Harvey moves on, putting in dire need a large rural population that's much more difficult to reach

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"As Houston, the urban behemoth that has so far been the focal point in the unfolding drama of Hurricane Harvey, began gingerly to assess the devastation, the storm marched on to conquer a vast new swath speckled with small towns that are home to millions of people who were shocked anew by Harvey’s tenaciously destructive power. Officials faced a population in dire need, but far more difficult to reach."

So report Campbell Robertson, Shalia Dewan and Rick Rojas of The New York Times, datelining the story from Newton, La., where the sheriff's office told Kristen Rogers that for the town's streets to flood, the event "would have to be Biblical," she recalled. "That's what they said about Houston." The Times reports, "In contrast to Houston, where the weather began to clear and a few children even returned to playgrounds, many people in these remote areas are still in desperate need of rescue. . . . Rural residents insisted that they were used to being far from outside help and that self-reliance and an ethos of neighbors helping neighbors came with the territory."

“The geographic scope of this event is probably what is going to make it one of the most costly flood disasters in U.S. history,” Samuel Brody, the director of the Center for Texas Beaches and Shores at Texas A&M University’s Galveston campus, told the Times. “I’ve seen heavy rain, I’ve seen 30, 40 inches, but not over such a large geographic area, impacting rich, poor, black, white, you name it.”

"This flood event is on an entirely different scale than what we’ve seen before in the United States," writes Jason Samenow of The Washington Post. "A new analysis from the University of Wisconsin’s Space Science and Engineering Center has determined that Harvey is a 1-in-1,000-year flood event that has overwhelmed an enormous section of Southeast Texas equivalent in size to New Jersey."