Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said Monday he has been through many hurricanes and bad storms since he came to the state in 1979, but he has never seen one like Hurricane Harvey.
"If you can picture, first of all, the storm came in at Rockport," Patrick told Fox News' "America's Newsroom." "Houston is 200 miles away. That would be like a hurricane hitting Rockefeller Center and Boston being flooded. That's the distance."
Patrick continued he could not be on an uplink with the network because he is flooded in himself and could not get out of his own Houston-area neighborhood.
Meanwhile, he compared the ongoing rescue efforts to the movie "Dunkirk," about "the big armada that went to save their soldiers."
"We have our own flotilla right now," Patrick said. "We have people trapped in their homes and trapped on balconies and on apartment rooftops. People from Louisiana, from surrounding states, from all across Texas, brought in their boats and are going out and staying past dark, sometimes when it gets pretty dangerous. It's dangerous during the day as well."
Texas will be recovering from Harvey for years, Patrick said.
"I was hoping to get to Victoria and other points," he said. "I can't even get out of my own neighborhood. My daughter's home is flooded out. Everybody is being impacted, but we are together as one."
Patrick said he wanted to thank President Donald Trump and the White House for their quick response to Gov. Greg Abbott.
"The governor and I have been in constant communication," Patrick said. "He is in Austin, and I'm in the Houston area."
Officials are hoping for a break in the rain for at least a day, but if it comes back and drops more rain, the emergency will grow, said Patrick, as "we can't absorb much more."
In addition, the hundreds of thousands of people evacuating will need a place to go.
"Right now, they're joyous to be rescued, you know," he said. "You can replace stuff. It's stuff. You can get your house repaired. When you see these people get rescued by police, fire or volunteers they praise god and are thankful."
But the reality will come in a week or two when people remain in a shelter because they have no place else to go, the lieutenant governor said.
"You have to supply three meals a day and security," Patrick continued. "It becomes a massive operation. This is a Texas-sized disaster . . . it is not just Houston. It is all across 200 miles away. In a country today that we've seen sadly divided among many issues, every Texan stands together again. No Republicans, Democrats, black, white, and brown – they're Texans and Americans helping each other to survive."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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