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Report from a Harvey House
If you look at Kelley’s Restaurant (appears at about 0:45 seconds, long building with the black roof), the street where I live is opposite the Kelley’s. I live about half a mile from FM-518 up that road.
Since everyone has been hearing about Hurricane Harvey on the news, I though folks might be interested in a typical experience by someone who went through Harvey in the Houston area. When I say a typical experience I mean just that — typical, not what you are seeing on the news.
Quilter and I left our home in League City last Friday. At that time it was still Hurricane Harvey and looked as if it would hit land near Corpus Christi. My instinct was to stay, but the problem with that is Quilter is receiving cancer treatment at MD Anderson in downtown Houston. My fear was Clear Creek, north of my house would flood. With my house on the south side of the creek that would leave us neatly cut off from MD Anderson. We decided the percentage move was to relocate to my brother’s place on the west side of Houston. What I did not consider was his place was north of Buffalo Bayou, and MD Anderson is south of the bayou.
So what happened? It rained. And rained some more, and rained still more. Storm hits land, marches inland, turns around and heads back the Gulf and east on the Texas coast. Really slo-o-owly. Dumping an inch or two of rain every hour. From Friday through Tuesday. (By the fourth day we were looking for some old guy building a big boat surrounded by cages filled with animals.)
We watch lots of the weather channel. And the local news and checked the National Hurricane Center on the Internet. And watched movies. (And I wrote and worked on the day job. The problem with working remotely is you do not get hurricane days.) That’s right, through the whole rainy period we had power and Internet connectivity. Then Tuesday evening about 6:00 the rain stops and the sun comes out and we are thinking we are through the worst of it.
Then the power goes out. It stays out for a day. Next morning my brother goes to the store for ice and charcoal. (Sun’s shining – remember?) We barbecue all the meat in the fridge and the freezer. Take a big pot of water, put that on the grill, get the water boiling. We pour some of it into the drip coffee maker for our morning coffee. Then we boil all the eggs in the refrigerator with the rest of the water. Fortunately weather is not too hot. The storm is sucking cool air from the north into Houston.
What we cannot do is go to MD Anderson or home. Quilter has an immunotherapy infusion scheduled Tuesday and a Supportive Care appointment on Wednesday. Remember all that rain? It has turned Houston into a city of moats. Every river, bayou, creek, or drainage ditch is filled with water. Quilter and I are cut off from MD Anderson by Buffalo Bayou. Would not matter anyway since MD Anderson is an island thanks to a moat provided by Brays Bayou near the Medical Center. So MD Anderson is shut down.
Power comes back almost 23 hours after it went out. Then goes away. Finally after almost exactly a full day it comes back for good.
We spend Thursday getting an emergency prescription filled for Quilter. We left League City with a week’s worth. Which meant she was out on Thursday. Get the prescription at a local pharmacy. The real issue is the rest of the prescription is sitting waiting for us at a pharmacy in League City, closed by the storm. Which we cannot reach, and is closed anyway. So we cannot transfer it. After about four hours of phone calls to MD Anderson, an open pharmacy we can reach, and our medical insurance company the prescription is filled and I get it. Our medical insurance company even okayed it – they actually were cutting red tape for Harvey.
Finally, today the waters part enough for us to return home. Actually they receded enough yesterday, but there were still issues, and we stayed put.
So what happened in my neighborhood? It rained. And rained some more, and rained still more. And Clear Creek flooded. It filled up the area with runoff. Everything north of FM-518 (League City’s Main Street) flooded. So did FM-518. At one point there was four-five feet of water in FM-518. And the entrance to the subdivision was flooded. But, just as at my brother’s none of the houses near mine (including my own) flooded. So my neighbors watched lots of the weather channel. And the local news and checked the National Hurricane Center on the Internet. And watched movies. That’s right, through the whole rainy period they had power and Internet connectivity. And sure enough – they lost power for a day.
The only difference between their experiences and mine were that they could not leave the neighborhood until Thursday and the local Walgreen flooded, so I would not have been able to fill the prescription.
I am back at my house in League City after a week away from it. The roof leaked in one spot, but not badly. The food in the freezer and refrigerator had to be tossed. And that was our great Harvey adventure. It was probably similar or even identical to the Harvey experience of 90% of the folks in the Greater Houston Metropolitan Area. Yes, there were 80,000 houses that took water, but there is something on the order of 2.2 million households in the GHMA.
Anyhow for me and my neighbors (and everyone at my brother’s neighborhood except one guy who got panicked by the weather channel and managed to drown his truck on Wednesday seeking safety) Harvey was mostly boring. Even the guy who drowned his truck managed to walk back to his place. The sun was shining, after all.
Seawriter
Published in General
Let’s see if this works:
Seawriter
What a great typical story. Thank you for sharing.
When I was in Germany in the Army in ’80 or ’81, I remember my mom sending me newspapers of League City being under water from some Hurricane. She was living in Texas City at the time and I believe she got flooded too. Were you there for that one?
I was in the area, but not in League City. I was in Clear Lake City, living in an apartment complex at the corner of Space Center Blvd and Bay Area Blvd.
It was another tropical storm – Claudette, I believe, in 1979. Dropped 40 inches of rain on Alvin. I had been in Houston just over a month.
People were a lot more sanguine about tropical storms back then. Probably rightfully so. Tropical storms really are not a threat to life if you do not do something stupid – like drive your car into a flooded underpass. Few companies suspended work for a tropical storm (or even a hurricane).
I was working at Lockheed back then. They were on the south side of Johnson Space Center and I lived on the north side. So, I got in my car to drive to work. Noticed water lapping around my soles as I got into the car. Backed out of the parking space. Realized there was about four inches of water around the tires of my car. Get ready to pull into the street. See a Volkswagen Beetle opposite the parking lot exit. Idlely note the water up to its door handle. Put the car in gear to go forward.
Suddenly my brain engages and I process what water up to the door handle means. Stop the car. Look at the Volkswagen. Put the car in reverse. Back up to my parking spot, and slide back into it. Go up to my apartment. Pick up the phone and call work. “Davis,” (my boss) I say, “I am going to be in a little late today. Or maybe a whole lot late.”
Seawriter
That may be the most extraordinary thing I have ever read on Ricochet.
glad to hear you survived it, and got home, none the worse for wear.
Glug, glug, glug… Thanks for the dispatches from the disaster area. Resilient is a word that comes to mind for Texans. Actually, this puts the SEA in Seawriter, doesn’t it?
Actually . . . I kinda avoided the sea. That was the idea. Even the inland, freshwater type of sea. Except (of course this had to happen while I evacuated) for delivering one book on a naval campaign and getting the page proofs to another about the USS Houston during this time period.
Seawriter
Yes, the good news is that not very many people died at all. It was just a lot of people and property getting wet. It will be expensive but not life threatening. There is plenty to be grateful for.
Thanks for reporting the honest “news”. More importantly, glad to hear you, Quilter and the rest of your family came through ok.
You can see the guy in the Jeep thinking “now HOW tall are the tires on that Army truck?”
Looks like a puppy following a bull.
Seawriter
Unfortunately my sister is among those 80,000. Y’all send some prayers her way if you have the time.
Clear Creek flooded indeed!
We could cross Chigger Creek (which never quite flooded our Harvey house), but not Clear or Coward’s.
I’m too tired to talk about much. Here’s a tiny, tiny anecdote: I think it was on Monday that Linda of Linda’s Donuts was feeding us and others like us. We got one of the last four dozen she had ingredients to bake. She’d lost several hours of sleep the night before to bake donuts. A real local hero!
Seawriter,
Very glad you and your family are okay.
Would you, or someone on Ricochet, tell me to what organization it’s best to give a donation to help the flood victims ? I’ve recently heard some negative things about an organization I would ordinarily trust. That’s why I’m asking.
You can’t go wrong with the Cajun Navy.
The Red Cross and Habitat for Humanity are pretty good generic charities, right? That should be safe. The Red Cross always has good work to do, whether or not it’s increased by floods; I would imagine Habitat will help with many homes in the Houston area.
I would imagine Texas Baptist Men (actually a relief organization with global reach) is taking donations (http://www.texasbaptistmen.org/). I think they may add some evangelism or other religious stuff along with their work, so people who don’t want to support that might want to find something else.
Gee. I bet we could use a whole post to discuss this and maybe come up with a comprehensive list, elevated to the Main Feed and covering organizations from the generic Habitat for Humanity sort of thing to dozens of super-specific ministries for the support of super-specific donors.
The author of the post could update the post from time to time listing various commenters’ suggestions.
I don’t think I can take this on right now, folks–partially as a result of Harvey himself (Harvey, that big jerk).
Anyone wanna take on that kind of project?
Making the time, Umbra Australis: ON it!
@seawriter and @quilter: so glad you’re home safe and dry….Donation to Catholic Charities of Galveston-Houston from here.
I sent a donation The Chabad of Baton Rouge, who went to TX to help.
Will do. Sorry, to hear she was impacted. I went through Hurricane Andrew, the storm itself was terrifying, but the recovery process was horrible,– far, far worse than the storm itself. Especially if you were a property owner and not just a renter. Or if the insurance company failed to “total” your home, which meant you had to repair, despite the 79% damage. And then every day, you found new damage that was not immediately visible. So, it was a new fight with the insurance company. For instance there was an long interior wall between my bedroom and living room — on the outside it looked perfectly fine. But if you touched it, it seemed to “move”. When I finally decided to investigate. We found every single stud (aluminum) in the wall had been torn in half when the house was breached by the wind. To this day I don’t understand how that could have happened; but it did.
Extra special prayers for your sister.
The Salvation Army are pretty darned good. They have a high “donations to giving ratio,” for example.
Glad you are all ok – Lots of lessons here – stock up and take meds (sometimes you can’t stock up since prescriptions only fill limited amounts), have alternative cooking source, don’t overstock frig – invest in pantry foods, etc. I never thought that hospitals or pharmacies could be shut down but that’s logical – for all Texas has been through – they have shown the nation a face of courage, love, resilience, and don’t wait for the government to rescue you!
That’s a nightmare. So wrong of that company. So wrong.
The Cajun Navy is requesting over a million volunteers to help Texas rebuild. They need 10 volunteers per house.
http://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/news/article_d8ca926c-8b57-11e7-b442-3779a777c29b.html
http://video.foxnews.com/v/5558305313001/?#sp=show-clips
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-cajun-navy-hurricane-harvey-20170828-story.html
We took some damage. The roof leaked and we need to replace the ceiling in one room. Plus replace the roof. (Not sure how much insurance will cover – we have had the same roof since we bought the house in 2002.)
The medicine issue was due to a new prescription. It was written on Wednesday, but the pharmacy did not have all of it when we picked it up on Thursday. They gave us a week’s worth. No problem – we could pick the rest up Sunday we were told. Only Friday Harvey came knocking. Otherwise Quilter and I had a month’s supply of all of our prescriptions.
Seawriter
Thanks for sharing. Your point about the extent and scale of the disaster is well taken. I have co-workers throughout Harris County who survived high and dry, retained power, and were stuck in place. Family from Katy escaped west to Schulenberg and their neighbors sent them pictures of the water which reached their house’s foundation but no higher. As the floodwaters recede, they will reveal the full scale of the rebuilding that is to come. We all would do well to remember that the affected areas range from Corpus Christi to Orange and as far inland as Bastrop and College Station. It was a big storm in a big state.
I’ve been thinking of you and Quilter on and off. Thank you for keeping us posted and giving us a real sense of what was going on from your personal experience. Glad you’re back home with a roof (more or less) over your head.
At this point it is more more than less. But it needs to be fixed.
Seawriter
A worthy cause, that.
I volunteered myself for a few hours yesterday with my parents’ church. If the Cajun Navy is trying to cover all the houses themselves, they’re aiming higher than they need to, since homeowners, neighbors, families, and churches are already doing so much good work.
But that’s not a complaint; aiming high is good, and the worst that comes of it is probably that all the houses will be cleaned up extra fast.
Fun fact: There were at least four different ethnicities working in that home yesterday!
I congratulated the black gentleman who was there on the shirt he was wearing–a Bible verse about not having treasures on earth. It seemed perfectly fit for a hurricane clean-up day.