First-person Harvey account: In a Dickinson subdivision, a normal weekend turned upside down

Bay Area Citizen reporter Jennifer Bolton and her husband, Luke, were forced to evacuate from their home on Sunday, Aug. 27 after water filled their Dickinson home on Saturday night. Both were rescued and are now safe with relatives. less Bay Area Citizen reporter Jennifer Bolton and her husband, Luke, were forced to evacuate from their home on Sunday, Aug. 27 after water filled their Dickinson home on Saturday night. Both were rescued and are ... more Photo: Jennifer Bolton Photo: Jennifer Bolton Image 1 of / 129 Caption Close First-person Harvey account: In a Dickinson subdivision, a normal weekend turned upside down 1 / 129 Back to Gallery

At 11:30 p.m. Saturday, I was watching "Rick and Morty" and drinking a glass of cheap wine in a pair of horrendous shorts on the couch with my husband. By 8 the next morning, my husband was slowly working his way through the roof of our attic with a dull Sawzall.

It was a pretty atypical weekend, is what I'm getting at.

I've been through a flood before — Allison pummeled my little La Porte subdivision for hours, and we —my sister, brother and parents — walked away with about 3 feet of water in our house by the time the rain stopped.

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If you've been through it, you know that for a while, rainstorms make you nervous. Water collecting in the streets is an unwelcome sight and compulsively watching weather forecasts and weather apps becomes a way of life.

But people move on. We're resilient. Complacency sets in as the memory of those disasters fade.

But if you ever find yourself in another flood, those flashes of unwelcome familiarity rise to the top of your memory very quickly — just like the floodwaters you see trickling and slithering under your walls.



First, the water came in slowly. Our first instinct was to try to stop it.

"Help me with this shop vac," my husband said, as he frantically filled the body of the vacuum and just as frantically tried to lug it to the front door to toss the water outside.

We may as well have been using our hands.

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When the flooring started floating, it became fairly evident that we were going to need a much larger shop vac.

Then we bargained.

"Ok," I said, "this room is probably done. But we can save the things in the other rooms. Let's just get stuff up."

Clothes were ripped from the closet and tossed on the bed. I placed my husband's paintings on dressers and beds. We removed file cabinet drawers and took them to the attic. We waited for the water to recede.

Except it didn't.

"Well. Let's get the stuff that's really important upstairs," my husband said.

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We packed two bags with whatever our hands landed on — which I realized as I unpacked the next day left me with five bras and zero shoes, a shirt that didn't fit and a tank top held together by safety pins that I promised to retire six years ago but never got around to it.

I grabbed my grandmother's earrings. I grabbed two necklaces my mom gave me. I grabbed a pair of sunglasses my brother left at my house, a purse, our wallets and a cup my sister got me that has a dinosaur on it. And the wine — you better believe I rescued that wine.

When water started pouring out of our electrical outlets, we grabbed the animals — two useless dogs and a demanding cat — and fled upstairs. My husband moved a couple pet rats to higher ground on a shelf; we were certain our Savannah monitor and ball python would be fine.

Eventually, the water rose hip high; with one hand I was absentmindedly crushing fire ants making a meal of my legs, and with the other I grabbed my ukulele. My husband was carrying my makeup and my purse as he retrieved some leftover tacos from dinner when things were normal — when we weren't sitting upstairs as water menaced from below.

Two hours — that's how long it took for us to be hip-deep in floodwater while we sat on the couch.

We then moved to our very small attic with our two dogs to wait. And wait. I started counting the number of steps visible above the advancing water line. We had nine.



Our refrigerator upended. My Sriracha floated by. The Wheat Thins I bought specifically to wait out the hurricane floated by.

From upstairs in our attic room, we heard heavy oak desks, our kitchen island, a piano, all come off their legs, floating in our living room. I didn't know refrigerators could float.

We had eight steps.



"I left my guitar," I said. "And I don't think Reptilicus will make it."

My husband went back downstairs in now waist-deep water to retrieve our snake, Squeezer Augustus, and Reptilicus, our Savannah monitor. He got the pet rats as well. Because he's thoughtful, he got my guitar and my diplomas.

Seven steps.

The rain wasn't showing any sign of stopping.



The water in the garage was up to my husband's neck; he's gone to try and retrieve one of his saws so that we can get out of the roof if we need to. Most of his good tools are already underwater.

He comes back with a Sawzall with a dull blade and an ax. That's all he has left. He goes back down one more time for my paddle board, just in case.

The seventh step is slowly fading from view.

At this point, we have to decide whether we want to swim through the house and out of the garage to wait — in the dark — for a rescue that might not be coming, or go out through the roof.

I chose the roof exit.

"That's our Alamo," my husband said. He actually said it a couple times — like saying it more than once will make it seem real. It doesn't seem real.

"The Alamo didn't go great," I told him. "Don't say 'This is our Alamo,' anymore."



At 7:30 a.m., my sister FaceTimed me to tell me that authorities were asking people to not hide in attics. She's trying not to cry, and so am I.

By 8 a.m., my husband had created a rooftop escape hatch. There are people on their rooftops all around us as Coast Guard helicopters hang in the sky. Crew members are pulling people, one by one, from the baskets and into their arms to safety.

I went back down into the attic to let my family know we were OK, but before I left, I made my husband promise not to go back into the water. He did not listen.

Almost immediately, he saw a neighbor down the street screaming for help, clinging to our kayak that floated out of our garage. My husband went down to save him, leaving me beside myself on the roof as the water lapped just below the eaves. And my car was certainly not where I left it. I screamed for him; he confirmed he's alive.



I had been willing to wait longer for the Coast Guard, but my husband was clearly getting antsy.

The hum of the helicopters was constant, but they don't take pets. The reptiles can make it, I'm pretty sure, but the dogs? Not so much. So my husband waits on the roof to flag down one of the neighbors who have started their own rescues with their own boats. I was not prepared for him to find help so fast.

"We have to go now baby," he screams down to me, "get the dogs and hand me our bags! They're going to leave!"

But, I know my husband.

"I'm not going if you're not going," I said through angry, stubborn tears.

"I'm just going to hang back and get things in order; I'll be right behind you," he said.

I dug in.

"That is EXACTLY how people die in literally every movie you've ever seen. I am not getting on that boat without you," I said.

"OK fine but we have to go now," he said, "they're leaving now!"

It felt like the last possible way out in that minute. Of course, it wasn't, but that's what it felt like. I hadn't felt true panic before then, which is odd because the water level hadn't changed significantly in more than an hour, but I panicked. I shoved my dogs through the hole in the roof. I grabbed some of our things.

I left the bag we packed with our wallets and important papers, his breathing machine, my grandmother's earrings, because at a certain point, your brain stops working and everything in your body is telling you to just get out. I shimmied my way through our neat, newly-installed escape hatch and literally log-rolled down the roof (this is an impressive talent, probably).

The water was so high, I sat on the roof and stepped down to the rescue boat manned by two people in my neighborhood — one of them who had just moved there — who were suffering equal devastation, equal loss, equal stress, and this is what they were doing, going from house to house in the clothes on their backs, pulling people off rooftops, giving them peace of mind and ferrying them to safety.

"We can take you to the end of the neighborhood right at 45, but that's as far as we can go," one of them said. I might have been experiencing something like shock, I guess. I didn't even get his name.



And that's where our family found us: on the feeder of I-45, with two bags that didn't have anything in them that we needed, trying to calm two useless dogs, and helping other people with their things as the boat neighbors brought them to safety.

And I was still wearing my horrendous shorts — in which I've never felt more grateful.