Harvey turns deadly, lashing Texas with torrential rain

Rockport : Tropical Storm Harvey lashed central Texas with torrential rains on Sunday, raising fears of "catastrophic" flooding after the megastorm -- the most powerful to hit the United States since 2005 -- left a deadly trail of devastation along the Gulf Coast.

The storm has caused at least two deaths since making landfall late Friday as a Category Four hurricane, pummeling the town of Rockport outside Corpus Christi with sustained winds of 130 miles (215 kilometers) per hour, the National Hurricane Center (NHC) said.

One person was killed when their house caught fire in the Rockport area, local officials said. 

And in Houston, a woman drowned when she left her car which had stalled in high water, local media reported citing police.

"Cannot emphasize enough how much flooding there is on roadways you are endangering yourself and our first responders by being out," Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo wrote on Twitter.

"Most areas of the city are being impacted by this flood waters, do not think it's safe to be driving anywhere in the city."

Harvey slowly weakened as it advanced, ripping off roofs, flipping mobile homes, sending boats floating into deserted streets and leaving hundreds of thousands of people without power on the Gulf Coast, home to some of the country's most important oil refineries.

The latest forecasts show Harvey hovering over the shore for the next four or five days -- a dangerous possibility given the amount of potential additional rainfall. 

In Houston, a city of 2.3 million, the city streets turned into fast moving rivers with officials warning residents to stay home.

While most did heed advice to head to safety, some hunkered down in Corpus Christi -- a city of about 325,000, where residents were told to boil their water before using.

"I've never seen anything like this. We do have strong winds -- we're right next to the bay -- but nothing like last night," store owner Brandon Gonzalez told AFP.

"I was even a little bit terrified of what was going to happen. Our building was just shaking back and forth. It really got bad."