Forecasters at the National Weather Service received reports of 10 to 15 inches of rain falling in northeastern Texas, parts of Arkansas and Louisiana over a day and a half.
Particularly hard hit was Monroe, Louisiana, with more than 17 inches, said Bob Oravec, lead forecaster with the the NWS Weather Prediction Center.
As the system moves east, flooding is a concern in areas of Mississippi, western Tennessee and Alabama, along with Louisiana, he said.
"It's going to continue to be a pretty high impact storm," Oravec said, noting that rains could linger into Saturday.
People in as many as 3,500 homes in Bossier City, Louisiana were told to evacuate, the Shreveport Times reported.
Louisiana National Guard soldiers and law enforcement helped to rescue people stranded in their homes and on roads by high waters, authorities said.
Louisiana's governor has declared a state of emergency in affected regions, and many schools were closed. State government offices in three dozen parishes were shuttered through Friday.
The National Weather Service has issued a flash flood watch stretching from the Gulf of Mexico coast of Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi north into the southern parts of Illinois.
A 30-year-old man drowned on Tuesday as he tried to drive across a flooded area in southeastern Oklahoma, according to the National Weather Service.
(Reporting by Colleen Jenkins in Winston-Salem, N.C., Jim Forsyth in San Antonio, Letitia Stein in Tampa, Fla. and Jon Herskovitz in Austin, TX; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn and Alistair Bell)
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