Story highlights
Deaths happened in a region with heavy rain
No rain is expected this weekend, but it is forecast for Tuesday
Three people have died in flood-related incidents in southeast Texas after the region was inundated with rain, authorities said.
All three died in Washington County, about 75 miles west of Houston, an area that was hammered with 17 inches of rain Thursday.
Although the rain stopped Friday night, the area remains clogged with floodwaters. Rescue boats helped people stranded in their homes and trapped in their cars.
The body of a man who was reported missing was found Saturday morning, said county judge John Brieden.
The other victims in Washington County include a person found in a mobile home in Brenham and thought to have drowned, said police spokeswoman Angela Hahn. Another person found dead in a vehicle swept away is thought to have died of a heart attack, Hahn said.
“Even if it was a heart attack, we don’t know what happened,” Brieden said. “He could have had the heart attack and crashed and got caught in the floodwaters, and in my humble opinion, that’s still a weather-related death.”
Nowhere for the water to go
Rain is not expected in the area over the Memorial Day weekend, said CNN meteorologist and severe weather expert Chad Myers. But he warned that heavy rain is expected to return Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.
Aerial footage showed people wading in waist-deep water and residents crawling out of windows to get into rescue boats.
“There’s nothing you can do about the water now,” Myers said. “It’s already on the rise. In some spots, it’s still rising.”
With so much heavy rain on top of a previous flooding in the area two weeks ago, Myers said, “There’s no place for the water to soak in. It’s just running into creeks, into neighborhoods.”
Search for boy in river
Elsewhere, emergency workers were searching for a 10-year-old boy who slipped and fell into the Brazos River, which had become quite swollen from recent rains, said Joel Kertok, spokesman for Parker County Emergency Management.
The search underway in Weatherford, west of Fort Worth – is about 200 miles north of Montgomery County, where the flooding deaths occurred.
The boy had been “fishing with some friends along the Brazos River and he slipped and fell in. The river is up from recent rains and moving fast,” Kertok said.
The search will go on until darkness, he said.
Texas hit hard this year
Southeast Texas has been pounded with horrific weather lately, with two 500-year flood events in two months.
“Basically, it’s a 1-in-500 chance of it happening in any year,” said CNN Meteorologist Taylor Ward. “Happening twice in a single year is very bad luck.”
The Houston area experienced its wettest April on record last month, with almost 14 inches of rain. The storm killed at least eight people in Texas and flooded 1,000 homes. The previous record was almost 11 inches in April 1976.
Deadly storms in May 2015 killed at least 22 people in Texas.
CNN’s Ralph Ellis and Tony Marco contributed to this report.