Environment

Updated at 8:15 p.m. ET

Officials are still trying to confirm whether Texas floodwaters have spread contamination from decades-old toxic waste sites, as water recedes and residents return to homes that, in some cases, were flooded with water that passed over known contaminated areas.

Over the last few years, many of my colleagues have asked me questions about cars. Recently at NPR West in Culver City, Calif., we got two electric chargers. When my colleague Melissa Kuypers said she wanted an electric car, I thought: perfect guinea pig for a little test.

After thousands of people were forced to leave their homes as a result of the flooding in Houston over the weekend, many have one thing on their minds: their pets.

As the water began to rise, Thomas Hayes, 73, stayed in his house in the neighborhood of Tidwell with his five dogs. He measured the water's climb by the height it hit on his car — first covering the tires, then the bumper, and it continued to rise. He didn't want to leave his home without his dogs.

"I wouldn't do it," he says. "I wouldn't leave without them."

Scientists have produced a preliminary map of the flooding in Houston from Tropical Storm Harvey.

The map doesn't yet represent all the flooded areas, and for technical reasons, it likely understates the extent of flooding. But even this early analysis shows that flooding from Harvey extended well beyond the traditional flood plains mapped out by the federal government.

When it comes to bluefin tuna, it's not often we have good news to share, but spin the globe today, and there's cause for celebration in both the Pacific and Atlantic.

Harvey dominated the news this week. What’s estimated to be the costliest storm ever dropped trillions of gallons of water on Texas and Louisiana, leaving Houston and many other cities badly flooded.

It can be hard to grasp the full impact of what Harvey unleashed on the Gulf Coast of Texas. After all, the story has been told mostly at ground level: Texans wading across interstate highways, scores of people trapped in their homes, others piloting small boats to rescue them.

When a female honeybee hatches, her future holds one of two possible paths within the hive's caste system. She will become either a worker bee or a queen bee. And her fate is determined in part by the food she eats as a larva.

In northeast Houston, grocery stores are boarded up. Gas stations are closed. Streets are covered in a thin layer of dusty mud.

And, on block after block, homes are full of people; some returning after harrowing rescues and frustrating nights in shelters, others who never escaped their apartments as the water rose.

Earlier this week, as torrents of rain fell on Houston, Craig Boyan, CEO of the H-E-B supermarket chain, went on a video-taped tour of his company's emergency operations center in San Antonio, Texas. The company later made the video available online.