Hurricane Harvey!

Thanks to all of you for your thoughts and prayers as the state of Texas has gone through the worst natural disaster in years.

This makes two years in a row that we have had torrential rains and subdivisions flooded, but never anything like this. It rained non-stop for six days and this flat city can’t handle 38 inches of rain.

Poor Rockport, TX got the brunt of the storm. Harvey wiped out their power grid so that will take a year to rebuild. Our house in Fulshear is on a lake and every drop of water drains into the lake. Our streets didn’t flood, since the water goes into the lake then into another creek, then to the Brazos River.

After getting this much rain and runoff, the lake started to rise and we started watching it, carefully monitoring how much it rose every two hours. One hour it rose 20 inches. That’s when we really started moving stuff upstairs so we could live there until the water went down.

We learned how to take several pieces of furniture apart to stack on the dining room table so now we know we can do it, but don’t want to have to ever again.

On Day Five, we went to bed fully expecting water to be on the floor the next morning but when I got up at 5 AM to check, I was so pleased that it had gone down two inches. Yay! I never would have thought that two inches was such a big deal, but it was.

The water started to recede very slowly and by the end of Day Six, I had to get outside. After six days of constant rain, it finally stopped, so Gil and I got in the car and drove around the subdivision since we couldn’t leave.

We had the Brazos behind us, the flooded lake in front, and were unable to go outside our subdivision. We were completely surrounded by water and all exits were flooded. But it felt so good to go outside when it wasn’t raining.

It took another day for the water to recede and we could leave and get to the office.

The following day we needed to get to the bay house, which was only 70 miles east of Rockport. We had been sent some pictures and needed to at least get the debris out of the yard and out front so the county could pick it up.

Since most of the roads were underwater, we had to take the long way down by going north to go south. A trip that usually takes an hour and a half now took three hours, but we made it.

The bay house was fine, but almost every pier in this bay was gone, including ours. A lot of them were in our front yard, so the work began to pull all that to the road.

We did our house and our neighbor’s, and the next day we did the neighbors on the other side and got it all done. Our boat stalls have a lot of damage and everything in it is gone, but we have a contractor all ready to go to fix it after he does the neighbor’s pier.

But that’s life on the coast.

Brian’s house was fine but daughter Andrea’s house had a foot of water in it. So the cutting and clearing out began when the water finally was down so we could get in.

All is good and we are all safe. That’s all that matters.