It will take cities and towns in the path of Hurricane Harvey years to recover from the devastation created by the monster storm, the head of the US Federal Emergency Management Agency said Saturday.

"This is going to be an unprecedented long and frustrating event for the state of Texas," FEMA director Brock Long told MSNBC. "The recovery from this disaster is going to be years."

Authorities were assessing the damage on Saturday after Harvy made landfall, unleashing torrential rains and whipping up massive storm surges that destroyed homes, severed power lines and forced tens of thousands of people to flee.

Source: AFP