What a week
A devastating storm absolute crushed South East Texas over the weekend. Having moved here one-year ago from Canada this was my family's first encounter with a hurricane. Raw natural power and destruction.
Crazy Facts:
- As of Monday morning 340 BILLION GALLONS of water fell on Houston
- That is enough water to fill 515,151 Olympic Sized Swimming pools
- It is the most rainfall in recorded history in Houston.
Timing was not on our side
We just signed the lease on our new home and were moving about 10 miles north into a better school district for our daughter. Unfortunately the move happened just the day before Hurricane Harvey made land fall. We rushed and rushed to get all of our belongings moved and into the new house as quickly as possible. The news was predicting landfall in Corpus Christi and then Harvey would meander his way up the coast towards us.
My Wife to Me: "We need to get supplies, they say, for at least a week."
Moving houses made it so we didn't have much time to prepare, we grabbed what we could. The rain began Friday night. Saturday morning the roads were still okay and we headed to target to by last minute supplies and ensure we were stocked up. The place was a Zoo lineups, out of supplies etc. This would be why "preppers" prepare themselves :)
Finally after waiting in line for an hour, we were able to check out with some milk, flashlights, food and....a bottle fo wine or two :)
Then Harvey came crashing down on Houston
The news had been talking about the storm since last Wednesday, we heeded the warnings and prepared as best we could.
We live in the Katy, TX area and things were getting pretty scary for us on Saturday. The torrential downpour just wouldn't stop and it began building up in our subdivision. Here's a video my wife and i took of a truck driving past our home.
It only got worse as the night continued. The volume of water pouring out of the sky overwhelmed all drainage systems in our area and rushed up to our house faster than you can imagine. This video was taken in the early morning, and shortly thereafter emergency personnel came to evacuate our neighbors who had called for help.
We did our best homemade sand-bagging job with some bags of mulch, fertilizer and salt and hunkered down for the long night ahead. I stepped outside shortly after this video was taken at around 2:00am Sunday morning, that's when I saw the emergency rescue men at my neighbors house, they asked if we wanted to be evacuated as well. I let them know that we were stocked up and had a 2-story house so we would "weather the storm". They told us it would be getting worse before it got better as the City had just began releasing water from the Addix and barker reservoirs and those would affect us.
Thank God that was the worst of it for us. As I write this story there are Blackhawk helicopters doing rescues in the subdivisions around us. The neighborhood we DID live in was evacuated so we were lucky to have moved here. Schools have all been canceled for a week and the parking garage where I work has flooded to the ceiling.
We had some nervous, anxious and scary moments but we were spared the worst of it. Others have not been so lucky. many friends of ours have been evacuated and the two high schools near us are at capacity as shelters for those who have been displaced. We took an air mattress, blankets, pillows, food and water to the high school this morning in an effort to help.
Help if you can...
This is just the beginning for the Houston area. An incredibly long cleanup and rebuilding process will begin as soon as Harvey is safely away. Billions of dollars in damage and many injured or even dead.
Praise God for all those who have come together to help one another and risked their lives to save others. Please keep all of us in your thoughts and prayers and if you are able to, please help.
#HoustonStrong
This is my first story on Steemit, I'm happy to be a new member of this community. Hopefully I can share many more stories with all of you in the future.