Texas facing 30 inches of rain in 24 hours as rescues underway

Water rescues are underway in southern Texas as former Tropical Storm Edouard continued to dump heavy rain, flooding streets and trapping people in their homes.

An unidentified woman and her four children were rescued from their Livingston mobile home after a creek overflowed, according to Click 2 Houston.

And people in the area were pulled from their cars stuck in flooded roads, KTRE said.

Rainfall rates have reached a whopping five inches an hour, ABC News also reported.

The storm has dropped 30 inches over Texas in the course of just 24 hours, WFLA meteorologist Jeff Berardelli wrote on social media.

A flash flood emergency has also been declared in Hardin and Tyler Counties, northeast of Houston, with rain expected to continue throughout Tuesday and into Wednesday.

“Widespread damaging and potentially catastrophic flooding is possible with a HIGH risk of flooding in effect,” the National Weather Service warned residents of southeastern Texas.

Social media videos showed cows moving their way through flooding and cars and trucks navigating water-covered highways.

The strengthening super El Niño climate pattern is tied to the “huge amounts” of rain in eastern Texas, meteorologist Ben Noll wrote on X. An El Niño typically brings warmer and wetter conditions to the Southeast.

But rain isn’t the only threat from Edouard. Trees fell into roadways and winds gusting up to 30 miles an hour in Livington’s Polk County have led to widespread power outages.

The county’s emergency managers told residents to avoid travel on Tuesday.

The storm had knocked out power for more than 72,000 customers by late Wednesday morning, according to tracker PowerOutage.US.

Some schools and government offices around Houston and the hardest-hit areas were closed, with plans to reopen on Wednesday, 12 News reported.

Edouard made landfall near the Texas-Louisiana border on Tuesday afternoon with maximum sustained winds of 60mph, according to the National Hurricane Center.

One weather station in Port Arthur, Texas, recorded a 90mph wind gust from the storm.

Edouard is the fifth named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season, which has been less active than normal due to the El Niño.

This is a developing story with reporting from The Associated Press