 campaign: the depth of President Donald Trump’s appeal with Republicans and how fully suburban voters have swung to the Democrats.

Firefighters got the call about a brush fire near state Route 18 shortly after 1 a.m. local time, said Chris Prater, a spokesman for the San Bernardino County Fire Department. Strong winds have pushed the blaze into northern San Bernardino. Hundreds of homes there have been evacuated.

The highway, which connects San Bernardino to the mountains north of the city, was also closed because of the fire, according the California Highway Patrol.

“It’s very fast-moving,” Prater said of the blaze, known as the Hillside fire. “We do have very strong winds coming out of the north-northeast, facilitating the fire spread.”

Another fire in Jurupa Valley, just southwest of San Bernardino, grew to cover 75 acres Thursday morning, damaged at least two residential structures and prompted evacuations, according to the Riverside County Fire Department.

Firefighters in Northern California believe they have “turned the corner” in battling the Kincade fire and are expecting more good news Thursday and in coming days.

At a Wednesday night news conference, authorities listed several positive signs: The fire was 45% contained, up from 30% on Wednesday morning. Air quality was improving. Strong, gusty winds had subsided. And most of the roughly 190,000 residents who were evacuated had been cleared to return to their homes.

“We believe that most of the threat is now in our rearview mirror, and we are moving forward here,” said Mark Essick, the Sonoma County sheriff.

The fire burned 76,825 acres, destroyed 266 structures and damaged 47 others as of Wednesday night. More than 4,200 firefighting personnel were still on the scene, some of whom worked through the night. Authorities cautioned that despite the good news, the fire could still behave unpredictably, as humidity remained low and there was no rain in the forecast.

In Southern California, a fast-moving brush fire that began early Wednesday — and burned its way 100 yards from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum — was still raging.

As of Wednesday night, that fire, known as the Easy fire, was 5% contained and threatened 7,000 structures.

California Fires Burn Homes in San Bernardino

Multiple homes were burning in the San Bernardino area after a brush fire ignited Thursday morning and quickly grew to engulf 200 acres in the latest eruption of wildfire in California.

But backstage it was a different, more informal story. Behind the scenes, as the winners and presenters walked from the theater, with its scripted banter and prepared speeches, to the scrum in the press tent, you could catch glimpses of the regular people beneath the starry exteriors.

The 71st Primetime Emmy Awards, celebrating the best of television, took place at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles on Sunday, offering the usual award show mix of manicured glamour, stage managed pomp and gushy platitudes.

Backstage at the Emmy Awards

Tropical Depression Imelda deluged southeast Texas on Thursday, pounding some areas with torrential rain and causing devastating flooding that shut down highways and left thousands of stranded residents in need of rescue.

The storm, which had been churning over Houston on Wednesday, slammed the area around Beaumont, Texas, overnight and throughout the day Thursday, 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.”

In Orange County, between Beaumont and the Louisiana line, Judge John Gothia said there had been at least 400 high-water rescues. Most of them, he said, were in the Vidor area, across the Neches River from Beaumont.

Beaumont Is Flooding, and Up To 42 Inches of Rain Have Fallen Nearby

Imelda, the first named storm to hit the region since Harvey in 2017, produced widespread flooding on Thursday in a part of Texas that was also clobbered by that storm.

While Houston was perhaps harder hit two years ago, Beaumont also suffered deadly flooding from Harvey that shut off running water and nearly turned the city of 120,000 into an island. Between the two cities, for 100 miles, town after town was under water in 2017.

That same area felt some of the worst of Imelda’s effects on Thursday. Gov. Greg Abbott declared a state of emergency for much of southeastern Texas.

In Beaumont, drivers 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.

Kenny Vaughan, who lives in Beaumont, said he had been out on his airboat with his daughter since daylight, ferrying people to nearby hotels, the tallest buildings around.

“We can’t get them out of here fast enough,” he said, just after pulling onboard a man with a disability who had been trapped in a bed encircled in water.

Vaughan said he had made similar runs during Hurricane Harvey, but that this time the devastation seemed more severe.

“Everyone has three more feet of water than they did during Harvey,” he said. “The whole city is going under.”

To the southwest, Chambers County was experiencing some of the worst flooding, as heavy rain poured down from a dark gray sky, giant blue-white veins of lightning flashed and thunder growled. Some panicked residents were struggling to get through to 911 operators, and resorted to email instead. A hospital evacuated some patients but remained open, with employees trudging barefoot across the sopping floor to treat those who remained.

As the rain pelted down and waters rose on Thursday, some homeowners and officials were reporting flooding as severe as any they had seen in years, with little sign of a reprieve. 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.”

Storm Is Petering Out, But Still Packs a Good Deal of Rain

Imelda had spent most of its force by Thursday evening, but it was not done soaking eastern Texas, forecasters at the National Hurricane Center said. Its sustained winds were down to 15 mph, and it no longer qualified even as a tropical depression.

But there was a good deal of rain still to fall on a region already drenched and flooding, the center said: 3 to 5 more inches along the Texas coast, 2 to 4 more inland, with isolated areas of as much as 8 inches. Isolated tornadoes were still possible as well.

The remnants of Imelda were expected to drift slowly north-northwest toward Oklahoma on Thursday night and Friday.

A Beaumont Woman Awoke to Find Imelda Flooding Her Out, Just as Harvey Had

Carla Cruz, 23, remembers Hurricane Harvey all too well. She remembers the surprise she and other Beaumont residents felt at the devastation it wrought. She remembers how she was roused in the middle of the night and forced to evacuate, how the water flowed through her house on Calder Avenue, how it took more than a year to replace her ruined furniture, and how she couldn’t drink the tap water or shower at home for two weeks after the storm.

When her dog began howling at around 4 a.m. Thursday, Cruz said, she woke up and swung her feet out of bed to see what was wrong. She felt cold water and heard a splash, and her heart sank. It had happened again.

“It was too late for us to try to save furniture and clothes,” she said from her brother’s house on higher ground in Beaumont. As Cruz and her family grabbed a few belongings, the water rose to their knees. When they walked out the door, it came up to her waist.

“Outside my house, it was basically like a lake,” she said. Her car was filled with water.

Cruz, a server at an Italian restaurant who grew up in Beaumont, said residents of the city live with “a little PTSD,” and tend to exchange nervous glances whenever it rains for more than an hour. After Harvey, she thought local and state officials would be ready with adequate warnings before the next storm.

“I know it’s weather, and we can’t control it, but we went through this already,” she said. “It’s literally not my first time.”

A Drive to Work Became a Swim to Safety for One Man

Jody Chesson, 53, who commutes 33 miles to his job at the Goodyear chemical plant in Beaumont, got an early start on Thursday, knowing the heavy rain would slow him down. “When I left Bridge City about 3:30 in the morning, it wasn’t that bad,” he said.

Driving a lifted 4-door Jeep Wrangler, he kept his speed to 25 mph, he said, and didn’t have too much difficulty with the wet spots on Highway 69. But when he got to Beaumont and took the ramp onto Interstate 10, he got in too deep almost before he knew it.

“It was immediate,” he said. “I put my brakes on, but it was at the hood. By the time I stopped, it was over the hood.”

He tried backing up, but the engine died. “Water was just gushing in,” Chesson said. He couldn’t open the driver’s side door, but he managed to get out on the passenger’s side and climb onto the roof of the Jeep. He called 911 from there, but was told no one was available to help him right away.

“I decided, I’m not going to just stand put,” he said. So he left the Jeep and set out for a nearby hotel, the Elegante, walking when he could and swimming when he had to. He said he was glad he had thought to grab his work bag from the Jeep, because it had a flashlight in it, and his phone charger.

The hotel still had power, and others had taken refuge there as well. When water began to flood the lobby, he said, they climbed the stairs to higher floors because the elevator couldn’t be used.

Much too late, Chesson then found out that he could have just stayed home: Goodyear sent out a notice at 7:30 a.m. that it was canceling his shift and closing the plant because of flooding. Stuck at the hotel, he got himself a bag of popcorn, he said; by early afternoon, he had half of it left.

Houston Grappled With Downpours, With Harvey on Its Mind

In the Houston area, which had seemed to escape the worst of the storm earlier in the week, rain was falling at up to four inches per hour on Thursday, flooding some streets and disrupting travel. There was at least one report of a building whose roof collapsed in the deluge.

George Bush Intercontinental Airport north of Houston, which serves an average of 120,000 travelers a day, briefly came to a “full ground stop,” in the morning, with all flight operations halted because of the weather. Flights headed to Houston were delayed by an average of nearly four hours. Some were diverted south to the city’s secondary airport, William P. Hobby, where flight operations were continuing.

At a news briefing, Mayor Sylvester Turner of Houston discouraged employers from sending their workers home early, saying everyone should avoid driving on the roads until the flooding receded.

“Wherever you are right now, stay put,” Turner said. “If you’re at work, please stay put.”

A television reporter posted video of a truck driver being rescued from his cab after it got stuck in high water. By the afternoon, the Harris County Sheriff’s Office said it had received 133 calls for high-water rescues in and around Houston.

Representatives of the county’s transportation department visited subdivisions around the county in the afternoon to see if conditions there were safe enough to send students home from school.

Some high schools in the Aldine Independent School District, north of Houston, were dismissing students, while others were sheltering them in place, according to Mike Keeney, a district spokesman. He said that every school campus had food and supplies, and that teachers would remain until it was deemed safe for buses to take students home.

“We’ve had some water damage to 19 schools so far, nothing major,” Keeney said. “There is water inside, or ceiling tiles knocked out of place. But a lot of subdivisions go underwater when there’s this much rain. It’s going to be a long evening.” He said his own home was flooded with half an inch of rainwater.

Keeney said he was told by county emergency management officials in the afternoon that, with no more bands of heavy rain expected, it might take 2 to 3 hours for the water to drain from major avenues, and up to 26 hours for other parts of the county to dry out. District officials planned to hold a conference call at 3 a.m. Friday to determine whether there will be school on Friday.

“We got lucky with Harvey and Ike,” he said, referring to a fast-moving 2008 hurricane that caused extensive wind damage but relatively little major flooding. “But Mother Nature caught us this time.”

Climate change tends to increase the amount of rainfall during storms, since a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, but scientists must evaluate individual storms after the fact to determine how much climate change may have contributed to them. (Researchers found that the record rainfall during Harvey was as much as 38% higher than would be expected in a world that was not warming.)

The New York Times

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