Rains and floods left Houston immersed and helpless, crippling a global center of the oil industry and testing the economic resiliency of a state that’s home to almost 1 in 12 U.S. workers. Tropical Storm Harvey, which made landfall as a category 4 hurricane, is drifting back toward the Gulf of Mexico, poised to regain strength before crashing ashore again Wednesday on the Texas-Louisiana border. The full extent of Harvey’s toll won’t be known for days, with downpours still forecast that are measured in feet rather than inches. “The damage will be horrific,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott said in an ABC television interview Monday morning. “This is going to take years for us to be able to build out the repairs that are going to be needed to overcome this flooding and hurricane disaster.” Harvey has been blamed for at least two deaths, and Houston television station KHOU reported Monday that six family members were believed to have drowned when floods swept away their van. Harvey will displace more than 30,000 residents, a number sure to climb now that the Army Corps of Engineers has begun to release water from two dams west of the nation’s fourth-largest city, flooding more neighborhoods. More than 450,000 residents will require assistance, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which said it will be at work in Houston for years. About one quarter of oil and natural gas production in the Gulf of Mexico and more than 10 percent of U.S. refining capacity has been shuttered. Crops, livestock and drinking water are under threat, and rail shipments near Houston have been delayed. ‘Fully Engaged’ The recovery will challenge a politically torn nation’s capacity to rebuild and represents the Trump administration’s first externally inflicted crisis. The U.S. can draw on the lessons of hurricanes Katrina in 2005 and Sandy in 2012, which ravaged New Orleans and New York and tested the resiliency of the nation’s response. Katrina, the most expensive hurricane to hit the U.S., cost about $118 billion, while Sandy in 2012 cost about $75 billion. Loss estimates for Harvey vary widely, but David Havens, an insurance analyst at Imperial Capital, said costs could surpass $100 billion. “It appears that Harvey will cause more flood damage than Katrina, given that Houston and those areas affected by the storm encompass a larger geographic area,” said Dave Marcus, managing director of the public entity practice at insurance broker Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. “There is simply nowhere for the flood water to go, and we are days away from the end of rain.” The White House has taken pains to demonstrate that President Donald Trump is marshaling resources for the disaster in the region of about 6.8 million people, and the president plans to travel to Texas on Tuesday. Trump said at a Monday afternoon news conference that coordination of the response has “been going very well.” Lawmakers started pushing for Congress to provide disaster funds. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California made clear that any bill should be exempt from offsetting spending cuts. It wasn’t clear whether Republican leaders such as Texas senators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, who argued for such offsets when Sandy hit New York and New Jersey, would back such a bill. Even as the politicians spoke, the disaster continued. Though Harvey drenched Houston with as much as 30 inches (76 centimeters) of rain, downpours will last through the week and as much as 25 inches more could fall, the National Hurricane Center said. Saving Lives Greater Houston, which includes eight counties, covers 8,778 square miles, an area larger than New Jersey. It’s a loosely organized city with multiple centers of commerce, defined by vast and looping highways, strip malls and subdivisions. The floods turned freeways into rivers and neighborhoods into lakes. The state’s 12,000-strong National Guard was activated, and volunteers joined emergency teams as thousands of people fled to rooftops and higher ground. Houston Police rescued 2,000 people, Chief Art Acevedo said in a televised press conference. Mayor Sylvester Turner said about 5,500 people were in shelters and that figure would rise exponentially. “For people in the shelters and people at home, the emotional cost—that’s what we have to be sensitive to and respond to,” he said. The nation’s most diverse city, Houston’s economy boomed even as the price of oil lagged. If Houston were its own country, its economy would be the world’s 30th largest, according to city statistics. In addition to being an international energy capital, Houston is a locus for other industries, with 18 Fortune 500 companies. Houston-based Texas Medical Center, for instance, is the world’s largest medical complex, employing more than 106,000 people. It has hospitals with 9,200 patient beds that do 180,000 surgeries a year. But the sprawling campus sits next to the now-flooding Brays Bayou. Sudden Need The storm promises to test the region’s economy. Though some small businesses may fail, large firms will be back on their feet within weeks, said Patrick Jankowski, senior vice president of research for the Greater Houston Partnership, whose members include Exxon Mobil Corp., LyondellBasell Industries NV and Royal Dutch Shell Plc. “If $26 oil didn’t destroy Houston, Hurricane Harvey is not going to destroy Houston,” Jankowski said. But the Texas labor market is already tight, and rebuilding will require tens of thousands of workers. That’s going to require incentives—usually in the form of higher wages—to pull engineers, tradesman and laborers from around the region. The Federal Reserve district banks in Dallas, Atlanta and St. Louis have already reported hiring difficulties. Gathering manpower could be complicated by Texas’s newly passed law requiring cities to be more aggressive in helping deport undocumented people. “If Houston is going to be rebuilt in a reasonable amount of time, it will be rebuilt with the contributions of undocumented immigrant workers,” said Mark Jones, a political-science professor at Rice University in Houston. “If undocumented immigrants are afraid or unwilling to come to Houston because of fears of deportation, that’s going to delay the recovery, as well as make it far more expensive.” Any national fallout will likely be seen first in weekly jobless-claims data, and also in monthly retail sales and industrial-production figures. If gasoline prices stay elevated, that could put upward pressure on the consumer price index. Gasoline futures scored their biggest advance in almost six months Monday as more than a million barrels of fuel-making capacity was knocked offline and refineries, natural-gas fields and offshore drilling rigs shut down. Analysts at Tudor Pickering Holt & Co. estimated that as much as 30 percent of the nation’s refining power was imperiled.  Ports along a 250-mile stretch of Texas coast were shut to tankers. Twenty-two vessels laden with a combined 15.3 million barrels of crude from as far afield as Brazil and Colombia were drifting off the coastline, waiting for the all clear. Now threatened by a hurricane, Houston was forged by one. In 1900, a storm hit nearby rival Galveston, then one of the country’s busiest ports. That hurricane remains one of the deadliest natural disasters in U.S. history, causing more than 8,000 deaths. Local officials then pushed to open a deepwater port in Houston. It opened in 1914, with then-President Woodrow Wilson celebrating by firing a cannon via remote control from Washington. Houston’s population took off, far outpacing its former rival to become the leading city of Texas by 1930. From the bayous and marshes rose a metropolis. Mayor Turner said the city that has weathered oil’s boom-and-bust cycles for decades will prove resilient. “We’ll do whatever we need to do to address this situation,” he said. “We’ll worry about the cost and all of that later.”