Houston flooding: 5 dead, 1,200 rescued -- and more rain to come

HOUSTON — (CNN) Sunita Singh was so determined to get to work, some water on the road didn’t deter her.

The Houston woman loved her electrical engineering job so much she refused to go out the night before so she could get ready, her husband, Rajiv Singh, told CNN affiliate KTRK-TV.

He spoke to his wife for the last time Monday.

“It was a brief phone call. She mentioned she was in a little trouble. She had water all around her,” Singh said.

Sunita Singh was one of five people who died this week after mammoth floodwaters swept away cars and inundated more than 1,000 houses.

The nearby community of Hockley got pummeled with 17 inches of rain in less than 24 hours. That’s more rain than Salt Lake City gets in an entire year.

“I think the worst is over for a lot of these areas,” CNN meteorologist Pedram Javaheri said Tuesday. “Unfortunately, there’s still plenty of rainfall in the forecast.”

State of disaster

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott declared a state of disaster for nine counties in and around the Houston area.

Emergency crews made more than 1,200 high-water rescues as some residents swam out of their homes, trying to reach rafts floating on streets.

On Tuesday, Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said the city will offer shuttle service to evacuees staying in shelters so they can return home and pick up any belongings “that may be salvageable.”

He said many residents are eager to see what happened to their homes.

“We want to ease people’s anxiety as much as possible,” the mayor said.

The flooding began to subside in some places Tuesday, but the Houston area can expect another 1 to 3 inches over the next few days, Javaheri said.

Slow recovery

At the height of the flooding, about 123,000 homes had no power, said CenterPoint Energy, the utility company that serves most of the Houston area. By midday Tuesday, crews had restored power to most of the homes.

And the city has started making schedules for debris collection, said Janice Evans, spokeswoman for the mayor’s office.

But given Houston’s flat topography, the floodwaters won’t disappear anytime soon, CNN meteorologist Chad Myers said.

‘Turn around, don’t down’

The flooding this week made for some dramatic rescues, including a man who was seconds away from being submerged.

Just before members of a news crew from KTRK was about to go on air at the edge of a flooded road, they saw the man’s black Toyota Prius drive into the water and quickly float away.

The man opened the door, and reporter Steve Campion yelled for him to get out of the car.

“You gotta get out!” he yelled. The man hesitated as Campion yelled, “Swim! Swim! Leave the car. Swim!”

The man finally swam toward Campion, and as the reporter helped him onto dry land, the car disappeared beneath the water.

Campion said later, “It certainly is a reminder to turn around, don’t drown. We say that in Houston so often, but you really never know how deep the water is.”

Billions of gallons of rain

An estimated 240 billion gallons of rain fell the Houston area in the past few days, Harris County Judge Ed Emmett said.

He called it the most significant flood event since Tropical Storm Allison in 2001, which left 41 people dead. It caused more than $5 billion in property damage in Harris County alone, according to the county’s Flood Control District.

At the Royal Phoenician apartment complex in north Houston, brown floodwaters submerged cars in the parking lot, a resident said. He posted video to Twitter later showing the waters had gone down slightly, though levels still reached car windshields.

Another north Houston resident posted video of people leaving their flooded homes in a canoe as the rain continued to fall.