Trump to visit deluged Texas to survey response to storm Harvey

RUNWAYS TURNED INTO LAKES

Since coming ashore, Harvey has virtually stalled along the Texas coast, picking up warm water from the Gulf of Mexico and dumping torrential rain from San Antonio to Louisiana.

The Houston metro area has suffered some of the worst precipitation with certain areas expected to receive more than 50 inches (127 cm) of rain in a week, more than they typically receive for a year.

Harvey is expected to produce another 10 to 20 inches of rain through Thursday over parts of the upper Texas coast into southwestern Louisiana, the National Weather Service said.

"These stationary bands of tropical rain are very hard to time, very hard to place and are very unpredictable," said Alek Krautmann, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Louisiana.

Schools and office buildings were closed throughout the Houston metropolitan area, home to 6.8 million people.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency director Brock Long estimated that 30,000 people would eventually be housed temporarily in shelters.

Houston and Dallas have set up a shelters in convention centers and Austin is preparing to house as many as 7,000 evacuees.

Hundreds of Houston-area roads were blocked by high water. The city's two main airports were shut as the floods turned runways into ponds and more than a quarter million customers were without power as of Tuesday morning.

The Gulf of Mexico is home to almost half of the nation's refining capacity. The reduced supply led gasoline futures to hit their highest in two years this week as Harvey knocked out about 13 percent of total U.S. refining capacity, based on company reports and Reuters estimates.

The floods could destroy as much as $20 billion in insured property, making the storm one of the costliest in history for U.S. insurers, Wall Street analysts say.