Hurricane Harvey downgraded to tropical storm, recovery will take ‘years’: US emergency agency

Hurricane Harvey left a trail of devastation Saturday after the most powerful storm to hit the US mainland in over a decade slammed into Texas, destroying homes, severing power supplies and forcing tens of thousands of residents to flee.

Monster storm Harvey has been downgraded from a hurricane to a tropical storm but is lingering over Texas, US meteorologists said Saturday, warning that it had unleashed “extremely serious flooding.”

A destroyed buildingand vehicles at Rockport Airport after heavy damage when Hurricane Harvey hit Rockport, Texas on August 26, 2017. (AFP Photo)

Harvey was not expected to move much for several days, meaning the state’s Gulf Coast was going to see massive amounts of rain, the National Hurricane Center said. Some communities could get up to 40 inches (more than 100 centimeters).

It will take cities and towns in the path of Hurricane Harvey years to recover from the devastation created by the monster storm, the head of the US Federal Emergency Management Agency said Saturday.

“This is going to be an unprecedented long and frustrating event for the state of Texas,” FEMA director Brock Long told MSNBC. “The recovery from this disaster is going to be years.”

Authorities were assessing the damage on Saturday after Harvy made landfall, unleashing torrential rains and whipping up massive storm surges that destroyed homes, severed power lines and forced tens of thousands of people to flee.