“We survived Harvey,” Ms. Hryhorchuk said. This, she said, was not Harvey.

Deweyville, a town of about 1,000, sits down the Sabine River from the Toledo Bend reservoir. One of the largest artificial bodies of water in the country, the site of lake houses and great bass fishing, the reservoir is held back by a power-generating dam. The floodgates at the reservoir are controlled by the Sabine River Authority. Under a protocol set by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the authority opens gates to a certain extent when the reservoir level reaches a predetermined level, sending the excess water down the Sabine.

That is what happened after torrential rains in 2016, and towns and communities along the river in Louisiana and Texas were inundated. More than 450 people joined a lawsuit against the authority, charging that the opening of the floodgates had been catastrophically mishandled — that the reservoir levels had been allowed to stay too high until it was too late. “Homes and businesses and churches were flooded, property was destroyed, burial vaults were disinterred and scattered, and animals and livestock were killed, in the name of” the Sabine River Authority, read the suit, which is continuing.

The town rebuilt. Then this year, the heavy rains came again with Harvey. The level in the reservoir rose, again, and the floodgates were opened. Deweyville had been soaked by Harvey’s rains like so many other little East Texas towns walloped by the hurricane, but the storm had already moved to the northeast before the worst of the flooding came to Deweyville. The water had taken a few days to make it downriver.

“I know we survived Harvey,” said Teddie Berry, 27, smoking Marlboros in a folding chair outside the camper where he is now living with his father. “Our damage is not from Harvey.”

But this was all Harvey, insisted Ann Galassi, the assistant general manager of the river authority. The repeated destruction may seem unnatural, but Harvey, and the rains last year, she said, had brought the sort of challenge that the authority had never seen before.

The rainfall last year set records for the reservoir’s 48-year existence. Then this year, after Harvey had passed through, there was so much water in the river, in the bayous and in Sabine Lake — into which both the Sabine and Neches Rivers flow — that “there was just nowhere for the water to go.” Ms. Galassi said that the presence of the floodgates, with the controlled release of water, actually held back what could have been a far more destructive torrent.

“Deweyville would have been in worse trouble without the dam than with it,” she said.

Still, she acknowledged the anger. “It is very emotional, and we understand that,” she said, pointing out that some people who work for the authority were dealing with flooded houses themselves.

Paul Price, the county judge here in Newton County, said the calamities of Deweyville were the result of a combination of factors, including the operation of the floodgates and some raised railroad tracks that run through town and keep floodwater from draining. But he agreed with Ms. Galassi that one of the factors was just abnormally bad weather.

“We’re getting more rain here in recent years as weather patterns change,” he said. It is a curse for a poor and rural county that has enough problems keeping people as it is. There are some already saying that rebuilding in Deweyville is out of the question. It’s just too tiring to endure over and over again.

But for a county that sits a little inland from the shore, Judge Price said, changes in the climate could cut both ways.