Harvey's floodwaters started dropping across much of the Houston area and the sun came out Wednesday in a glimmer of hope for the stricken city, even as the storm doubled back toward land and pounded communities farther east, near the Texas-Louisiana line.The scope of the devastation caused by the hurricane came into sharper focus, meanwhile, and the murky green floodwaters from the record-breaking, 4-foot deluge of rain began yielding up bodies as predicted.DONATE: What you can do to help victims of Harvey The confirmed death toll climbed to 23, including six family members - four of them children - whose bodies were pulled Wednesday from a van that had been swept off a Houston bridge into a bayou.Authorities are investigating at least 17 more deaths to determine whether they were storm-related.READ MORE: Harvey horror: Shivering girl, 3, clinging to drowned mom"Unfortunately, it seems that our worst thoughts are being realized," Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez said after the van that disappeared over the weekend was found in 10 feet of muddy water.While conditions in the nation's fourth-largest city appeared to improve, authorities warned that the crisis in Houston and across the region is far from over. The storm, in fact, took a turn for the worse east of the city, close to the Louisiana line.Beaumont and Port Arthur, Texas, struggled with rising floodwaters and worked to evacuate residents after Harvey completed a U-turn in the Gulf of Mexico and rolled ashore early Wednesday for the second time in six days. It hit southwestern Louisiana as a tropical storm with heavy rain and winds of 45 mph.Forecasters predicted that a wobbling and weakening Harvey will be downgraded to a tropical depression late Wednesday or early Thursday and completely dissipate within three to four days. But it still has lots of rain and potential damage to spread, with 4 to 8 inches forecast from the Louisiana-Texas line into Tennessee and Kentucky through Friday. Some spots may get as much as a foot, raising the risk of more flooding.READ MORE: East Texas county tells residents 'GET OUT OR DIE!' For much of the Houston area, forecasters said the rain is pretty much over."We have good news," said Jeff Lindner, a meteorologist with the Harris County Flood Control District. "The water levels are going down."Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said the city's two major airports would be up and running again in the afternoon.At Hermann Park, south of downtown, children glided by in strollers and wagons, joggers took in midday runs and couples walked beside cascading fountains and beneath a sparkling sun. People pulled into drive-thru restaurants and emerged from a store with groceries.At the same time, many thousands of Houston-area homes are under water and could stay that way for days or weeks. And Lindner cautioned that homes near at least one swollen bayou could still get flooded. Officials said 911 centers in the Houston area are getting more than 1,000 calls an hour from people seeking help.In Houston's flooded Meyerland neighborhood, hundreds of families emptied their homes of sodden possessions under a baking sun as the temperature climbed into the 90s. They piled up couches, soggy drywall and carpets ripped out of foul-smelling homes where the floodwaters had lingered for more than 24 hours.READ MORE: 'Hell's breaking loose': A 911 center under siege by Harvey For Harry Duffey, a 48-year-old computer security specialist, this was flood No. 3 in as many years. Just before the flood, he got a notice that his flood insurance premium had nearly doubled to $5,300 a year. "Everywhere we look this water has cost me money after money after money. It just does not end," he said. But he said he has no intention of moving: "This is in my blood. This is where I'm from." Altogether, more than 1,000 homes in Texas were destroyed and close to 50,000 damaged, and over 32,000 people were in shelters across the state, emergency officials reported. About 10,000 more National Guard troops are being deployed to Texas, bringing the total to 24,000, Gov. Greg Abbot said. "This is going to be an incredibly large disaster," Brock Long, chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said in Washington. "We're not going to know the true cost for years to come. ... But it's going to be huge." Confirmed deaths from the storm include a married couple who drowned after their pickup truck was swept away while they were on the phone with a 911 dispatcher asking for help, officials said. Others among the dead include a woman whose body was discovered floating in Beaumont, a man who tried to swim across a flooded road, and a woman who died after she and her young daughter were swept into a drainage canal in Beaumont. The child was rescued clinging to her dead mother, authorities said. When Harvey paid its return visit to land overnight, it hit near Cameron, Louisiana, about 45 miles from Port Arthur. Port Arthur found itself increasingly isolated as floodwaters swamped most major roads out of the city and spilled into a storm shelter with about 100 people inside. Motiva Enterprises closed its Port Arthur refinery, the largest in the nation, because of flooding. Port Arthur Mayor Derrick Freeman posted on his Facebook page: "city is underwater right now but we are coming!" He urged residents to move to higher ground and avoid getting trapped in attics. More than 500 people - along with dozens of dogs, cats, a lizard and a monkey - took shelter at the Max Bowl bowling alley in Port Arthur after firefighters popped the lock in the middle of the night, said the establishment's general manager, Jeff Tolliver. "The monkey was a little surprising, but we're trying to help," he said. In Orange, Texas, about 30 miles east of Beaumont, residents of a retirement home surrounded by thigh-deep water were rescued by National Guardsmen and wildlife officers, who carried them from the second floor and put them aboard an airboat. Harvey initially came ashore as a Category 4 hurricane in Texas on Friday, then went back out to sea and lingered off the coast as a tropical storm for days, inundating flood-prone Houston. Harvey's five straight days of rain totaled close to 52 inches, the heaviest tropical downpour ever recorded in the continental U.S.Harvey horror: Shivering girl, 3, clinging to drowned momA shivering 3-year-old girl found clinging to the body of her drowned mother in a rain-swollen canal in Southeast Texas was likely saved by her mom's effort to carry her child to safety from Harvey's floods, police said Wednesday. Beaumont police identified the mother as 41-year-old Colette Sulcer and said her daughter was being treated for hypothermia but doing well. When rescuers found the mother and daughter, the girl was on her mother's back, holding on, said Police Officer Haley Morrow. "I envision what I would do if that was me in that situation and that's what I would do: I would put my child on my back and try to swim to safety," Morrow said. Sulcer's vehicle got stuck Tuesday afternoon in the flooded parking lot of an office park just off Interstate 10, said Capt. Brad Penisson of the fire-rescue department in Beaumont. Squalls from Harvey were pounding Beaumont with up to 2 inches of rain an hour with 38 mph gusts, according to the National Weather Service. A witness saw the woman take her 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, Penisson said. Morrow said the woman's actions probably saved her little girl's life. "When they found her she was still up out of the water," Morrow said. A police and fire-rescue team in a boat caught up to them a half-mile downstream from Sucler's vehicle, according to Penisson. 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. A citizen allowed first responders to load the mother and daughter into his truck and he brought them to a waiting ambulance, Morrow said. The child was taken to the Christus St. Elizabeth Hospital in Beaumont, and was expected to be released Wednesday. Officer Carol Riley said the girl was doing "very well" and was chatty. "Everybody at the hospital and the officers just fell in love with her," Riley said. At least 25 people 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.Harvey repeats devastation back on shore in Texas, LouisianaORANGE, Texas (AP) - A weaker Harvey replicated its devastating roll Wednesday, returning to shore with a deluge of rain that inundated homes and highways and left police and government officials struggling to pluck people from the water. The Texas-Louisiana border bore the brunt of Harvey's second coming, this time as a tropical storm. It caused a repeat of the flooding endured by Houston, its suburbs and nearby beach towns when it made first landfall last week as a Category 4 hurricane before meandering back to the Gulf of Mexico. It has dumped up to 50 inches of rain in spots, leaving more than 20 dead. But as Houston got its first glimpses of sunlight in days, areas to the east that had already seen rain were waking up to even more - and to waterlogged homes. Orange, Texas, resident Mike Henry said he went to bed Tuesday with water only in his yard. He woke up to rain falling so hard it sounded like a "power washer." And then it quickly started seeping into his house. "I kept marking it on the wall, every 15 minutes," Henry said. It leveled off at 1 foot (30 cm). A neighbor delivered him, his longtime girlfriend, Rose Marie Carpenter, and her dog, Maggie May, to dry ground - first in a truck, and then in a boat. They were trying to figure out what to do next as they waited along Interstate 10, where ambulances were taking the medically fragile to Louisiana. But many on the freeway didn't want to head there because they wouldn't take dogs. Carpenter uses a wheelchair, and Henry said he wasn't sure where they would go. Some motorists were stranded along elevated I-10 for nearly 24 hours after they pulled off the freeway, but couldn't re-enter when the ramps flooded. In Orange, more than two dozen vehicles -including a news truck - clustered around a closed convenience store when they could not return to the freeway. Erin Gaudet of nearby Beaumont, Texas, said she went home to pick up her kitten, then they spent the night in her SUV. She said she plans to name the kitten Harvey. Police in Beaumont and Port Arthur, Texas, were recruiting anyone with boats to help check neighborhoods for potential rescues, with one meeting point for available vessels at a Walmart. Authorities said that instead of calling 911, many people were trying to seek help via social media, adding to the chaos. But Anna McKay, of Orange, said she tried calling 911 for help, and nobody answered. Neighbors helped bring her and 12 other people who had sought refuge in her home to a Baptist church on higher ground. There, people were planning to cook food they salvaged from their freezers after homeowners shut off their own power to avoid fires. Florida Wildlife Commission agents and soldiers with the Louisiana Army National Guard evacuated eight residents and three employees from the Golden Years retirement home in Orange. Most of the gray brick structure is one story, although staff took residents to a small second-story area as the water on the ground floor rose to thigh level. "I was just wondering if it was going to get any higher," said resident Madison Selph, 87. He said he could tell water had stopped rising by looking at a shed across the parking lot. Rescuers carried the residents out one-by-one, floating them to high-clearance National Guard trucks on an airboat. Three who were too weak to stand were lifted onto a mattress in the back of a truck. The other five got their pajama bottoms wet as they were helped into a second truck, shivering in the still-gusty wind as they sat on metal benches. "It's cold and I don't know where I'm going," a female resident said at one point, as the truck growled and jolted along a flooded Texas highway. The storm came ashore again before dawn Wednesday just west of Cameron, Louisiana, bringing maximum sustained winds near 45 mph (72 kph), the U.S. National Hurricane Center said. Harvey had dumped rain as it lingered over Texas for days. Low-lying southeast Texas and southwest Louisiana are far more rural than the 6-million-plus Houston area and are home to many of the nation's oil refineries, including the biggest in the U.S. in Port Arthur. Motiva Enterprises closed the refinery because of flooding. Port Arthur found itself increasingly isolated as floodwaters swamped most major roads out of the city and spilled into a storm shelter with about 100 people inside.