“I’m terrified,” Ms. McGowen said, as she sat on the concrete benches outside of one of three emergency shelters in San Antonio that, as of Sunday night, were housing 1,002 evacuees. A day earlier, she said, someone swiped her phone, cutting her off from the rest of her family.

“I have no way of even getting a hold of them.”

In normal times, Ms. McGowen said she and her extended family would call one another every two hours to chat and check in. The last time she talked to her Uncle Jon, the hurricane was bearing down and he told her that the wind was stripping away the doors and windows of the mobile home where she home-schooled her sons, Connor and Bobby Lewis, 9 and 11 years old.

“We live four feet below sea level,” Ms. McGowen said. “I know I don’t have a house.”

Paul Wood, 61, a foreman at a cattle ranch, said that a neighbor’s garage was flattened in his hometown, Rockport, which was right in the path of the storm. But a gas leak had kept residents at bay, and he was unsure about the fate of his family’s home.

On Sunday night, he dropped off his dogs at an animal shelter that is caring for hurricane-evacuated pets. And he said he was focused on one thing: “Just getting back down there and rebuilding. I know we can.”

Like many others at the middle school, Sena Gonzalez, 35, and her 5-year-old son, Agustin, had few material things to lose when Harvey drove them out of Corpus Christi. They had been staying in a shelter for homeless women and their children since moving there from Portland, and now found themselves in another shelter in another city.