Look Where We Are Now-- After the Storm, We're Back

Text

I had about two and a half feet of water in my house. It rained that night constantly, just constantly. I remember going to the back door and I saw that the water level was right at the edge of my back door. I thought if it doesn't stop raining, it's going to come in. I started to put my furniture up on bricks. As I was doing that, the water started coming through the front door and bubbling up through the carpet. I thought wow, I need to do this faster. I decided instead of that to get my electrical stuff off of the ground. As I was doing that, I heard a noise in the kitchen. The water had gotten so high that it was hitting the fan on the refrigerator motor. Not thinking that I'm standing in water, I decided to unplug the refrigerator. When I did that, it shocked me. Luckily I was pulling when I did that. It threw me backwards. After that, I was too scared to touch anything else. My brother called and told me to go into the back yard and turn off the power. After I had been shocked by the refrigerator, I was too scared to touch the power box. I decided it was time for my fiance and me to leave the house. We had to walk two blocks over to her mother's house; it hadn't flooded. When we walked out of my house, the water was waist high. When we get to the street, the water was chest high. I held her hand and she was scared to death. I kept reassuring her, just trust me, I'm going to get you out of this. We walked in chest high water for two blocks. God know's what's in the water. It was pouring down rain and we were soaking wet. We finally got there. That was a very scary experience. I was scared for her because she was shaking so. It was bad. That water stayed up for about two days when it finally started going down. When I went back to the house the day after the water went down, everything was tumbled everywhere. There was dirt and soot. Everything was soaking wet. It was terrible. All my clothes in the closets, all my furniture-- everything was wet, actually destroyed. I'm staying in the house I grew up in. My dad passed in '14, my mom passed in '12. I hadn't had the house put in my name. I didn't have insurance-- I didn't have flood insurance. When I went to FEMA, at first they didn't want to help me because the house wasn't in my name, so I had to show proof that we had been in the house and were paying the taxes, utility, and upkeep on the house. They agreed to help me with some money. We were out of the house for close to six months. We were blessed to have some friends that let us stay with them for a while. We're still having issues, but we're pressing through.

Creator

Michael Parks and Patricia White

Title

Look Where We Are Now-- After the Storm, We're Back

Rights

This item is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.

Source

This item was contributed via the Harvey Memories Project "Contribute an Item" form.

Date Created

2018-10-06

Date Submitted

2018-10-06

Date Available

2018-10-06

Spatial Coverage

+29.773861-095.271056/
Pleasantville Texas

Temporal Coverage

start=2017-08-26; end=2017-08-28; scheme=ISO 8601;

Geolocation