BEAUMONT, Texas — Tropical Storm Harvey’s impact on the sprawling city of Houston has been vast, costly and deadly. Dozens have lost their lives, and flooding has damaged an estimated 156,000 dwellings across the greater Houston area.

But Harvey didn’t discriminate. The massive storm has proven an equal opportunity disaster, wreaking catastrophic havoc in multiple Gulf Coast cities and states.

Beaumont, a municipality of 118,000 about 90 miles northeast of Houston, has been floored by the historic storm. Flooding, water shortages and power outages continued Saturday to plague the city and many of its surrounding communities.

Inundated roads have even turned some neighborhoods into veritable islands — isolated and inaccessible to motorists.

The presiding Mormon official in the region, Beaumont Texas Stake President Mark Ratcliff, has not stepped inside his home since Harvey raged across southeast Texas earlier this week.

President Ratcliff was out of the country when the storm hit. So he enlisted both resourcefulness and pluck to make it back to Beaumont. He then went directly to the Beaumont LDS chapel and hasn’t really left since.

But the stake president would surely count himself among the lucky in Harvey-weary Jefferson County.

“We have 60 to 80 members in our stake who have had water in their homes. Some have had a few inches, and others have had water up to the ceiling,” he told the Deseret News.

Many of those homes, he said, “we just can’t get to” because floodwaters haven’t receded. Entire communities remain inaccessible. The city of Lumberton, for example, “is completely isolated.” Meanwhile, many in the northern communities of the Beaumont stake were without power Saturday.

“All of our impacted members have been able to find shelter with friends or relatives,” President Ratcliff added.

To serve their threatened community, Latter-day Saints have converted the Beaumont chapel into a shelter/emergency distribution center — handing out food, clothing, bottled water and other provisions to anyone who visits the building.

On Friday, an LDS Church-owned Deseret welfare semitrailer made the onerous drive from Houston to Beaumont to deliver the relief supplies. Local church members jumped in to help unload and store the stacks of bottled water and other items.

“Yesterday we had about 700 people come to the chapel,” said President Ratcliff.

No one's asked for proof of church membership. The life-sustaining goods are being given to any and all who walk through the door.