‘We Need a Boat ASAP’

“We need a boat asap!!!” Kris had written on Facebook. “The helicopters are not picking up by us!!! Please anybody!!!”

Harvey had made landfall on the Central Texas coast late Friday. Now it was Monday, and the waters were still rising across Houston. On the Amofas’ street, the water was topping car windows and reaching the height of small children. And it was flowing inside the beige-brick home on the northeast side of town where Kris and her husband, Yaw Amofa, 47, had lived for less than a year.

The family thought they would be safe. Kris had a second floor. The federal government said the area was at “minimal hazard” for flooding. So they bought milk, eggs, loaves of bread, and hunkered down for the weekend, joined by Kris’s younger sister, Miesha Jolly, 36, and Miesha’s three children.

It had taken Kris and Yaw six years of work to buy the house. Six years of saving up, fixing their credit, attending personal-finance classes and debating whether they should invest so much money and risk into a single $180,000 purchase.

Yaw, an immigrant from Ghana, said it was their American dream. The family moved from southwest Houston to this new subdivision on the edge of the woods, a slice of suburbia so newly built that the family’s address did not yet show up on some online maps.

When they moved in, they hung a sign on the living-room wall: “Home — where life begins.”

Now, they needed a way out. Miesha’s husband was trying to return from his job on an offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. That left three adults and six children in the house — including Miesha’s 4-month-old daughter, her 2-year-old son, and Kris’s oldest son, Jason, 17, who has autism and walks with difficulty.

As the waters rose past car doors and seeped into the home, the family called 911, the Coast Guard, the Cajun Navy volunteers who were zipping around the city in bass boats and Jet Skis. The children waved white T-shirts out the window.

Nobody came. The children tried to stanch the water with towels and sweatshirts. Phones blared with tornado warnings. Then, the power went out. The water in the living room started crawling up the stairs toward the bedrooms.

At 9:14 p.m. Sunday, Kris posted on Facebook: “We’re gonna have to make a move cause the water is coming through the doors and under the base boards like a river!!”

Around noon the next day, they threw a few clothes and papers into backpacks. The family, who link hands for grace before meals and attend a Baptist church, tried to gather strength. “Jesus remove this fear from me to actually get on it,” Kris wrote to her 378 Facebook friends.

And then they set off through the flooded street. Kris’s younger son, Joshua, cried that he didn’t want to leave and clung to the driver’s side-view mirror of their new 2017 Nissan Pathfinder, now swamped with water.

They pried his hands away and waded down the driveway. The water was up to the children’s chests.

With one arm, Kris guided her older son, Jason. He loves water, and she had to make sure he didn’t stray into the currents bobbing with garbage and portable toilets unmoored from construction sites. With her other hand, Kris helped carry Miesha’s 2-year-old son, Trey, tucked into a plastic garbage can that was padded with backpacks.

They strapped Miesha’s 4-month-old daughter, Quinn, into her car seat, set it into a plastic bin and entrusted the baby to the two oldest girls: Kris’s 12-year-old daughter, Raechel, and Miesha’s 11-year-old, Lejla. The girls floated the baby up the street as she smiled at the rain spattering her face.

They took shelter in a still-vacant house up the block, but decided the water was rising too fast. They went on, and ended up at the home of a neighbor, who was cooking hot dogs and hamburgers for the makeshift evacuation shelter that was sprouting up in his home and garage.

After a few hours, a rickety boat pulled up, and everyone except Kris’s husband climbed aboard. They threaded through the flooded trees toward a Walmart parking lot where a co-worker of Miesha’s picked them up, fixed them rice and quesadillas and rolled out air mattresses for the night.

Miesha’s 11-year-old daughter, Lejla, dreamed about floodwaters swallowing her baby sister.