aerial view of flood damage. what did you see? reporter: spending a couple days around the addicks area and to see it from the ground is one thing. from the air, completely another. the sweep of devastation, particularly around the area of addicks reservoir is just incredible. you know, they re predicting that some 27 trillion gallons of water, rainwater, fell on texas and louisiana, and from the air over that part of west houston, you can certainly see it. houses still buried in water. up to their roof lines. the entire area looks more like a swamp land than a park, like it usually is. the levees for both the barker and the, and the addicks. it s not clear from the ground what it looks like. when in the air you can see levees that are miles and miles long. ones alongside the i-10 freeway.
president s visit this weekend will be helpful or harmful? what do you hope to see? i suppose from what you re saying you want to see him shaking hands and meeting with storm victims? yes. people need to feel like he understands the depth of the tragedy and the pain, and more than that, that he s going to stick to this and make sure t t that, that the administration pushes a well-funded bill through congress to get folks the resources they need for recovery. that s going to be many billions of dollars. so whether or not his trip to texas makes sense on saturday is really going to depend whether he approaches it in a better way than he did last time. i was going to say about a year ago when i was hud secretary i was out in baton rouge, louisiana looking at the damage from flooding there. i can t say enough about the professionalism of the folks
louisiana. seen boats from as far away as wisconsin have come leer to thes spot and just dropped people off. it was a good thing. the problem that became was that they were in a situation where there were so many people being rescued, but nowhere to take them. late here last night there were literally hundreds of people lined up at this supermarket looking for pa place to go. it around 11:00 local time we saw about ten different school buses come. round up all of the people and take them back to lake charles, where shelters are now. that process is continuing. still seeing people dropped off here and a gentleman from new orleans, attempting to get to houston. making lunch, offering it for free for anyone who could come. this is as far as he got because of how much damp and flooding there is in the east part of texas. this recovery will take a long time and, again, i cannot stress enough, people here in orange are by no means out of the
door and many neighbors still underwater and in beaumont, there s no clean drinking water adding to problems there. people who can make it out to the roads are lining up to get bottled water and brian rokus is live in organize texas. i see the water behind you there. it appears cars are moving along there. i suppose that s some progress. what are you seeing? reporter: jim, here on the eastern bored of the texas near louisiana is very much on the edge now. unlike where brian was in houston. neighborhoods accustomed to flooding, folks here in orange have never seen this volume of water flood their streets and they re not out of the woods yet because a dam has been released just ever the louisiana border designed to release pressure on some bodies of water s. the unintended is this particular area could see moreflooding over the next 24