By MATTHEW WATKINS
Brazos Valley officials said Monday that life has finally begun to return to normal after more than a week of power outages, evacuations and dangerous weather from Hurricane Ike.
The number of evacuees in Brazos County shelters dropped sharply over the weekend to about 250 on Monday as power was restored to many areas and the federal government worked to place people with long-term needs in hotels.
The county has not been accepting new evacuees for days as they have consolidated shelters and worked to get evacuees into hotels. Officials said they still do not know how much longer the remaining two shelters will be open.
At its peak, Brazos County was housing more than 3,000 evacuees in 15 shelters.
The hotels, which have been packed because of the hurricane and Saturday's Texas A&M football game, are also beginning to empty. The Bryan-College Station Convention and Visitors Bureau reported that the cities had about 500 vacant rooms Monday evening.
"We really have gotten to the point that there are no new people with needs coming in," said Shannon Overby, interim president of the visitors bureau. "Everything is going back to normal."
The two cities have about 3,700 hotel rooms. All but about 20 of those rooms are booked for next weekend, when Texas A&M will play Army in football.
More than 750 hotel rooms are currently occupied by evacuees, the visitors bureau reported.
Brazos County emergency officials said that they had scaled down operations on Monday, but still participated in a conference call with state and federal officials to keep up to date on the situation. Brazos County commissioners are expected to repeal an emergency declaration in the county at their weekly meeting on Tuesday morning.
Authorities in Grimes, Leon and Madison counties -- which were hit with power outages after the storm passed through Texas -- reported that all but a small handful of residents had power restored by Monday. The highest number of outages was in Grimes County, where Entergy reported 11 customers were still without power.
Navasota spokesperson Sarah Korpita said that the city had shut down its emergency operations center.
"All of the city's offices have returned to operation and services are back to normal," she said.
Grimes County Sheriff Don Sowell said his office was sending equipment, food and ice to Montgomery County, which still had thousands without power Monday.
Chambers County officials are looking to the Brazos Valley for help with livestock in need of pastures. Chambers County's grazing land has been flooded and cannot support its cows.
Residents with available pasture land are asked to call the Chambers County Extension Office at 409-374-2123.
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