The spirit of Texans shines through Hurricane Harvey

Hurricane Harvey met its match in Texas. The 500-year storm wreaked havoc on Southeast Texas yet Texans responded with hope, unity and immediate action.

Weathering the storm

Hurricane Harvey made landfall as a Category 5 storm, only the third to hit the United States since record keeping began. The latest before Harvey was Hurricane Katrina in 2005. It reached Category 5 in open water but shrunk to Category 3 before hitting the coast. Hurricane Katrina killed 1,200 people and caused $75 billion in damage.

Hurricane Harvey affected 40 counties across Southeast Texas. Monty Dozier, special assistant for the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service’s Rebuild Texas initiative, said the storm caused unprecedented damages because of the wide impact zone and different types of damage.

“Harvey’s kind of unprecedented because it’s such a wide area,” Dozier said. “There’s storm damage and wind storm damage, like what we’d see on a hurricane, in the south coastal bend, Corpus Christi and north of Corpus Christi. Then it’s all flood water from Brazoria over to east of Houston.”

On Aug. 25, Hurricane Harvey landed near Rockport at 10 p.m. Sustained winds of higher than 157 mph and storm surges of three to six feet pummeled the coast around Corpus Christi. Continuous rain caused flood waters to rise quickly all over the area even after the storm lost strength.

Rather than continuing inland after making landfall, Harvey stalled over Southeast Texas. The stalling of the storm produced record-breaking rain fall in some areas with totals of 45 to over 50 inches of rain.

College Station averaged 2.68 inches of rain in August in previous years. This year, it set a new record of 21.02 inches of total rainfall in only one month.

The rain stopped several days after Harvey landed, but rivers and drainage systems continued to gather the flood waters. Some areas were still under mandatory evacuation over a week after Harvey landed. In Brazoria County, the San Bernard River did not crest near the small town of Sweeny until Sept. 4, 10 days after Harvey made landfall.

The San Bernard River’s flood stage consists of three levels. The minor flood stage reaches 16 feet over the natural banks, moderate reaches 17 feet and major flood stage begins at 20 feet past the bank. The river crested at 30 feet over the natural banks.

Dan Reilly, warning coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service, said the flooding reached record levels in Sweeny. “It was just way over major flood stage and I’m fairly certain that’s a record,” Reilly said. The previous record for flooding was 23.9 feet in Oct. 1998.

Reilly began working for the National Weather Service 24 years ago and has been working for the Houston/Galveston area for nine years. Throughout his time working there, he said Harvey was by far the biggest rain event experienced in the US.

“Harvey, the biggest thing with it was the amount of rainfall,” Reilly said. “We’ve never had any kind of hurricane in this country, or tropical system, produce that much rain over such a large area.”

Agriculture

When flood waters started rising, many people were unable to leave their homes. Stories were shared on social media of neighbors and strangers alike rescuing people from flooded homes and other dangerous areas.

Some individuals and agencies even dedicated themselves to rescuing livestock from dangerous areas.

“One of our key missions that we do as far as response to hurricanes or wildfires is setting up animal supply points,” Dozier said. “Those are to bring feed and hay into storm impacted areas.”

The AgriLife Extension Service organizes animal supply points and sets up local shelters for livestock during hazardous conditions, including the flooding that followed Harvey. The shelters are set up at the request of county officials following evacuation orders.

“Well, people want to be able to evacuate with their horse, their 4-H project, those kind of things,” Dozier said. “So on request of the county judge, we’ll set up sheltering facilities for those livestock. Then we’ll also set up the animal supply points to get feed and hay in.”

They began organizing livestock shelters and rescues during Hurricane Ike in 2008. Typically, Dozier said, they set up three or four during hazardous weather conditions. They operated 11 animal supply points during Hurricane Harvey and in the week following it.

"As far as what we do, it was the biggest response we’ve been associated with,” Dozier said.

Volunteers from across Texas and the US hitched up their boats and came to the rescue, literally. Police officers, firefighters, game wardens, civilian groups and others came from across the state and nation to lend their services.

There’s a spirit…

Many students at Texas A&M University watched from College Station that weekend as their homes and hometowns were demolished or flooded. By Sunday evening, senior sports management major Greta Swift could no longer bear feeling helpless while her parents were stuck in Katy.

“I was sitting there Sunday night, right before they cancelled all the classes, like ‘I feel helpless,’” Swift said.

Swift tweeted her idea that Texas A&M should organize an event similar to Big Event but for local Harvey victims. Her tweet drew the attention of other Texas A&M student leaders and they formed a group to spearhead the endeavor. With a core team of 15 students, they called themselves the Built to Help Others organization and immediately began working on the “BTHO Harvey” campaign.

The first part of the campaign consisted of collecting and distributing donated supplies to hurricane victims. They organized and hosted a supply sendoff where they filled five 18-wheelers with supplies. Three of the trucks went to Beaumont and two went to Lake Jackson.

After the supply send-offs, the monetary campaign began as part two of BTHO Harvey. All of the funds raised went to the American Red Cross. With this campaign, Swift said they wanted to find a way that students could help despite limited budgets and free time.

“One of the things we wanted to do was get people to act who otherwise wouldn’t act,” Swift said. “The T-shirts were the perfect way.”

The “BTHO Harvey” T-shirts were sold leading up to the Sept. 9 football game versus Nicholls State. The organization members encouraged students and community members to buy shirts and “white out” Kyle Field in support of hurricane relief efforts. The group raised over $300,000 from that campaign alone.

The group began the process of becoming an official student organization at Texas A&M. Swift said that the university acknowledged them as an official organization from the very beginning so they could utilize the same resources and support that Texas A&M provides official student organizations.

“A&M has been very gracious,” Swift said. “If we were to total what they’ve donated to us, it’s over $75,000 easy of resources they’ve given to us since we started.”

Aggies have also been quick to help. Students purchased T-shirts, volunteered at the supply send-offs and donated money. Former Texas A&M football players Myles Garrett and Von Miller contributed $5,000 and $100,000 respectively to Built to Help Others’ Red Cross fund.

Social media

Social media significantly changed the nature of rescue and recovery operations during Hurricane Harvey. People posted their distress signals online and others were able to help rescuers find them or their livestock, take them to shelters and give supplies to those in need.

“Somebody asked me what the big difference was from when we did it in Ike and Harvey, and it is social media,” Dozier said. "There were positives associated with social media, like getting information."

Pictures and videos were shared across Facebook and Twitter of people helping round up cattle in flood waters and strangers driving boats through neighborhoods to find people stuck in their homes. However, social media led many people to initiate rescue operations without coordinating with local officials.

“There was a downside to social media because we would have individuals out doing stuff,” Dozier said. “We had a lot of freelancers, what I call freelancers, and they’re doing good stuff, but we may not know they’re coming in with a load of animals.”

The AgriLife Extension Service operated in conjunction with the USDA Wildlife Services Management to find cattle in dangerous locations and relocate them to a shelter. They worked in systems and with legal authority to enter properties and take care of the livestock.

“They’re good hearted, they just want to help,” Dozier said. He said they just needed to work with the proper authorities to ensure the most efficient and safe operations.

Social media gave people across the nation and world the ability to immediately see the devastation of Hurricane Harvey. It also allowed them to witness the selfless service, acts of heroism and outpouring of love taking place in Texas.

People saw the videos of Rockport utterly demolished and were able to send help. People saw the pleas for help from Houstonians trapped in their homes and sent boats and helicopters to rescue them. People saw people, hurting and in need, and stepped up to take action.

Seeing the loss and devastation of Harvey motivated Swift to take action. “Somebody was going to do it and it might as well have been me,” Swift said.

Don’t mess with Texas

In the midst of Harvey, people from all organizations, agencies and walks of life came together. From Texas A&M to the National Weather Service Houston/Galveston operations room, people rallied together to help others.

“Really, it was just a very, very intense period where everyone worked really hard and did their best to save lives, especially those first responders,” Reilly said.

Before, the world knew Texans for their resilience and pride. Then they withstood Hurricane Harvey, a 500-year storm. In the wake of it, the world saw the true power of Texans’ unbreakable spirit.