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CNN Sunday Morning

Floodwaters Rise Quickly in Houston, Texas

Aired June 10, 2001 - 09:36   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Now more on the floods in Texas, reporter Doug Miller of CNN affiliate KHOU is in Houston. He's beside Interstate 610 and he has been reporting there for quite some time.

And Doug, as I understand it, if we had checked in with you, what, yesterday, you'd be underwater right now?

DOUG MILLER, KHOU REPORTER: Yes, indeed we would be. As a matter of fact, the water would be way over my head -- about 12 feet above my head, as a matter of fact. That's how deep the water was here.

But as the floodwaters from tropical storm Allison recede, this is what we're discovering back here. Cars and trucks were trapped on the freeway. This 18-wheel tanker truck floating down the road at the height of the storm and now it's landed on top of a couple of other vehicles. But this is just one isolated situation, it's happened up and down the freeway.

We see about a mile-long line of cars and trucks that floated -- were stranded here -- and that were floating to some extent and banging in to each other. And just now people are finally getting back to their vehicles -- they're finally able to get back to their cars, their trucks, their SUVs and try to retrieve whatever they can out of -- out of the damage of the storm.

And, again, this is a scene that recurred on a couple of freeways -- on a couple of freeways around the Houston area. And it's especially bad here on the east side of town. There are still people on this side of town who are stranded inside their homes. And this is where the worst of it was.

Now this is the big problem here, on this particular freeway and on one other freeway that we know of in the Houston area, the waters went down, the cars were exposed, the wreckers came along. They had to haul all of the cargo off of the 18-wheelers and then they had to tow away the vehicles but they're discovering now that the freeways themselves in some places have been damaged.

So traffic flow through this area could be effected for quite some time. We won't know until the waters come completely and the highway department can come by and inspect exactly what tropical storm Allison has done to our freeways around Houston. O'BRIEN: Doug, I know you've had a chance to talk to some of those motorists as they've tried to retrieve their vehicles such as they are. How do they describe the way events unfolded on Friday night?

MILLER: Well, they've got this sort of bemused attitude about it. What happened was this, say right up there in this direction, that's where it flooded first. So these cars and trucks came up behind there not knowing what was ahead of them -- in fact, they had a lot of stalled cars and trucks down there.

The man who drove this white pickup behind me said, "People thought I was a moron whenever they saw that picture on TV -- "What were you doing driving in that kind of water?"" There wasn't much water there when he got there but it rose very, very quickly. He had to swim to shore eventually and he spent 48 hours hiding under a bridge here with a bunch of other people whose vehicles were also stranded here.

So that's exactly what happened -- people abandoned their vehicles and they were stuck here for days at a stretch. They're finally getting away and now they're finally coming back. They're able to get back to their cars and back to their trucks. And they're finally able to get back inside. In fact, some of them have started pushing their cars and trucks away from here because finally this stretch of road the water is going down.

As a matter of fact, we've been here about an hour this morning. We've seen it go down dramatically. Behind me -- that white pickup truck -- I'd say the water was up to the bumper when we arrived here about an hour ago. It shows you how quickly the water rises and then falls here.

It's been about 48 hours since this all happened -- maybe 36 hours, I guess. But now it's dramatically coming up and now comes the messy clean up.

O'BRIEN: Yeah, and what about that clean up and the response? Do you get the sense that city, state and federal governments are doing their parts right now?

MILLER: Well, no doubt about it, the emergency response systems around here were simply overloaded. You simply couldn't respond to all of the emergencies -- all of the calls for help.

As a matter of fact, yesterday I was at an apartment complex where the water was all the way up covering the first floor of the apartment complex. Those people were able to get out but people were trapped on the second story. A couple of elderly people couldn't get out of there. There were 10 people simply trapped. They tried to call the fire department, tried to call 911, they couldn't get through on the phone.

Eventually what happened was we simply put them on television -- we put out a call on television saying, "Anybody in the neighborhood got a boat, come on down." And eventually someone found a canoe and rowed out an rescued those people. That's the kind of effort that's been going on here -- bit by bit individuals have had to respond to the emergencies because the fire department, the police department, the Coast Guard, the National Guard -- all of these entities have been trying to do what they can but there simply isn't enough or hasn't been enough vehicles, enough helicopters, enough boats to handle all of the emergencies we've seen.

O'BRIEN: Doug Miller is with our affiliate KHOU in a rather soggy Houston. Thanks for that report -- we appreciate it.

MILLER: You bet.

O'BRIEN: All right, let's send it now to Jill Brown who's been watching things from a little more afar than Doug who's down there slogging in the mud quite literally. I don't know if you had a chance to listen to that, Jill, but he was saying the water was receding fairly quickly this morning.

JILL BROWN, CNN METEOROLOGIST: That's right. I've seen some of the river reports, Miles, and some are still rising but I was kind of surprised to see that most are expected to crest today or tomorrow. We may see that extended if we get more rain. Take a look at some of these five-day totals -- they're amazing. And Harristown was seeing the heaviest.

This is groomed by some of the independent reporting stations. Typically what you see is reports from the airports -- those are the official reporting stations. And so at Hobby Airport 18 1/2 inches in five days since this one came ashore on Tuesday. Intercontinental 15 1/2 inches. Some parts of the city have very much at all.

It's really been very concentrated and what you notice probably from that last live shot is, it wasn't raining. Great news in Houston. That may not last as we may see some bands kind of circle back around our area of low pressure, which is now over the Gulf of Mexico.

But it definitely looks like the heavier rain is going to be farther east. Look at the stats coming up toward you in New Orleans and up towards Baton Rouge. We've also seen a whole lot of rain in Louisiana and flash flood watches are in effect from Houston over to New Orleans. Not a lot of flood warnings as the waters aren't rapidly rising now. They're starting to recede in some places. But in Louisiana I think that's where we're going to end up seeing more problems arising today.

Miles, back to you.

O'BRIEN: All right, Jill Brown, thank you very much.

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