As Hurricane Harvey approached Texas, Judy Levison, a sixty-seven-year-old physician and professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Baylor College of Medicine, got ready for a long weekend of work. If a disaster was declared on Friday, she was going to be one of two alternating faculty at Ben Taub Hospital, helping deliver any babies born there during the storm. Her department didn’t declare a disaster until Saturday, though, so she was sent home, and another doctor took her place. “I even, last night, went out with some friends and ate dinner outdoors, around seven o’clock,” she told me early on Sunday. At the time, she said, “there were just a few puddles. We thought, did they over-call it?”
Houston is now experiencing catastrophic floods, and the rain is expected to continue in the days ahead. Levison, who lives in the city of Bellaire, part of the Houston metropolitan area, moved to Texas, from Seattle, in 2000. In 2001, she lost a vehicle to Tropical Storm Allison, which was, she said, “quite a wake-up call about flooding. I’d never understood how people could drive into deep water and get swept away, until then. You can’t tell how deep it is when you’re looking at it from outside.” More than twenty people were killed by Tropical Storm Allison, and there was five billion dollars’ worth of damage done to southeast Texas. The medical center where she worked back then was devastated. Animals were lost. People hurt. “That was terrible, but everyone is saying this is worse,” she told me. Today, the National Weather Service tweeted, “This event is unprecedented & all impacts are unknown & beyond anything experienced.”
Sunday morning, as Levison joined more than two dozen of her neighbors in a home on higher ground, and wondered about where one of her two pet cats had gone, we talked by phone about the flood. After we spoke, there were reports that Ben Taub Hospital was being evacuated. She checked in with a colleague who told her that they weren’t evacuating just yet—“they are figuring out the plan.” Levison’s account below, from this morning, has been edited and condensed.
“Throughout the night, I could hear the thunder and lightning. Whenever I got up, it didn’t look too bad. I’ve had water in my backyard before. This morning, at six-thirty or seven, a friend of mine called and said, ‘The water is lapping at my door.’ The next thing she texted was, ‘We’ve evacuated to a neighbor’s.’ Half an hour later, I walked into my garage and it was filling up. I walked into my study, a little lower than the rest of the house—I’ve never had water in there before—and it was starting to come in. You realize what’s important: photo albums are the only thing I really care about. So I lifted things into closets as high as I could.
“Just as I was doing that, a neighbor from across the street came knocking, around eight-thirty, saying, ‘Please come to our house, because we know that most of these houses are flooding.’ And I thought, You know, that’s probably a good idea. I put everything I needed in a backpack and put one of my cats—the one I could find—in a carrier. I also grabbed some food from my refrigerator to share. Three rooms were filling up with water.
“I rent the house I’ve lived in, which is on a street that’s quite common in parts of Houston: there are a lot of one-story, sort of nineteen-fifties-bungalow-types. And then we have these much larger, higher McMansions. And one of the families in the larger, newer homes, built a little higher, is who has taken us in. I didn’t know them at all before. We’d never met.
“Well, we are now nineteen adults and nine children, who have all been taken in by this lovely family in this five-bedroom, two-story house. I’m standing out on their stone front porch right now, looking at my house. My neighbor’s Toyota Corolla is covered up to its wheels. The street is a river. It’s greenish-clear, medium-flow. There are a few steps and a ramp leading down to the street. The water is lapping the bottom of the steps. The front lawn is underwater. And this house is about three feet higher than my house. None of these houses flooded in 2001.
“Some of the men have been going down the street, checking on neighbors. It’s hip-high for them.”
“I just realized, it’s kind of like the stages of grief: first there’s the shock and awe, and the disbelief. And then, now, suddenly everybody is getting a little bit quieter, trying to figure out what our next steps will be. Some of it has to do with dealing with belongings and homes and things like that. But the other is: So, where are we going to lay our heads? Certainly, hotels will be full. Just choosing which friend are you going to ask—which ones live higher and won’t have damage.
“I just heard a twenty-year-old on the phone here saying, ‘I’m still in denial. I can’t quite figure out the impact of this.’
“I’m safe. I hope my missing cat is in a tree somewhere. All the people on the street seem to be safe. They even evacuated a woman down the street, who is an amputee. The men carried her in her wheelchair through the water—which is about waist-deep—to this house.
“I just talked to a colleague at the hospital. The staff that’s there will stay until further notice and take turns sleeping and working. The emergency department in the hospital remains open, though water surrounds the hospital. It’s an island. The last laboring woman delivered at five this morning. No one is currently in labor, but the postpartum beds are full.
“All my faculty people from Baylor’s O.B.G.Y.N. program have been checking with one another. One by one, people are saying, ‘My house is okay but I can’t leave.’ Others say, ‘Water is coming in the house, we’re on the second floor.’ The stories are circulating.
“My kids, in Denver, have been sending me photos of beautiful sunsets there. My ex-husband is here in Houston, and he told me to feel free to come over. But he must have realized there’s no way I could get there.
“One of my other neighbors just came over and said, ‘Our hostess has saved our lives.’ And our hostess is giving the credit to her husband. She says, ‘I just made the tea.’ Well, she makes great tea. This is our first block party, people are saying. That part of it is lovely. But it’s scary, too. Once it stops raining, we’ll go back to our houses and try to figure out what we’re going to do, where we’re going to sleep. I brought a sleeping sheet with me here, just in case.”
