Texas' recovery from Hurricane Harvey will be a "generational effort," as the state is still rebuilding in places hit by other hurricanes years ago, Texas General Land Office Commissioner George P. Bush said Monday.
"Our agencies were involved in the rebuilding efforts after Ike and Dolly that hit our state in 2009, and we're still in the process of rebuilding many of those communities in Galveston," said Bush, the son of former Florida governor and presidential candidate Jeb Bush, told Fox News' "America's Newsroom." "This will be a long effort to help those communities."
The efforts will include rebuilding infrastructure, Bush said, including getting basic utility service restored to the hit communities, and work on that will be done in conjunction with the federal government.
"We'll be working with our federal partners as part of that, but that's why we're asking our county and local partners throughout the state that have been hit to document as much as you can," Bush said. "One of the lessons learned from Ike and Dolly, we didn't document many of our expenses and damage on the front end and why we weren't able to get as many reimbursements from the federal government last time."
As for now, Texas is still in the first response stage of the emergency, and many lives are still in danger, Bush said.
"The state's resources, federal, with our county and local partners throughout the state are rescuing as many lives as possible," Bush said. "Red Cross, along with cities, counties and the state of Texas have set up shelters throughout the state with more than enough capacity, as FEMA indicated, with 30,000 evacuees sheltered."
Bush said his agency is more involved with both the "painstaking years of rebuilding" that it will take to rebuild many of the hit communities and in managing block grant money.
Texas' oil industry is also bracing for the fallout from Harvey, Bush said.
"A quarter of the nation's petroleum refining process is located on the Texas Gulf Coast," Bush said. "We've probably lost about a million barrels a day of refining in the last few days. A few of the refineries have shut down . . . roughly a quarter of the capacity of the state's refining process is offline now."
However, many of the methods for delivering gasoline, diesel fuel, and other petroleum products to other parts of the country are still online, Bush said, and he only expects "a little increase" in gas and diesel prices.
Bush said the losses will eventually total into several billion dollars to the state's public and private properties.
"If you don't include the property damage that some estimates put as 10s of billions of dollars, we are looking right now at a quarter of the offshore oil and gas production being down as well," Bush said. "We're talking about a loss of several billion dollars."
The Houston ship channel has been shut in, he continued, and that means billions of dollars of lost economic activity as well. Further, the Corpus Christi port, which exports more petroleum than any other part of the county, has also been hit.
"We're looking at a devastating impact to the nation's economy and life and limb here in Texas," Bush said.