coordination. we ve been talking about, as we heard the governor, brock long, the fema administrator say this is going to be in the headlines or page two six months from now because it s going to be an incredibly long recovery. are you confident that this coordination will continue over the next months and potentially years? we sure hope so. now is when the rebuilding starts to happen. we re talking about roads, bridges, sewer systems, water systems, like in beaumont. all those things have to be repaired. the bridges that more than likely would have been damaged because of the high water. there will be a lot of back and forth, negotiating how we re going to pay for this. back and forth. if we focus on working as a team we ll get through it. i m hopeful that will happen. we ll watch and wait and see. david pauleson, thank you for
this has been going on in beaumont since friday. we stood up our emergency operations center last wednesday. we did stop doing high water rescues that were non-emergency at dark last night, because it is so dangerous at night to do so. so we have resumed this morning those non-emergency rescues. we have a customer service hotline, our 311 system. the people that call in there. our teams are out already this morning to start rescuing the people that may have had issues overnight. we did start announcing yesterday afternoon that if you thought you might want to evacuate or need to evacuate, to call us. because we would come before dark. however, we do have 911 calls. we would go out to them. i know you are getting everyone the help as quickly as you can.
aftermath but the challenges then we have got to focus on louisiana. they are about to get smacked. hey, janice. janice: flooding emergencies east of houston. beaumont as well as port arthur. if you reflect back to hurricane katrina. we were all focused on new orleans. people cannot get rescued right now east of the houston area in beaumont and port arthur, flooding emergencies right now. so we re going to be watching you throughout the hours. because you can see the radar. the radar has moved a little bit east of houston. but we re still seeing incredible rainfall rates for southeast texas in towards louisiana and the storm made a second landfall, it is still a tropical storm. i also want to touch on the buffalo bayou. even though they are expecting drier weather over the next five days, we are going to see it still see the buffalo bayou at west belt drive for example as 70 feet. that s major record flood stage for days if not weeks. so any rain in the forecast is not welcomed news. a
we saw some of that flooding all over the roadways. now we re talking about major highways, i-10 south of here. 69 is closed. beaumont becoming its own mini island, and in very many places across jefferson county, you have islands just trying to get help to them, because there are so many rivers that are passing through. rivers that used to be streamtr like this street behind me. you see the water coming off the street there. that s traveling into a drainage ditch, and this is the problem. we just saw a man try to cross the drainage ditch. he thought it was a street. he was almost washed away before our eyes. he was able to swim right back up before the current took him away. that is why police are saying here in southeast, texas, this is not over by any means. the brunt of the storm may be head thing way right now. drew griffin in beaumont.
and drew, take us back to that scene and tell us about the latest there. well, the latest is that rainfall continues to come down, adding to the misery that is going on in beaumont and jefferson county. nine inches in three hours overnight. really, inundated the county, according to the sheriff s department and it created these areas where you have roads that are overtaken and then you can t distinguish the roads from the gullies and the drainage ditches and that right there is where a man was coming across what he thought was a parking lot, when we wound up floating down a ravine, i think we have video of it. we actually saw him doing it right before our live shot, ran over there, tried to help him, were able to get a rope to him as he swam out of his vehicle and pulled him safely to shore. it was a stark reminder of how quickly things can happen and a stark reminder that the warnings