The entrance road into the Concord Bridge housing development, northwest of Houston, is mildly sloped: the farther in you go, the deeper the water gets. This is because the neighborhood is situated in the Addicks Reservoir, which was built after the Second World War to divert floodwaters away from Houston. It hasn’t rained here since Monday, but the twenty trillion gallons that fell during Hurricane Harvey have left many neighborhoods in Houston’s periphery under several feet of water. In some parts, the water is still rising. Tens of thousands of people have been rescued and displaced, but many others have refused to leave their homes. On one porch near Addicks, an orange sign read, “Armed! Looters / Tress-passers Will Be Shot!”
Last night, in Concord Bridge, a hunched-over man in brown fishing waders emerged from the dark, moving slowly toward the street lamp at the Bridgewalk Lane intersection. A paddleboard rested on the grass, but the water was threatening a row of pleasant suburban homes. When the man was about twenty steps from safety, he paused, and looked around, as if he was lost. I asked if he needed help. He looked up and said nothing, but he started moving toward my voice. When he reached the curb, he looked as if he was going to collapse. I grabbed his shoulders and led him to the sidewalk, where he started sobbing. A middle-aged woman was waiting for him.
“Bryan. Bryan!” she said. Her voice was shaking. “Who sent away the ambulance?”
“You know, I told them he doesn’t need an ambulance,” Bryan said.
“He does need an ambulance! He’s in a diabetic situation,” she said.
“It doesn’t seem like it.”
“He is! He’s gonna die!”
“I know, I tried to tell him!” Bryan said. “He just won’t leave.”
The woman, whose name was Sam, had come to extract her brother, an elderly diabetic named David. “He hasn’t eaten right since the flood,” she told me. “He’s been stuck in his house, in eight inches of water. He’s not in his right mind. He’s just a hardheaded bull!”
Bryan is David’s son. He lives in a different part of town, but he has spent the past four days coming to Concord Bridge and wading through neck-deep water to get to his father’s house, several blocks past the flood line. “I been swimming my whole life,” Bryan said. “But walking through water like that? Uhhhhhhh.”
Once the water is above your waist, you lose all leverage; even a short distance in deep flooding can lead to total exhaustion. The water is dirty and opaque, so each step requires concentration, to make sure that you have sure footing and aren’t stepping in, say, a sewage drain that’s missing its manhole cover. Waders may keep you dry, but if water gets inside, the suit becomes incredibly heavy, and if there’s a current, it can pull you down. There are also the issues of downed power lines, of chemical spills, of swimming snakes, of floating colonies of fire ants.
Bryan was in a bad state. Yesterday he made four trips to his father’s house, and failed each time to persuade David to leave home. Bryan hadn’t eaten or had anything to drink. When I asked how old he was, he paused for several seconds. “I had to think,” he said. “Thought I was eighteen.” He is twenty-five.
Bryan was unable to stand. He complained of severe stomach pains, and then started to faint. His aunt Sam wanted to call an ambulance but fumbled with her phone. “How do you do 911?” she screamed. Adding to her agitation was the fact that a fireman had told her, incorrectly, that the water in Concord Bridge was expected to rise another three feet overnight.
While Bryan slumped on the sidewalk, a small paddleboat moved toward the intersection. One of the passengers was David, a heavyset man with a white beard and a bandage on his forearm. He passed me his luggage, climbed out of the boat with a splash, and walked over to Sam. “You happy?” he said.
“Yeah,” she said. “I had an ambulance here for you. You need medical help.”
“What?”
“Your blood sugar’s so screwed up, David! You’re going to go in a coma.”
“Boy,” he replied. “I don’t have any control over anything.”
