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Article snippet: With drinking water cut off, its river still rising, and most routes in and out of the city flooded, Beaumont suffered the worst of Texas’ hardships on Thursday, and they showed no sign of abating. Flooding shut down the pumping plants that supply water to Beaumont in the morning, prompting a hospital to transport its patients out of the city, and trucks carrying bottled water struggled to reach the largely isolated city. The Neches River surged far beyond its banks, into streets, houses and businesses in the city of almost 120,000 people 70 miles east-northeast of Houston, reaching six feet above the previous record by afternoon, the National Weather Service reported. It was projected to rise another foot by Friday afternoon. The loss of water was just one of a host of new dangers emerging in the aftermath of Harvey, a storm system that pounded southeast Texas with record rainfall for several days before blowing across Louisiana and into Mississippi. Once a Category 4 hurricane, Harvey has been downgraded to a tropical depression. A series of small explosions shook a chemical plant about 25 miles northeast of downtown Houston on Thursday and more blasts were expected, after floodwaters shut down the cooling systems that kept the chemicals stable. Twenty-one emergency workers were treated for exposure to the resulting fumes and smoke, which were described as a lung and eye irritant. It appeared that the health and safety risk from the plant was limited. But in a ... Link to the full article to read more