Harvey hurricane : Floodwaters drop in Houston as Harvey..

Harveyfloodwaters started dropping across the Houston area and the sun peeked through the clouds Wednesday in a glimmer of hope for the besieged city. But the crisis was far from over, with the storm doubling back toward land and battering communities near the Texas Louisiana line.

The storm, meanwhile, began to give up some of its dead.

The confirmed death toll from the hurricane climbed to 21 after a woman’s body was discovered floating in Beaumont. Also, the bodies of six family members, including four children, were pulled from a van that had been swept off a Houston bridge into a bayou, and authorities were investigating at least 17 more deaths to determine whether they were storm-related.

Unfortunately, it seems that our worst thoughts are being realized,” Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez said after the van was found in 10 feet of muddy water.

While conditions in Houston appeared to improve, the disaster took a turn for the worse east of the city, close to the Louisiana line.

Beaumont and Port Arthur, Texas, struggled with rising floodwaters and worked to evacuate residents after Harvey completed a U-turn in the Gulf of Mexico and rolled ashore early Wednesday for the second time in six days. It hit southwestern Louisiana as a tropical storm with heavy rain and winds of 45 mph.

For much of the rest of the Houston area, forecasters said the rain is pretty much over.

Nevertheless, many thousands of homes in and around the nation’s fourth-largest city still were under water from the record-breaking deluge of 4 feet of rain and could stay that way for days or weeks. Officials said 911 centers in the Houston area were still getting more than 1,000 calls an hour from people seeking help.

About 10,000 more National Guard troops are being deployed to Texas, bringing the total to 24,000, Gov. Greg Abbot said.

The scale of the catastrophe in Texas began to come into sharper focus  More than 1,000 homes were destroyed and close to 50,000 damaged, and over 32,000 people were in shelters across the state, emergency officials reported.This is going to be an incredibly large disaster, Brock Long, chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said in Washington. “We’re not going to know the true cost for years to come.But it’s going to be huge.