HOUSTON — Flooding brought Houston to a near-standstill Tuesday and killed as many as five people there, sending normally tame rivers and bayous surging past their banks, inundating streets and homes, and leaving roadways littered with thousands of abandoned, ruined cars.
Punishing thunderstorms had left at least five other people dead over the weekend in Texas and Oklahoma, and a dozen or more missing. Recovery teams resumed the search Tuesday for 12 people who are missing after a rain-swollen river carried a vacation home in Wimberley, Tex., off its foundation and slammed it into a bridge downstream.
Floodwaters from those storms flowed downstream from central Texas into the Houston area Monday night and Tuesday morning, bolstered by as much as 10 inches of rain that lashed the area overnight.
Sections of two major roadways, Memorial Drive and Allen Parkway,that run parallel to Buffalo Bayou were turned into a lake. On Tuesday morning, dozens of people gathered on an overpass to stare in awe at the sight: Water the color of chocolate milk filled up the low-lying thoroughfares and rose so high that it submerged all but the tops of some street signs.
Trent Stephens, 43, had no problems commuting to work Tuesday morning: He used his inflatable stand-up paddle board to paddle to his law office in the middle of flooded Memorial Drive. Mr. Stephens, a lawyer whose office is about 10 blocks from Buffalo Bayou, estimated that the water was eight to 10 feet deep on the roadway. Once a month, Mr. Stephens said he takes the paddle board to work using Buffalo Bayou. His trip on Memorial Drive on Tuesday was different.
I just passed a couple of submerged cars and I had to kind of go around them so I didn’t go over the top of the vehicle, Mr. Stephens said. There was somebody in a canoe or kayak on the other side. Everybody’s pretty laid back in this town.
Water could not quickly penetrate the clay soil across much of the region, instead it pooled and flowed along the surface, forcing waterways to rise from trickle to torrent faster than people could get out of the way.
Houston’s Metro mass transit system suspended all rail and bus service, and the Houston Independent School District, with more than 215,000 students, closed all of its schools and offices Tuesday. Even as officials asked people to avoid driving, and warned that emergency crews might not be able to rescue them, miles-long traffic jams formed where floods severed major roads and highways.
Mayor Annise Parker confirmed two deaths at a news conference, saying that one body had been found in a flooded vehicle, and another in Braes Bayou. The Associated Press reported that three more bodies had been recovered in the region.
The mayor said that emergency workers had performed about 130 high-water rescues from vehicles overnight. Once the water recedes, she said, the city faces an enormous job towing the wrecked vehicles and clearing mud from the roadways.
I want to urge folks to not go out looking for floodwaters, not to go out sightseeing, she said.
We have thousands and thousands of vehicles that are underwater right now, and as the water goes down, we may find more people in vehicles, said Jeff Lindner, a meteorologist at the Harris County Flood Control District. We’re conservatively estimating 500 to 700 homes flooded, but that’s going to turn out to be on the low end.
He said that Keegans Bayou had reached the highest flood level ever recorded, and that Braes Bayou was, in places, the highest it had been since 1983.
Hundreds of people who attended the Houston Rockets playoff game Monday evening spent the night in the Toyota Center, rather than risk the drive home.
Over the weekend, Wimberley and San Marcos, a pair of Blanco River towns off the Interstate 35 corridor linking Austin and San Antonio, appear to have been the hardest-hit places in the United States. But in Ciudad Acuña, a Mexican city on the border west of San Antonio, a tornado leveled blocks of buildings at sunrise on Monday and killed at least 13 people.
We’ve seen lots of flooding — nothing to this magnitude, Mayor Daniel Guerrero of San Marcos told CNN on Tuesday.
In Texas’ Hill Country, Louie Bond, a magazine editor and former editor of Wimberley’s newspaper, called it a tsunami — a surge of water that began late Saturday night with torrential rains and raced down the valley carved out by the Blanco River.
By the time the water reached the vacation getaways and retirees’ cabins overlooking the river at Wimberley, some 30 miles southwest of here, the surge was 40 feet high, sweeping away bridges, homes and ancient stands of cypresses as if they were bath toys.
One of the homes held Jonathan McComb, 36, his wife and two children and two other families from Corpus Christi — nine in all, including at least three children. On Monday, Mr. McComb was in a San Antonio hospital with a collapsed lung and broken bones.
The other eight were missing, along with four others from the area, apparently lost in the torrent that capped weeks of rain and violent weather across Texas and Oklahoma. One of those killed was Alyssa Ramirez, 18, who was driving home from her senior prom in Devine, southwest of San Antonio, on Saturday night, when her car was swept away.
Two of the dead were in Oklahoma: a firefighter in Claremore, near Tulsa, who was swept into a storm drain on Sunday, and a Tulsa woman who died on Saturday after her car hydroplaned on a highway.
Overnight, the authorities helped residents evacuate their homes in the village of Webberville, about 15 miles east of Austin. Crews used boats and helicopters to rescue residents from their flooded homes.
Over the last three weeks, torrential rains have put an abrupt end to a drought that had plagued much of Texas for five years, filling lakes and reservoirs, though underground aquifers will be slower to recover. Brian Fuchs, a climatologist at the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska, said 72 percent of Texas was in a state of drought a year ago, and 43 percent of the state three months ago, and he expects that to drop possibly to single digits this week.
To see anything like this outside of the tropics is just amazing, he said.
He said that Arrowhead Lake, the primary water source for Wichita Falls, has gone in one month from 19 percent of capacity to 93 percent; Lake Bridgeport, in the Fort Worth area, from 38 percent to 96 percent; and Canyon Lake, in the Hill Country, from 79 percent to 125 percent, flooding a wide swath of surrounding landscape.
In downtown Houston, Buffalo Bayou surged far over its banks, and street overpass signs warning drivers of a 13 to 14-foot clearance were under water. A popular hiking trail off Interstate 10 outside downtown turned into a fast-moving river.
North of downtown, fast-rising water trapped many cars on Interstate 45; drivers seeking higher ground edged their vehicles onto shoulders and even grassy slopes off the highway, to no avail, then abandoned them to the flood and fled on foot. Some overpasses turned into islands, with vehicles crowded onto them as motorists waited for the water to recede.
South of downtown, Braes Bayou overtopped state Highway 288 during the night.
Houston officials activated an emergency operations center and delayed some employee start times, declaring an emergency at the highest level of its four-tiered emergency management system, for the first time since Hurricane Ike in September 2008. The Harris County Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management reported that hundreds of homes had been flooded on the west side of the county, which includes Houston.
In Texas on Monday, Gov. Greg Abbott added 24 counties to 13 that had been declared disaster areas this month because of bad weather. Forecasters predicted more rain and severe weather across the state the rest of this week.
Officials recommended on Monday that outside Houston, families leave about 400 homes below the Lewis Creek Reservoir dam, which was said to have been weakened by steady rain and to be at risk of failing.
Mr. Abbott, who flew across the Blanco River valley on Monday, said that the damage there was absolutely devastating.