Pictures from Texas show the devastation being wrought by Hurricane Harvey against forecasts flooding is only going to get worse.
Five people have already died in the Houston area, according to the National Weather Service, and scores have been rescued as authorities urged people to stay off the streets and to climb to rooftops if trapped.
On Sunday, it called the flooding “unprecedented” and “beyond anything experienced.”
News agencies filed photographs that detailled how roads have been affected by flooding.
Before-and-after pictures being shared on social media underlined the impact of the extreme weather.
Another showed a car almost entirely submerged.
And a picture of senior citizens sitting in waist-deep floodwaters in a nursing home was widely shared on Twitter.
The residents of La Vita Bella, an assisted living home in Dickinson, Texas, were trapped when water poured inside, Kim McIntosh, whose mother owns the facility, told the New York Daily News.
Owner Trudy Lampson sent photos of the stranded residents to McIntosh and her husband Timothy, who then posted them to social media, McIntosh said.
“Need help asap emergency services please,” Timothy McIntosh tweeted on Sunday, identifying the facility by name.
More than a dozen senior citizens are now reportedly back on dry land.
And another photograph showed Houston’s airport completely underwater.
NWS said that the storm will bring dozens more inches of rain over the coming days, and that heavy flooding could plague the area for weeks.
“With this flooding event we were using words like catastrophic and life threatening,” said Dennis Feltgen, a spokesman for the National Hurricane Center. “It’s as bad as we thought it was going to be, and it’s only getting worse.”
Meanwhile, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is preparing to occupy Texas for years to come.
When asked how long FEMA relief efforts will be ongoing in the Houston area and elsewhere, agency administrator Brock Long told CNN, “FEMA is going to be there for years.”
“This disaster is going to be a landmark event,” he said.