It was a One and a million thing, they said it only happens every 1000 years hence the nickname “1000 Year Flood” looking back.
I was sitting at Levy Park watching the dark clouds roll in & wind howl constantly over the skyline on my way back to Galveston County from Prairie View A&M after getting my dorm room for my final fall semester before student teaching for me. I finally got back to my home and got prepared to go back to PVAMU the following Sunday Evening with things I needed because I made it a day trip to get everything resolved.
It’s 11 pm or so, the emergency siren is going off
on the tv constantly giving updates that we are under a flood watch. It’s a normal night of the usual video games & web surfing, then the spaces on the floor and windows start gurgling from water coming in, the thing about water is once soil & the ground gets saturated the water has to go somewhere, no difference here. It’s all hands on deck unplugging everything that is low, waking everyone up, & trying to salvage what is possible to reach now, none of that should we start to worry or is it time to move, the time is now. Surveying everything the garage is flooded, the den is as well, & the entire house has shin-deep water in it and it’s even worse outside because looking out the front window through the hurricane shutters the water is even higher at waist level for me rushing down the street trying to find someplace to go. This situation went on for several hours holding down several things so they don’t float, hearing the siren go off on the TV because the electricity never went out, & I even got shocked by an electric heater that was underwater because it was on the floor trying to keep my grandma in one place because she wanted to go to the bathroom across the hallway, but problem with that is the pot was flooded like everything else, so on top of everything I had to play negotiator too.
Once it reached 6 am
Sunday morning the water started to recede because it found somewhere to drain to, us getting berated by rain & wind ended for now & all we could do is laugh hysterically about the night we had and watched law and order since we had electricity and cable still. Maybe we cracked or snapped officially or we knew that the work was just beginning far as everything. This went on for another 3 days because they say Harvey hit a U-turn over the Gulf of Mexico then came back inland hitting another part of Texas when it did still making the emergency siren go off constantly still because of it, it wasn’t as rough for us but we were still on alert. After all the chaos happening in the area we were constantly getting information while we were cleaning from the destruction, like living off I-45 we were blocked by Dickinson Bayou keeping us from going anywhere or my grandma even getting picked up by my aunt in Clear Lake till it receded as an example. It was a tedious process & didn’t end for several months, like my parents were in a hotel because they couldn’t stay in the house, I went back to PVAMU several weeks later once I helped at home & took what I had with me to stash in my dorm since I couldn’t take it anywhere else and my other things were totaled like my car.