station. this wasn t wind. this was water that brought this roof down. you come this way a little bit, you can see underneath is a car that got trapped under the roof. thankfully, the owner of that car was actually inside the gas station when it fell. the national weather service did something last night that it very rarely does, and, in fact, has never done before in the city of new york. they declared first a flash flood warning, but then they upgraded that to a flash flood emergency, and that s when lives are at risk because of the flooding. here in new york, we already know that lives were lost. nypd says eight people were killed in storm-related deaths, and in the description of those events, all of them related to flooding. they appear, hallie, like people just got caught off guard in their homes. the water rose that quickly, that fast. and they just couldn t get help to them in time. you talked a little bit about the numbers of total rainfall
good morning. breaking news coverage of hurricane harvey continues. let s get started. we have been here for quite a while. the eye. you get a break with the absolutely unrelenting winds. we re being hit by a pretty significant band from harvey. my gosh, what a fix here in texas for days to come. almost getting blasted back to the stone age. it s going to rain and rain. it s not going to stop. and it may be days before it ends up finally stopping. the wind is still blowing. the gusts sometimes upwards of 100 miles per hour. today is just the first of many difficult days ahead. and we now have a new update on harvey from the national hurricane center.
you re not even close to the amount of rain you re going to get over the course of the next couple of days, but our reporters keep telling us the ground is saturated, so it s going to take a lot less wind to drop a beautiful oak from victoria than it would under normal circumstances. absolutely, and we also had some pole damage, power pole damage in the front yard. it s leaning on top of the stop sign right now. so it s kind of scary. rick, we talked to your son richard a little earlier who also didn t leave. tell me about this decision not to leave, and tell me what your options are now if power doesn t come back soon. well, our options right now for power is we re trying to hold on, hopefully everything will be okay. we ve got plenty of united states to ice things down. our reason for not leaving, my reason was one, this house is over 100 years old. it s withstood the challenges of hurricanes in the past, and we were pretty sure that this was going to be okay this time, and
to get out, but we stayed here. because you texans are like that. we re tough. how did it go? how did it play off? well, it went very well until the power went out this morning at 2:06:00 a.m. we also caught a lot of wind. it was very scary last night. my daughter was upset. she s 15 and she was upset with us being here. my wife and i just hunkered down with her, and we just said it s going to be okay. when the sun came up, we could see what happened. there s a lot of tree damage. we also had some damage on the roof where the shingles are flying all over the place. flooding is minor. i don t know if you can hear that, but we still have high wind gusts. we just saw a picture of a tree go down. in a hurricane you sometimes see a tree break or things like that. but what you ve got in victoria,
welcome back. i m ali velshi. hurricane harvey is now a category 1 storm. it s still a hurricane, though. continues to batter east texas this morning. reporter: if they got a call for help, there is no way their officers can be out in the middle of this. reporter: oh my goodness, oh my goodness. we just got word it s a category 4 hurricane. i hope and pray that people evacuated. because if they did not, they are going to go through the worst night of that irlife. a hurricane here and it is imminent. hurricane force winds are going to penetrate well inland. reporter: this storm could kit a new path along the texas coast. reporter: right now we re getting hammered with the thunderstorm. we are really getting battered down here with this wind right now. reporter: some buildings have been obliterated. reporter: all eyes on the