A UNCW professor’s eyewitness account: The rains of Hurricane Harvey

September 2, 2017

Monday night three families and a dog sit together in a home in Houston. The rain has not stopped since it began on Friday, and two of the families are unsure if they will have a home to return to when their hosts’ hospitality can no longer sustain them.

When the rain from Hurricane Harvey began on Friday, the people of Houston weren’t expecting much. One resident–a professor who has taught at two local universities, as well as teaching online religion courses for UNC Wilmington–remembers laughing about the seemingly overdramatic coverage of the storm Saturday night. It wasn’t until she woke at 4 a.m. to the sound of pouring rain that Sravana Borkataky-Varma began to grasp what was to come.

Sravana Borkataky-Varma
A view from the front porch of the Borkataky-Varma home Monday provided by the family

“It was still looking like nothing much,” said Borkataky-Varma in a quiet voice, remembering Saturday night. Early Sunday morning, everything changed in what seemed like a moment. Water was falling in record-breaking amounts.

“I’ve never seen water like this in my life,” Borkataky-Varma said in a phone interview, telling how floodwater rose to over three feet by her house. She was in Texas when Hurricane Ike hit in September 2008, and before that she was in the Tsunami which struck the Andaman Islands of India in 2004. Nothing she had seen before compared to the rains from Harvey, however, as the largest rainstorm in the history of the United States pummeled the nation’s fourth largest city.

Six hours later, at 10 a.m. there was a slight break in the rain and the Borkataky-Varma family moved quickly to walk their dog, and quickly gather supplies to move upstairs where they knew the water wouldn’t reach.  “We packed a backpack with all our essentials, all our important papers,” Borkataky-Varma said. They gathered whatever they couldn’t stand to lose, as well as food for the dog, and went up to the second floor.

As the day went on the water continued to rise, and for Borkataky-Varma the situation became harder to believe. Sometime close to 5 p.m. a man who she believed to be a police officer was seen riding down the street on a jetski, with rescued citizens clinging to his back as if riding down the street on a motorcycle. Borkataky-Varma laughed when calling the image to mind. “It was quite a sight. You would never think of a jetski going down your backyard,” she said with dry amusement in her voice.

Sravana Borkataky-Varma
A jetski being piloted down the streets of Houston Monday

But jetskis were far from the end as only about an hour later she would stand on her front porch and watch as a convoy of military grade tactical vehicles, likely belonging to the national guard, moved slowly down her residential street, which now resembled a small canal.

“It was surreal. I’ve only seen that on a tv screen,” Borkataky-Varma said over the phone as she described the line of deep green and khaki colored semiaquatic vehicles carefully moving down her street and leaving small surges in their wake.

Sravana Borkataky-Varma
Armored vehicles moving down the streets of Houston on their way to aid civilians caught in the storm.

What sticks in her mind most however, is not the armored exteriors of the vehicles or the fact that her front yard now looked like a waterlogged warzone, it’s the faces of the storm-beaten, storm-made refugees who lined the back of the open-top truck, sitting dazed in their drenched t-shirts and shorts.  

“Those people, the look on their faces–I don’t think I can ever forget that. They had that combination of ‘thank God I’m safe,’ and shock,” she said. She later mentioned that she has a tendency to watch people’s eyes at times like this. “There is a sense of shock in people’s eyes…people’s eyes look very dazed. Like they cannot believe this has happened.”

Sravana Borkataky-Varma
People having been rescued are carried to a shelter.

Throughout the storm, Borkataky-Varma has been impressed by the public efforts to help those in need. “Lots and lots of churches have been opening their doors,” she said going on to discuss the efforts of civilians to rescue people using their own boats.  “It’s a very religious city. Very cosmopolitan, very diverse.” She became somewhat emotional describing her pride in her city and the compassion being shown in this time of great fear.

Still, she worries for those who were hit worse than she was.

“A lot more people will have a lot more damage,” she said, going on to discuss Texas House Bill 1774 which will affect insurance claims and potentially remove a great deal of power from the homeowner in the process of making claims. Borkataky-Varma rushed to make insurance claims before the bill went into effect on Sept. 1, but she realizes many will not have the same opportunity.

On Monday, the extensive flooding of the nearby Brazos River led to a call for those nearest to evacuate. The river was slowly inching upward and threatening to engulf several homes. Borkataky-Varma knew some people from the area, and her family agreed to take them in. They had decided not to evacuate themselves so long as the home seemed safe. “We need to leave all the resources including space in the the streets to people who need it worse…We have decided we are not using any resources that could be used by someone who needs more than we do,” she said.

“If it was just the three of us we could have easily lasted two weeks,” she said speaking of Indian food being easy to keep for days and how they could last on only lentils if need be. With three families however, those equations shifted. It was no longer only her husband and daughter she had to think about. Even with the additional people, she expected to last three or four days. The families sat that first night after having come together around 6 p.m. and ate chicken curry with rice that Borkataky-Varma prepared, before splitting up into the house’s bedrooms to try and sleep.

Wednesday, though the rain had still not broken, the waters began to rescind and eventually, the families were able to return to their homes. At this point a curfew had been issued and penalties were set in place for looters.

By Friday Borkataky-Varma was out volunteering at the NRG Center, which had been established as a shelter for the displaced and homeless. What she saw there she would later call “very upsetting.”

“The plight of people there is at a whole different level,” she said in a text the next day. “I was overwhelmed by the number of cots laid out,” she said telling how the stadium was sectioned off, all single men and women separated and families in another section. “Homeless people, very poor people. I realized that for many the shelter is better than what they ever had.” She seemed weary as she now stood one full week from the moment the rains had first begun, painfully aware that though the sun had emerged, this crisis was far from over.

At one point in interview, Borkataky-Varma recalled being a little girl in India during a major cyclone.  “We were in a two-bedroom apartment because my father was in the armed services,” she said remembering being trapped throughout the destruction which overtook Odisha. “I distinctly remember stepping out after all this was over,” she said calling up memories of felled power lines and “total destruction.” That moment sometimes still comes back to her when she hears the sound of a violent storm.

And much like the cyclone in Odisha, more than the initial disaster, the recovery is what will scar Houston. In a speech Monday, Texas Governor Greg Abbott said that the effects of Harvey would be long-lasting, creating a “new normal” for the region. For the Borkataky-Varma family and others in the region, the story of Hurricane Harvey has only just begun.

 

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