powerful photo with those folks in the nursing home sitting in waist high or higher water. they were able to get helicopters there to lift people out. we re not sure where they were taken but everyone was taken out of that nursing home safely before the waters got any higher. joe, thank you so much. i want to head south to victoria where nbc s katy beck is. tell us where you are, where is victoria, and what are you seeing this morning. reporter: victoria is one of the areas that has been most hit most frequently bihar vie. at any given point victoria has been within 60 miles within the eye of this storm so obviously the rainfall has been significant. it is still raining here. and the big concern for folks at victoria is flooding at this point, primarily because of the river behind me. this is the guadalupe river. this river is right now even higher than it was, you know, last night by several feet. you can see all of the debris floating down the river.
possible way. and i wonder what you make of the president s decision to go there tomorrow. hopefully he changes his mind. i don t think the impact of a presidential visit on what s going on in texas is just going to impact the effort to rescue people. i think what s remarkable about this story is the hurricane hit down there in corpus christi so that s where you suffered a lot of wind damage. now that the emergency has moved to houston because houston is a lot of concrete, a lot of asphalt, and virtualry no zoning so you hald these big buildings next to these neighborhoods and imagine concrete doesn t absorb watt sore everything s going to run off. the first place that s going to go is into the bayous and those are like meandering marshland river, slow moving rivers. when they fill up, everything else gets inundated and flooded. in katrina, it hit in pass christiane and, but new orleans
gasoline and food. there was one local restaurant that opened up a food trailer and people were waiting in the pouring rain for hours just to get a hot meal. as far as the proximity, this river runs along a very residential area. in fact, some of the oldest homes in victoria, historic homes are along the river front. we were speaking to some residents yesterday who have homes in that floodplain and they were saying we re moving our furniture to the second floor, we know what this means, we were here in 1998, we, appearanced it once, the entire first level of our home was under water. the this rimp does continue to rise as it s expected to, that can happen all over gn for these folks. we spoke to one gentleman, father of six children, crying at the gas pump as he was describing his situation to us. it was a moment you understood the gravity of how motion nal this is for people. his business is across this bridge and he said this is my livelihood, i have six children, i lost everything i
this is directly over the downtown. so if this floods, which it very well could today and tomorrow with all the extra rainfall, the entire downtown will be submerged. yesterday we spoke to folks here, long lines at gas stations, been without power for day, and they told us this is what they re really holding their breath over, whether or not this river is actually going to submerge the entire downtown area as they saw in 1998. so for them, this is the concern and the rain continues to fall. there s a lot of fear and anxiety here. they of just gotten through one round and again here comes another one. so they re definitely worried about the potential for this particular river to spill into the middle of the town. give us a sense of how much companies around there have you been seeing people at all out and about? reporter: yesterday there was a brief lull in the rainfall and we did see people out. they were trying to stock up, get more supply, trying to get