BROWNWOOD, Texas — As murky water lapped against sandbags piled in front of restaurants, motels and gas stations, residents hoped desperately it wouldn't rise.
A 2-square-mile swath of downtown was already under 3 to 4 feet of water Sunday afternoon. Lake Brownwood was rising to a record 7.7 feet above the spillway, and it was expected to crest Monday at 9 feet.
Then the unexpected happened.
The lake that feeds Pecan Bayou, which runs through the town's business district, slowly started receding. It was at 7 feet above spillway by Sunday night.
It was a bit of good news for this community of 20,000 people bracing for a repeat of floods that devastated the town more than a decade ago.
"This will be bad, but I sure hope not like we saw back in '90," said Mel Robertson, who tried to get a glimpse of the saturated roads downtown but was turned away at a roadblock, along with dozens of other drivers. "I never thought I'd see this much flooding again. And I never wanted to."
More than 30 inches of rain fell in parts of south-central Texas during the week, causing tens of millions of dollars in property damage. Eight people have died.
Some 150 miles to the south in flood-ravaged New Braunfels, residents returned to their homes to survey the devastation left by the Guadalupe River. Soggy carpets were piled on driveways in one neighborhood.
Fred Maxwell's home, the only one left standing from a 1998 flood, withstood the latest flooding as well. At the height of the flooding, it had 3 feet of water on its second floor.
"We're going to stay, I'm sure," Maxwell said, then hesitated. "I'm at least going to rebuild. I can't sell it like this."
Preliminary damage assessments show at least 48,000 houses have been affected statewide — double the number of cases reported after tropical storm Allison last year, according to the American Red Cross. In some places, rivers have crested as high as 28 feet above flood stage.
Thirteen Texas counties have been declared federal disaster areas by President Bush. Gov. Rick Perry, who took a helicopter tour of the swollen Guadalupe River, asked for declarations Sunday for a total of 17 counties.
The Guadalupe and other rivers originating in Texas' Hill Country were flooding cities and croplands downstream along a low-lying coastal plain leading to the Gulf of Mexico.
Flooding was reported at Gonzales on the Guadalupe and was expected Monday at Cuero. Some residents in San Patricio were out of their homes because of high waters from the Nueces River.
Flood waters started receding Sunday in Abilene, Buffalo Gap and other west Texas towns hit by a thunderstorm early Saturday. More than 1,500 people had been evacuated.