Donald Trump will visit Texas on Tuesday, the White House said as tropical storm Harvey brought intense rainfall that threatened “historic” flooding in Houston, freeways turning into rivers and water rushing into homes in America’s fourth-largest city.

 

As coastal Texas cleaned up from Harvey, which made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane on Friday night before weakening, the storm shifted its attention inland. Amid predictions that as much as 50in of rain could fall, waters rose so high that people were advised to climb to their roofs rather than take refuge in attics, unless they had “an axe or means to break through”.

 

Heavy rains were predicted to linger for several days and the National Weather Service (NWS), issuing a flash flood emergency warning, said “catastrophic flooding in the Houston metropolitan area is expected to worsen and could become historic”.

 

More than 6.5 million people live in the region. Several deaths were reported. Early in the day Harris County sheriff Ed Gonzalez reported on Twitter that a woman and child had died in a submerged vehicle on Interstate 10. The deaths were not confirmed, because the location was unreachable. Texas governor Greg Abbott later told CBS he was “not capable at this time of confirming” the number of fatalities caused by the hurricane.