a total of 19 people are believed to have been killed all together so far in texas and oklahoma combined. a number of people are still missing. so the human toll of the disaster is yet to be fully known. the mayor of houston, annise parker, says the city has impounded thousands of abandoned cars already. more than 750 at last count. they believe the number of properties destroyed in houston, alone, stands at more than 4,000 destroyed properties. beyond the five people confirmed dead in the city limits, there are, again, more people still missing. the weather forecast in houston is for scattered thundershowers tonight and through the end of this week and then another storm system heading in next weekend. joining us now is the mayor of houston, annise parker. mayor parker, i know this is a very, very challenging time. thanks very much for being with us tonight.
our underpasses because it s not an unusual occurrence. but then something else happened this morning. it became a different type of crisis. that is the bayous all of a sudden just started rising and that s what inundated structures. i see. in terms of that, in terms of that last inundation that you re talking about there and in terms of the scale of the flooding it s interesting to hear you say you re designed for this in a way, the street grid is the way houston is designed to drain out. was this big enough you think you re going to have considerable infrastructure damage? looking at the major roadways and interstates and everything that we re seeing flooding, is a
but in houston, in the nation s fourth largest city, when the bayous in houston fill up, the city of houston tends to fill up, too. that has led to these just remarkable and scary scenes of a big, modern, urban center, one of biggest urban centers in our country, fourth largest city in the nation, being up to its knees or some cases up to its neck, or some cases worse in this urban street flooding. some of the most dramatic and most dangerous scenes out of houston have actually been from the interstates. i-10 and i-45 converge in houston. and with flooding like this, instead of those interstates serving as evacuation routes and arteries for people to leave, to escape the flooding, the interstates, themselves, have become places from which people have had to be rescued. five people are confirmed dead in houston, alone, so far. most of them found dead in submerged cars.
glad to talk to you. let me just ask you the latest on how things are in your city right now, and what your biggest concern is immediately this evening. we are very quickly returning back to normal. the as you mentioned in your intro, we are defined by ten small shallow rivers that go west to east across the city, and they were all out of their banks earlier this morning. they ve been receding fairly rapidly, and water drains out of houston quickly once it stops raining. the biggest problem now is going house by house, making sure that those that are in the floodway have been searched and that we make sure that all houstonians are accounted for. as you mentioned, we believe and that is very much a guess, but right now based on where we saw flooding from overflights, we think we have about 4,000 homes. the challenge for us was that, and it s hard to parse this for the public. large segments of the city were perfectly fine. but the areas that were hit were
the way it works geographically. but those rivers, those bayous in houston are also incredibly important in terms of climate because houston is on low-lying ground. when there is an influx of rain, houston needs to drain out, it is those bayous that do that work. the bayous take on the extra water and funnel it out into groundwater and galveston bay and the gulf of mexico. the bayous do that heavy lifting for the low-lying city of houston. now, in recent years, texas and big parts of the whole southwest have had the opposite problem. they ve been way too dry. texas has been coping with an extreme drought for the past few years. in the year 2011, 97% of the state of texas was rated as being under extreme drought or even worse ratings than that. but over the past few weeks, somebody somewhere in the universe decided to flip a switch, rather more like turn on a faucet, and specifically in houston that led to some pretty