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On Saturday August 26th I got an email from my Mom with the subject "Harvey update". It read:
We got about 1 inch of rain here yesterday and about 3 inches overnight. It stopped around 7:00 this morning, and the sun is out here (10:15). Of course we will continue to watch the coverage closely, because they change things every hour or so. But right now, it looks like they expect the storm to take a more northerly path, which would put it closer to Austin! I told John (my brother) to keep an eye on it. He said they got some rain overnight, but that it isn’t raining there now, either. There are rain bands coming through Houston, but most of it is on the east side of town, and, for now, it looks like that will continue to be the case. So, definitely, some people are getting way more rain than they want, but not here – so far.I grew up with hurricanes. We lived first in Louisiana, then on the Gulf Coast of Alabama, and finally in Houston. When we lived in Mobile, AL it seemed like at least once every year we filled the bathtubs with water, taped up the windows and hunkered down, but the storm always hit somewhere else. Once I remember we left and went towards Mississippi, where my Dad was playing in a golf tournament, but then the storm changed course and headed there and we moved again, trying to stay out of its path. Hurricanes are notoriously unpredictable and each one is different, but in all of my life I have never been the one who was in the final path. So I dismissed Mom's email as just another false alarm, just another time that the news media stirs up a frenzy over nothing.
...But, again, Dad and I don’t anticipate any big problems here. I hope we are right! We will try to keep you posted. But, in the meantime, don’t worry!
But then the rain came and it didn't stop.
My Dad woke up in the wee hours of the morning of Sunday August 27th and stepped into water in the bedroom. He woke up my mom and they began raising things up. They took things off low shelves and put them on high shelves. They took things from the floor and put them on top of tables. Once, 15 or 20 years ago, they had water in their home - a few inches. That was before the city spent millions of dollars digging out huge retaining pits next to the bayou across the street and there had never been a scare since. So raising things up a little seemed like a reasonable thing to do.
But the water continued to rise. By Sunday evening my parents, in their mid-late seventies, were wading through waist-deep water in the first floor of their home, making trip after trip up the stairs trying to move some things up to what they hoped would be the safety of the second floor. The things they had moved up on top of tables were now underwater. Still, they planned to stay in the house. Others on the street had evacuated by boat, but my parents had some snacks and water upstairs and hoped to ride it out. The turning point came when they heard that the army corps of engineers was going to begin releasing water from the dams, and this would cause the bayou to rise further and potentially cause greater flooding. When a neighbor with an airboat came by, my parents took their wallets, phones and a change of clothes, made their way past floating appliances to the front door, and got on the boat.
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| Both cars were submerged in the driveway and re-emerged when the water receded |
My parents spent the next 10 days with my cousin in Houston whose house didn't flood. Thank God they had a home to go to and didn't have to be in a shelter. I spent the next 10 days here in Berlin obsessively following the news and reading about disaster recovery. It was like cramming for a final in a course I never took. I studied manuals on home demolition, read FEMA pamphlets on mold remediation, watched YouTube videos on salvaging books, photos, artwork and furniture after a flood. I kept close tabs on the US Geological Survey website, which displays current water levels for Buffalo Bayou at certain measurement points, and I tried to predict when the water would go down in the house. I agonized over the right time to buy my ticket and head to Houston to help: go too early and I would just be sitting around, unable to enter the house due to high water; go too late and I would miss the critical first 24-48 hours after the water leaves but before mold sets in on anything that was wet. On Amazon I ordered waders, safety goggles and pond gloves (didn't know this existed previously - shoulder length gloves) for staying out of the contaminated water. I bought art brushes, clotheslines and absorbent cloths for cleaning and drying photos and keepsakes. And I waited.
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| The water receded from inside the house on the 9th, but my brothers still needed a canoe to get down the street to the house |
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| Measuring the high water mark in the back of the house |
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| Is this a shrimp in our yard? |
Roles had been organically worked out. My older brother Kevin, due to his own personal hobbies and many hours spent renovating his own home, has a wealth of knowledge in woodworking and electrical work, as well as general handyman skills. He too had done a lot of disaster recovery reading, and came prepared to lead the demolition effort. He acted as general contractor for all the crews who came to help us, and also did a huge amount of the work himself. My self-proclaimed job was to try to save things. I sorted through closets of clothes to try to salvage the least-damaged things; I set aside items from cabinets and shelves that I thought could be cleaned; whenever we entered a new room and we found more photographs, scrapbooks, newspaper clippings, journals, they came to me. My younger brother John wasn't able to get as much time away from his work, but when he was at the house he pitched in with whatever was needed. Of course Mom and Dad were there too almost every day, every long hour that we worked they were scrubbing, power washing, sorting, sweating and carrying things that were way too heavy for them.
And then there were the volunteers. So many volunteers! Every bit of demolition work was done by helpers volunteering their time. This is the part that blows me away, and is one of a few silver linings that makes a huge dent in the sadness of this experience. The way the city of Houston stood up and came together to help the community was just incredible. Because of natural high and low areas around the city and because the bayou snakes through the whole city, there were huge areas of town where everyone flooded, but also huge areas with no water damage. So the people without damage came out in droves to help those who flooded. I saw the #HoustonStrong motto all over town and it truly warmed my heart to hear the stories of people coming together from near and far to help. There were people coming and going all the time so I didn't always even know who was at our house each day, but here are just some of the people who helped us:
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| These workers in yellow shirts are the Mormon Helping Hands, who helped out all over town. |
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| These tough ladies are a group from the physical therapy program at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor in Belton, TX, about 3 hours northeast of our house. I still don't know how they found us, but they showed up with their hammers and shovels and tools and set in to the exhausting dirty demolition work. |
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| It wasn't just young people doing the work; some longtime friends of Mom and Dad's came out too. |
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| Every day food showed up; always for lunch, and sometimes for dinner too. The cookies and chips this high school friend of Mom's brought for us lasted the entire two weeks and also fed the workers at the neighbors' houses! One day a golf cart came putting down our street with tons of chicken sandwiches donated by Chick-fil-A and some homemade brownies someone made. |
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| My cousins headed up a crew who came in and took charge of the dishes. Mom has a lot of sets of dishes, seasonal, fine china, inherited china, and cut glass and crystal both from her wedding and inherited. My cousins took it upon themselves to come collect all the dishes and glassware, pack it up and take it back to Kim's home, where she organized her neighbors to have an assembly line of bins to soak things in - soap, bleach, rinse, more bleach, more soap, and then everything through the dishwasher. Then they packed everything securely in boxes and when the moving truck came to take the remaining belongings to a storage unit, there were 24 boxes! |
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| This is my brother and me with a distant cousin from Louisiana whom we had never met. Her home flooded a year ago and when she found out about my parents' situation, she first offered lots of advice and then spent her two days off working at our house, driving 5 hours each way. Oh - and she brought us crawfish étouffée!! |
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| My cousin Kim also loaned me her fun little mini Cooper for almost the entire duration of my stay |
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| My invaluable friend Phyllis had emailed everyone she knew to recruit helpers for us. This guy, who was kind enough to pose with my sweaty dad, works for a woman who received Phyllis' email. The woman passed on our information to him and, bless his heart, he came out late in our time in Houston and did a million physically exhausting leftover tasks. You can tell from the photo he's a strong young guy; he told us he doesn't tire easily but when he left about 3:00 he said he was completely exhausted! We really asked a lot of him! |
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| Our neighbors' son is a chiropractor in central Texas. He came down for a weekend and offered free adjustments in his parents' stripped-down home to volunteers and families on our street. |
Speaking of amazing things, on the right of the picture is my ex-sister-in-law and her fiancée. They drove back and forth from Austin to help us for several days, and so did one of her ex-boyfriends, whom she dated between her marriage with my brother and her engagement to her current love. What kind of people voluntarily spend their days with a respirator on their face ripping out soggy moldy wood and walls with their ex-husband's family, their ex-girlfriend's ex-husband's family, their fiancée's ex-husband's family? Good, kind, generous people, that's who. My parents are also good, kind, generous people and this was a way to give back to them.
Phyllis and I had sorted through my parents' closets full of clothes and selected things that weren't moldy or stained from rusty hangers. She took home a load to experiment with disinfecting them to see if they could be salvaged. She had to wash them several times to figure out the right combination of detergents and disinfectants that would remove the foul dirty water smell, but eventually she was able to declare success. She and several of her friends took large garbage bags full of clothing to their homes to wash, fold and repack in plastic bins that they donated to our cause.
And then there were the people who donated space in their homes to us. I spent a week with Phyllis, a friend from elementary/middle school in Alabama who had later moved to Houston, and about 10 days with my friend Adrienne, whom I went to school with during the two years I lived in Houston while I was finishing high school. It was an unexpected benefit to come home each night to a comfortable home, a glass of wine, a dinner waiting for me if I hadn't already eaten, an escape from the stress of the day, and a chance to get to know my friends' families. Kevin, John, Mom and Dad spent many nights with each of our 3 cousins in the Houston area.
I haven't told all the stories here, or mentioned all the people who contributed to getting the house in order. But even in this sampling you can see how huge the outpouring of support was. I have accepted help in the past when I had newborn babies and after my bike accident and concussion, but this was well beyond anything I have experienced. We couldn't begin to pay all these people back. You just say yes with a heart full of gratitude to whatever it is people offer to do. May God bless them all! Because there was so much to do, it was easy to feel overwhelmed and somewhat paralyzed by indecision, so I am especially grateful for the times when people took charge and took on a specific task - "I'll take the laundry and get it clean', "I will wash all the dishes", "I will bring you dinner on Wednesday", "I will find you more trash bags", "I will bring moving boxes and packing material". If I am ever in a position to help someone else in this situation I will be sure to remember to do this.
Some people have expressed confusion in understanding why my parents didn't expect their house to flood and didn't have flood insurance. After all, they live across the street from the bayou; didn't they know this could happen? As I said earlier, my parents had water in their home (a couple of inches) once in the last 28 years. In addition, Hurricane Harvey broke the record for the most total rainfall ever recorded from a single storm in the lower 48 states (more than 50 inches/127 cm depending on where which part of town you measure). The Space Science and Engineering Center at the University of Wisconsin at Madison did some calculations and announced that many areas of Southeast Texas received rain that could be expected to come around only once every 1,000 years, assuming a stationary climate (which of course may not be a valid assumption, but still - the point is made.) But in addition to this data, while I was in Houston I tried to take some pictures that would display just how much water had to accumulate in order to create a flood of this magnitude.
This photo begins to show how far away from the water my parents' house actually is. You can see in the photo at the top of the blog just how large my parents' front yard is, and it slopes upwards. Beyond the yard is the street, and across the street a huge open park/levee. The park is flat for a while and then the edge drops off about 15 feet to huge retaining areas next to the bayou. The photo on the left is taken standing just before the dropoff and looking back towards the houses (the cars you see are parked on the street and the houses are beyond).
This photo shows how the land drops off towards the right, and the retaining area is now doing its job of holding water. Underneath that water is a paved bicycle path, which is normally full of cyclists and joggers. The trees beyond the water flank the bayou, and the actual bayou is unseen to the right beyond the trees. On normal days it's quite low and you can even walk on a small path in the trees next to the water.
In this photo I'm standing down in the low space. Ahead of me on the left you see the path which in this stretch isn't covered by water, while the water still stands in the pool to the right. You can see the brown water mark in the tree.
So to reach our house, the water had to rise in the bayou, spill over into the low retaining area, fill that completely and then crest the 15ish foot hill, wash across the levee and spill into the street, and finally climb across the front yard to enter the home. Of course it was also coming from the back and side yards, which had nowhere to send the rain that was pooling there as well. When the Army Corps of Engineers decided to open the dams and release more water into the bayou to lessen the pressure on the straining embankments, the water in these homes rose along with the bayou. (In fact many homes hadn't flooded at all until the corps' decision. Many people in Houston are angry about this and feel they are owed compensation.) Then it had nowhere to go for weeks as every drop of water in the inundated city tried to make its way out at once.
So what does flood damage look like? Driving into the neighborhood each day we truly entered a disaster area.
And inside the homes? I hesitate to post the next few photos because it still shocks me to see them, and also because there's something very intimate and personal about a home in this state that makes you feel very exposed. But I think you can't really understand unless you can see this. When the water went down, this is what was left behind.
So to reach our house, the water had to rise in the bayou, spill over into the low retaining area, fill that completely and then crest the 15ish foot hill, wash across the levee and spill into the street, and finally climb across the front yard to enter the home. Of course it was also coming from the back and side yards, which had nowhere to send the rain that was pooling there as well. When the Army Corps of Engineers decided to open the dams and release more water into the bayou to lessen the pressure on the straining embankments, the water in these homes rose along with the bayou. (In fact many homes hadn't flooded at all until the corps' decision. Many people in Houston are angry about this and feel they are owed compensation.) Then it had nowhere to go for weeks as every drop of water in the inundated city tried to make its way out at once.
So what does flood damage look like? Driving into the neighborhood each day we truly entered a disaster area.
And inside the homes? I hesitate to post the next few photos because it still shocks me to see them, and also because there's something very intimate and personal about a home in this state that makes you feel very exposed. But I think you can't really understand unless you can see this. When the water went down, this is what was left behind.
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| This is the living room. You can see the water line on the walls. The black spots above are mold. The white and grey on the furniture is mold. The wood squares are part of the flooring from the den. |
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| The kitchen looks like it's from an episode of Hoarders, with trash and food everywhere. In the foreground is the refrigerator toppled over. |
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| Relic from a bygone era: Volume U-V of the World Book Encyclopedia floated from the den to its resting spot in the bathroom |
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| My parents' bedroom, this is after we cleared it enough to be able to walk in. We sent the beautiful four-poster bed to a furniture refinishing company to have it restored. |
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| The den after it was cleared and the floor was removed. |
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| Me, Dad, Kevin |
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| Furniture toppled, contents jumbled. When we lifted out cups and bowls we first dumped out the muddy water. |
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| There was always a trash can nearby when we were at work. |
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| Lunch in the bed of the truck; respirators dangle from our necks, filthy boots on our feet |
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| Standing in my parents' bedroom looking at the remains of the closet (center) |
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| The trash pile grew in the front yard |
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| Bob works in the kitchen - cabinets, sinks and appliances torn out |
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| A crew works in the bedroom |
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| After a string of blessedly sunny days, we got some heavy rain. |
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| Bob "remodeled" the downstairs bathroom to provide a private toilet and sink. |
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| Not the healthiest place to eat lunch, but we had to move inside due to the rain. |
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| Powerwashing on the driveway |
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| Mom and Dad's new truck was a rockstar. It carried all our supplies, held snacks and drinks, and served as dining table. |
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| We had to pull the ivy off the walls so it could be power washed underneath. |
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| Imagine the weight of 6 feet of water. The fireplace is appropriately cracked. |
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| Baby shoes |
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| Kevin posed with his baby blanket before it was lovingly tossed into the trash pile |
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| Poor bunny sits in the mud. Item after item was transformed into trash by the floodwaters. |
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| We uncovered some gems deep in the cabinets! |
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| (Nottingham Forest is the name of our neighborhood) |
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| "Angels keep me safe" |
One day "the claw" came to our street to take away the piles from the yards. First it raked everything into the street, and then later more machines came to load everything into gigantic dumpsters. As I stood filming the scene for posterity, I was surprised by the strength of the emotion that came over me. I turned off the video, sank to my knees and sobbed. I couldn't watch the claw bulldoze my parents' possessions into the street any longer. Many well-meaning people have told me during this process that possessions can be replaced and the most important thing is that my parents are safe. Of course it's true that if my parents weren't safe and well then everything else would pale in comparison. But I believe the loss of a lifetime of possessions is a death in itself and is absolutely something to be grieved. Especially for people my parents' age, who have had many years to build their collections, and who have also inherited precious things from family members who have died. Of course not everything in the house was an heirloom; there's no special emotion attached to the microwave or the thermometer or the plastic cups, and this was as good an excuse as any to sort through the many many things that were simply clutter and trash. But there were so many things in that pile that were special, that represented memories. After I composed myself I walked over to the crewman nearest me, who was watching me. Typical of everyone I met in Houston, he was full of compassion. He expressed his sympathy and told me how hard it was to watch this go on for house after house, day after day. He told me that he had lost his home in a fire not many years ago and that this is bringing back tough memories for him.
Strangely enough, I spoke with at least 6 or 7 people during the Harvey episode who had been through a house fire. You just don't hear about house fires very often, so I was surprised by the number of people I encountered who had experienced it. A friend from college actually told me that his mother had experienced flood and then fire in the same time period: hurricane flooding, and then a house fire accident during the rebuilding of the house. He said that given the two disasters they preferred the flood; at least with flood you can see the items that are destroyed and grieve them as you throw them away, but with fire they are just gone and you wonder what exactly you have lost. I kept those words in mind as we threw things away, and they have also been at the forefront of my mind in the past few weeks as so many have lost homes to fire in California.
The smell of the area greatly improved after the trash was hauled away. As you can imagine, the rotting moldy piles on everyone's front lawn created a horrific smell. The masks we wore filtered not just the unsafe particles but also the scent. I didn't really want to breathe without the mask; we had to take them off to eat or take a drink of water, but otherwise I wore mine pretty much all the time. It was also really nice to have the trash gone and not have to stare at the sad soggy pile every day. We did quickly create a new pile as we continued to finish the cleanup and sort through the upstairs as well, but the new pile wasn't as depressing as the first.
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| What a difference between right and left! |
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| A worker sprays the bedroom with a super hot power washer |
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| We joked that the house has a lovely new "open floorplan". Here we are standing in the dining room. Looking to the right is the kitchen, then laundry room and door to the back yard. On the left is the living room and then the study. The den is in the middle delineated by the studs. |
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| No way we were getting rid of these pants! They were washed and will live to see another day. |
Another great thing was the support of my community back in Berlin. First and foremost Dan, who didn't bat an eyelash when I suggested going to Houston for an indefinite period of time. I could focus 100% on what I needed to do in Houston without worrying about the kids or animals or school or anything else in Berlin, because he was entirely capable of managing it (not quite as well as I do, of course, but passably :) ). Dan's aunt and uncle, Hedi and Helmut, drove over from Austria to watch the kids for the first several days while Dan was away on a business trip. A parent who lives close by drove Haley to and from school each day. A few friends dropped by with dinner. I had a list of people who had volunteered to help in any way, Dan just had to ask. And then Carter and Haley themselves really stepped up to the challenge. They took over the dishes, shopping, dog walking, and pet feeding while I was gone. And my spirits were lifted by the love, support and prayers of my friends in Berlin.
Last but certainly not least, I was well aware, as we sorted through their things, that I had the privilege to do this task side by side with my parents. Most often the task of going through your parents' things is undertaken after their deaths, when you are grieving their loss. I am so thankful that this was not the case and we still have more time together. And rather than wonder about the significance of some picture or knickknack, I was able to simply find Mom or Dad and ask where it came from and what was the story behind it, so for that I am grateful.
Harvey furnished me with a rich new set of experiences: new faith in the goodness of people, new empathy for disaster victims, new skills in photo restoration and house demolition, new memories with my family, new knowledge of the resilience of which people are capable. "That which doesn't kill us makes us stronger", and I'm confident this experience will be with me forever.
