Harvey horror: Shivering tot found clinging to drowned mom
BEAUMONT, Texas -- Authorities found a shivering toddler clinging to the body of her drowned mother in a rain-swollen canal in southeast Texas after the woman tried to carry her child to safety from Harvey's floods.
CBS Beaumont affiliate KFDM-TV reports the woman was driving on an Interstate 10 service road Tuesday afternoon when she encountered high water and turned into an office park parking lot.
Capt. Brad Penisson, of the fire-rescue department in Beaumont, said the woman's vehicle then got stuck in the flooded parking lot. Squalls from Harvey were pounding Beaumont with up to 2 inches of rain an hour at the time with 38 mph gusts, according to the National Weather Service.
Penisson said a witness saw the woman take her 18-month-old daughter and try to walk to safety when the swift current of a flooded drainage canal next to the parking lot swept them both away.
The child was holding onto the floating woman when a police and fire-rescue team in a boat caught up to them a half-mile downstream, he said. Rescuers pulled them into the boat just before they would have gone under a railroad trestle where the water was so high that the boat could not have followed.
First responders lifted the child from her mother's body and tried to revive the woman, but she never regained consciousness.
Penisson said the child was in stable condition at Christus St. Elizabeth Hospital. KFDM says the tot appeared to be suffering from hypothermia
The identities of the mother and child were being withheld until the father, who was out of town, could be notified.
On Tuesday night, two people were killed when a tree fell onto a pickup truck Tuesday night in Jasper County, just north of Beaumont, KFDM-TV reports.
The Jasper County Fire Department confirmed to CBS News that two people did drive under a tree, when asked if two people had died.
At least 10 people, including those in Beaumont and Jasper County, have been killed by Harvey since Friday, when it made landfall in Texas as a Category 4 hurricane. Harvey has since weakened to a tropical storm, moved back out onto the Gulf of Mexico then made landfall again.