A damaged home sits amid a flood on Saturday after Hurricane Harvey slammed Rockport, Texas.
At least three people have died and thousands of others left without power as emergency services continue to battle "catastrophic flooding" across Texas in the wake of Hurricane Harvey.
The National Hurricane Center downgraded the storm from category 4 to category 1 on the Saffir-Simpson scale earlier on Saturday before later downgrading it to a tropical storm. However, meteorologists warn that major damage could come from flooding, with torrential rains expected to continue for days.
At least three people were killed in Aransas County, an area hit heavily by Hurricane Harvey, the assistant fire chief with the Rockport Volunteer Fire Department, Roy Laird, told the Los Angeles Times. The number of casualties could rise as rescuers are still searching through the debris of collapsed buildings.
Harvey made landfall Friday night and pummelled the southeast of Texas with heavy rain and 130mph winds.
It is the most intense storm to hit the US in more than ten years.Experts now fear Harvey could linger over Texas for days and bring "catastrophic flooding," with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) saying that Harvey is "turning into a deadly inland event."
Comment: Harvey wielded the "highest potential to kill the most amount of people and cause the most amount of damage," Brock Long, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency,
had warned. He echoed forecasters who predicted Harvey would be leave areas "uninhabitable for weeks or months," echoing language last seen ahead of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
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