At Least 18 Die After Storms in Texas and Oklahoma

BY ERIN MCCLAM AND ELISHA FIELDSTADT

The death toll from Texas flooding continued to climb on Tuesday, as many areas remained inaccessible and authorities warned of more trouble to come.

At least 11 people were killed in Texas, four of them in Houston. Authorities believe one of the dead might be one of three people who went missing after tumbling from a capsized boat, but that has not been confirmed, authorities said Tuesday.

Seven people in Oklahoma died in flooding and storms since Friday, authorities said.

In Hays County, about 180 miles west of Houston, officials said two people were dead, and 13 were missing, officials said.

That included eight people staying together in a vacation home in Wimberley, which was swept off its stilts by a tsunami-like "wall of water" that roared down the Blanco River over the weekend following a wave of torrential rain, Hays County Commissioner Will Conley said.

Search-and-rescue operations were continuing, on land and from air, across a landscape where centuries-old trees had been ripped away by the 44-foot storm surge. "It looks like a savannah," Conley said.

Seventy homes were destroyed, and another 1,400 properties were damaged. If not for a phone notification system, "God knows how many people we would have lost," Conley said.

In Houston, officials believe the number of severely damaged homes could reach 4,000.

Among the confirmed dead in Texas were a 14-year-old boy found inside a storm drain in Desoto, and Alyssa Ramirez, 18, a homecoming queen who was driving home from her prom in Devine when floodwaters swept her car off the road.

Two victims in Houston were under or in submerged cars, and a third involved a capsized boat, officials said. The body of a man was also found in a vehicle in Williamson County, north of Austin, authorities said.

Another seven people were killed in storms and flooding in Oklahoma from Friday to Monday, including a Claremore firefighter who died during a water rescue, and a 33-year-old woman who died in a storm-related traffic crash in Tulsa.

A 48-year-old woman was killed Monday after a tornado struck Bryan County, the Oklahoma Department of Emergency Management said. A total of 11 people have died in the state due to storms since May 5, the department said.

While officials continued searching for victims, meteorologists said the region should brace for more severe thunderstorms and tornadoes that could batter the south-central United States, including Texas and Oklahoma, and trigger more flash flooding.

A large swath of the country, from the Gulf Coast to the Great Lakes, remained under threat of violent storms.

In Houston, a city bisected by small rivers, more than 80,000 people were without power and the flood waters closed roads including Interstate 10 and Interstate 45.

Houston Intercontinental Airport smashed its all-time record for most rainfall in one day on Monday — its 4.34 inches almost doubling the previous milestone set in 1946.

"The rain just kept coming, and coming, and coming," said Ashley Aivles, a 25-year-old call center worker who struggled to make it back to her home in a Houston suburb early Tuesday.

PHOTOS: Widespread Flooding Hits Texas

Around 200 basketball fans were trapped inside the city's Toyota Center at 4 a.m. local time (5 a.m. ET), having watched the Houston Rockets' playoff win over the Golden State Warriors.

All Houston METRO rail and bus services were canceled until the flood waters receded and conditions were deemed safe by the city's Office of Emergency Management, the transportation service announced at 4:20 a.m. local time (5:20 a.m. ET).

An unknown number of people were also stranded in Houston's The Galleria mall, after parts of the building and the surrounding streets were drenched by the deluge.

But there was reason for optimism there, as water levels in the city's bayou system declined on Tuesday, Parker said.

Provided no more rain hits the city in the next 24 hours, all the bayous will return to their normal levels, she said.

Texas, Oklahoma and southwestern Kansas have been experiencing extreme drought conditions for the past five years. That left the soil "like concrete," which typically exacerbates flooding conditions, said Mark Svoboda, a climatologist with the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska.

But the latest round of flooding in Texas and Oklahoma can be attributed to sustained rainfall, including the equivalent of 12 to 16 inches above normal falling in the past 30 days, Svoboda said.

"The soil is too full. It's oversaturated with water," he said. "There's been too much, too soon, after you've had so little for such a long period of time."

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