One week after Harvey, Texas residents are exhausted — and still stranded

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Darius Presley, 17, wipes sweat from his brow as he and his family clean up their flood-damaged home in Houston on Thursday, Aug. 31, 2017. It is uncertain how many of this region’s residents have tried to return home since the storm, but Houston officials said the numbers in shelters were dropping. (Tamir Kalifa/The New York Times

HOUSTON — A week after Texas was slammed by Hurricane Harvey, this region was still engulfed in crisis Saturday, with weary residents of Houston searching for ways to repair swamped homes and salvage possessions and with thousands of others, to the east, stranded by rising waters and still without dry shelter.

After seven days, frustration and exhaustion had set in for many. Parts of Beaumont, a city of nearly 120,000, and a vast array of towns east of Houston were cut off from one another, and coping with flooded roads, submerged homes, limited power, and no relief in sight. For a third day, residents of Beaumont on Saturday were going without drinking water after flooding knocked out pumps for the city's fresh water system.

"This has been a trying week," Amelia Nickerson said, as she and her husband hauled yet another bag of trash out of their Houston home where the waters had risen after the storm made landfall late on Aug. 25. What had been their bedroom walls were being carried out, one soggy wheelbarrow load at a time. "This was so much worse than what we expected," she said.

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President Donald Trump visited Texas and Louisiana on Saturday, his second trip to the affected region last week. In Houston, he toured a temporary shelter, helped volunteers load boxes of supplies and said he was "very happy" with a recovery that, in many places, has barely begun.

As officials were only beginning to assess the widespread damage across the region and as rescue flights and boat missions continued through parts of the state, Trump was expected to ask Congress to approve $7.8 billion for disaster relief in the coming days, and $6.7 billion more by the end of the month, White House officials said.

Texas officials said 440,000 residents had applied for aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and tens of thousands of people remain in shelters. Local authorities said there were at least 47 deaths in Texas that were related or suspected to be related to the storm.

Residents of the region said the days since the storm's first landfall had been a long, dreadful blur. Some described spending hours moving their families to safe places, only to be moved along to another town a few days later when the waters rose again where they were. Others said they had gone a week without clean clothes, showers or cooked meals.

Houston was sputtering back to life — some restaurants were open and buses were running — and school officials were assessing the damage before a delayed first day of school on Sept. 11.

A spokesman for the Houston Independent School District said water had gotten into at least 202 of the district's 284 schools, and that officials were deep-cleaning 115 schools. Officials have not yet checked on 39 schools.

Beaumont, about 80 miles northeast of Houston, was still in crisis mode. After the city's water service shut down early Thursday, some homes have had small trickles of water coming out of faucets. Officials have warned residents to boil water and are distributing bottled water. The city said it had passed out water to at least 6,000 vehicles that waited in a line that snaked around a park in Beaumont's east end.

Rescuers, volunteers and others bringing help to the area were weary by Saturday, as well. Unlike some storms where waters recede quickly, this one seemed to move in slow motion, spreading around the area and continuing to impact new communities.

"I don't even know what day it is right now," said Tony Gonzales, a worker who had come from Laredo to assist efforts to raise dozens of telephone poles toppled around Port Aransas. "It's been a 100-hour week," said Gonzales, who looked bleary from the heat and was battling a cold.

Chief Warrant Officer Pedro Vargas-Lebron, who pilots Black Hawk helicopters for the Texas Army National Guard and spent much of the week on search-and-rescue missions, said he could recall only a vague outline of recent days: the missions, the rescues, the weather.

Each mission, he said, proved startling. "Every time we went out, it was the same thing," he said. "Every time we flew over a flooded area, I'd say the same exact thing to my crew: 'Oh my God, this is crazy.'"

He added, "Every step is just, 'Oh my God, I can't believe these many people are out here.'"

The signs of exhaustion were seen all around.

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Colleen Grice and her husband plunked down in the lobby of an Extended Stay America hotel in Corpus Christi on Friday night. Her family, from a town near Beaumont, had fled to a hotel in Beaumont to avoid the storm's high waters.

Then the water went off in Beaumont. So the family was moving again, this time with no sense of when they may return home.

"We're tired, I guess," Grice said. "It's hard."

Audra D.S. Burch reported from Houston, and Rick Rojas from Beaumont, Texas. Annie Correal contributed from Corpus Christi, Texas, and Port Aransas, Texas; Jack Healy, Alan Blinder and Monica Davey from Houston.