Chunks of asphalt lie scattered across the westbound lanes of Interstate 10 between Washington Avenue and the West Loop. The road was destroyed by floodwaters.

By ALLAN TURNER and LISA TEACHEY
Copyright 2001 Houston Chronicle

After five days' pounding by intermittent, torrential rain, Houston-area residents awoke Monday to cheery blue skies -- and to the wreckage and misery caused by the worst urban flooding in seven years.

At least 20 people died as Tropical Storm Allison's floodwaters surged over freeways and swamped 20,000 homes. Property damage from the storm, which dumped roughly 3 feet of rain on the city, was estimated at $1 billion.

On Monday, the city and region staggered back to normalcy.

Traffic flowed freely on U.S. 59 and Interstates 45 and 10. Metropolitan Transit Authority buses generally ran on their regular routes and schedules. Most city parks were open. Only 762 flood victims sought refuge in the 14 emergency shelters that remained in operation -- down from the 15,000 housed in 40 shelters at the storm's height.

U.S. Coast Guard officials sent home out-of-town rescue crews as calls for assistance dwindled to zero. Coast Guard Capt. Donald Thompson said 194 people were rescued Saturday and Sunday.

Allison, again gaining strength as it moved over the Gulf of Mexico, drifted out of the Houston area, striking the coasts of Mississippi and Alabama. No rain was expected in the Houston area at least through Thursday.

Still, as the drone of pumps sucking water from underground parking garages replaced the usual chatter of pedestrians on downtown streets, it was apparent that the city had suffered a terrible blow.

"We have experienced one of the worst disasters I have ever seen," said Mayor Lee Brown after he joined Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Joe Allbaugh and other officials on a helicopter tour of the devastated area.

Speaking later in Austin, Allbaugh lamented the storm's toll.

"The loss of life is significant," he said. " ... Make no mistake. Folks will be impacted for not days, for not weeks, but years to come. There is no way we can go back and re-create their life prior to this incident."

U.S. Rep. Nick Lampson, who participated in the Houston tour, said: "We've seen some unbelievable sights today. The hard part is going to be the recovery."

Officials noted that last week's flooding was the worst in Houston since 1994, when 17 were killed and 22,000 were left homeless. Property damage then was estimated at $700 million.

Last week's storm also belted area communities. Three hundred homes were flooded in Pearland, where waters had receded by Monday. In Montgomery County, some streets and homes in the Timber Lakes, Timber Ridge and River Plantation subdivisions remained inundated Monday.

In Liberty County, water stood 6 feet deep in the town of Dayton Lakes and in the Snake River, Trinity River Plaza, Knights Forest and West Lake subdivisions. Most of the problems resulted from emergency releases from Lake Livingston.

In Houston neighborhoods, stunned residents stood Monday in worried knots surveying the damage to their ruined homes. Furniture, appliances, photographs, books and bedding stood heaped in dismal, muddy pyramids on front lawns.

Traffic lights in many parts of the city remained out of service.

Rental cars were virtually impossible to obtain.

Police reported 1,365 vehicles had been towed from once-flooded roadways.

More than half of the Houston Independent School District's 300 schools sustained damage, prompting at least a one-day delay in the opening of summer school. North Forest Independent School District's administration building suffered major loss of computers and other expensive equipment because of flooding. Summer sessions in that district were delayed until next Monday.

In the hard-hit Texas Medical Center, Senior Vice President Andy Icken said water rose 4 feet higher than the projected level of a "100-year-flood," wreaking havoc on electrical generators. Hardest-hit hospitals were Memorial Hermann, St. Luke's Episcopal and Methodist.

Eight medical center hospitals last weekend declared internal emergencies as a result of flooding or electrical outages. Memorial Hermann suspended operations for the first time since its 1925 opening, transferring 540 patients to other facilities.

Icken said it might take as long as a week for operations to return to normal.

While 911 ambulance service will remain available for critically ill patients, Dr. David Persse, director of Houston's emergency medical services, Monday urged those with less serious problems to seek help at any of three ambulatory care centers. The centers have been established at the Reliant Astrohall, the police academy at Rankin Road and Aldine-Westfield and at Wallisville Road and Uvalde Street.

As many as 30,000 research animals died at Baylor College of Medicine when floodwaters filled laboratories, and an untallied amount of cancer, AIDS and other medical research was lost when power to freezers failed and cell cultures were destroyed.

The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston lost 2,500 animals. UT also reported loss of a cyclotron accelerator and a magnetic resonance imaging device valued in the millions.

The University of Houston reported most of the 105 buildings on its main campus suffered flood damage.

About 125 low-income Housing Authority of the city of Houston apartments sustained flood damage, most of it minor.

Tropical Storm Allison played environmental havoc with the Houston area as well, and on Monday officials were investigating reports of flood-borne sewage, oil spills and atmospheric releases of chemicals. In some cases, sewage treatment plants remained inundated or otherwise inaccessible.

In downtown Houston, Harris County District Clerk Charles Bacarisse warned that child-support checks to divorced parents might be delayed because of flooding. Computers and the printing press used to cut the checks were swamped Saturday.

Although Bacarisse located another press and was processing checks Monday, he warned that possible post office slowdowns still might delay delivery. Bacarisse's office dispenses $1.5 million in such checks daily.

Postal officials said all but the main Franklin Street station was open for business Monday and that department workers were endeavoring to salvage water-damaged mail. They warned customers, however, not to deposit mail in blue curbside receptacles for a week.

Meanwhile, President Bush added 10 Louisiana parishes -- Ascension, Assumption, East Baton Rouge, Iberville, Lafayette, Lafourche, Livingston, St. Martin, Terrebonne and Vermilion -- to the federal disaster list Monday.

Total damages were "$15 million and counting," said Ken Johnson, a spokesman for U.S. Rep. Billy Tauzin, R-La. They added up to more than $1 million just at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, where five buildings flooded, two of them large classroom buildings.

Residents said it was the worst damage since Hurricane Andrew in 1992.

"That hurricane did not do what this little storm did," said Jane Falgoust, 30, a junior high school teacher in Thibodaux, about 60 miles southwest of New Orleans. "It's unbelievable the damage this storm did."

All of the foregoing was just background misery for those who lost their homes.

For 30 years, Clara Daniels said, her one-story brick house in the Wood Shadow subdivision near Oates Road on Houston's east side had been her family's haven in time of inclement weather.

This time, too, the home rode out the storm -- until Friday night. Then, in the midst of a violent rainstorm, water surged into the home occupied by Daniels, 64, and her 84-year-old mother, Betty Gamble, who recently had been treated at the hospital for a heart condition.

Within minutes, a freezer was swept from the kitchen into the living room by the rising tide. Neighbors evacuated the older woman on a raft; Daniels was forced to wade to safety through chest-high water.

On Monday morning, Daniels returned for the first time to her home. All she could do was cry.

"We didn't have time to do anything," she recalled. "We didn't have nothing but what was on our backs. And that's all we've got now."

Daniels hired day laborers to help her and her three children clean the house of debris.

Carpeting, furniture, pictures -- even valuable old jukeboxes the family collected -- were piled outside on the lawn.

The house's walls were buckled and filled with holes.

"This was the place we always came," said Daniels' daughter, Donna Williams. "It was safe. We called it `heaven.' When she (Daniels) called me at 3 a.m. on Saturday and said they were leaving the house, I just said, `God, we are in trouble.' "

Because Daniels' house was safe, it was the site her granddaughter, Chaumdricka Hanks, chose to store her wedding dress.

As Daniels and Williams talked with a reporter, the young woman, now seven months pregnant, arrived to retrieve her treasured garment.

"Where is my dress?" she asked Daniels.

The older woman pointed into a back room.

Hanks entered, then returned minutes later, wordless with tears forming in her eyes.

"It's ruined," Daniels, tearful herself, explained in hushed tones.

Chronicle reporters Eric Berger, Mike Snyder, Ron Nissimov, Bill Dawson, Melanie Markley, Miriam Garcia, Todd Ackerman, Edward Hegstrom, Steve Olafson and Terry Kliewer and the Associated Press contributed to this story.