Deconstructing the Harvey Experience
I’ll start with a few statistics. Over the course of six days from August 24th to the 30th, Hurricane Harvey dumped an estimated 27 trillion gallons of water onto the area from the tip of Texas to Louisiana. As observed by Vox, that’s approximately 1 million gallons of water for every inhabitant of the state of Texas. Data collected by the Nevada Geodetic Laboratory shows that the weight of all this water was enough to push the earth’s crust down by two full centimeters in Houston. The LA Times reports that some areas of Houston had over 50 inches of rain, and over 30,000 people were estimated to be displaced and in temporary shelters. We still don’t know how many lives were lost, homes damaged, or how much the reconstruction will cost. But none of those numbers mean much of anything to me on paper.
My first week of school was different this year. Instead of buying books, seeing friends, and trying to find a routine, I sat in bed hunched over my laptop for hours, glued to local news, calling family friends, and trying to anticipate what disaster would strike next. I poured over elevation maps, trying to make some sort of bargain with the universe about how high the water was allowed to reach with each band of rain. I would follow the height of the bayou and reservoirs near my house, until the water level overtook the sensors. I felt like with the amount of information I had at my fingertips, I should be able to confine the storm to a number, a concrete prediction. But the universe would not be reasoned with, and every hour I was forced to keep negotiating back as places I cared about were swallowed.
If you were a resident of Texas, where would you put your 1 million gallons of water? Mine, along with many others, probably ended up in the Addicks and Barker Reservoirs, behind my house. Even as Harvey was winding down, they were still edging towards their limits, so the Army Corps of Engineers began controlled releases into the bayous and gutters which moved into the roads and filled the streets. So even after the rain had stopped, the situation had not gotten any better. I watched water rush into the homes and businesses of several friends days after we thought we were safe. We knew the alternative may have been worse. But that’s hard to rationalize when it’s your home that fills up instead.
[pullquote]If you were a resident of Texas, where would you put your 1 million gallons of water?[/pullquote]
Water is a peculiar form of home invader, because there is no way to win. You can’t fight it, push it back, or reason with it. There is no way to humanize yourself to an encroaching flood, it doesn’t care who you are or what you’ve done. It inexorably swallows whatever is in its path as it creeps, leaving behind months worth of mold, debris, and seething mounds of fire ants. The water acts as a mill, an equalizer, taking everything with meaning and turning it back to dirt. The floods do not discriminate, but they always manage to hit those who are most vulnerable to its effects the hardest anyways.
As glad as I was to have been out of Houston when Harvey hit, my only wish was to be there, at home. I felt like if I was on the ground, there would be something that I could do to help, some comfort I could give. The wet grip that Harvey had over my city had settled into my chest, and it seemed wrong to look for a distraction just because I wasn’t at home, dealing with this mess like everyone else. Instead I was here, in St. Louis, trying to sit through an hour’s worth of lecture without checking the weather. Every time my phone buzzed my stomach would drop, because I knew it could be someone else I knew telling me they were now homeless, their neighborhood was under water, they had lost everything.
Weighed down by an odd form of survivor’s guilt, back at school it was odd to watch people going about their normal lives. When I would talk to friends about the destruction at home, the most common refrain that I would get was “wow, I can’t even imagine”. And I would laugh, because a week ago I couldn’t either. When you grow up on the Gulf Coast, hurricane coverage is something that usually fades quickly into background noise by midsummer. Every year, we Houston natives make our hurricane boxes and distantly watch the pixelated green and yellow blobs on the weather map spiral off towards Mexico or the Atlantic Ocean. But then something like Harvey hits. Andrew, Allison, Katrina, Ike, Sandy, Irma, now Jose and Maria. Because of these storms, I now know the aerial view of my neighborhood better flooded than as before, because of the number of times I’ve seen it this week on national news. The standard shock of seeing the flooding and destruction on the internet is transformed by an almost numb jolt of recognition when you realize the photo is of a favorite bakery taken two blocks away from where you live.
[pullquote]Because of these storms, I now know the aerial view of my neighborhood better flooded than as before, because of the number of times I’ve seen it this week on national news.[/pullquote]
To truly understand the impact of Harvey though, you need to understand Houston. And I don’t think many people in America did until the mangled sights of our day-to-day were thrust into the spotlight as we were put through nature’s spin cycle. By the numbers, Houston, my hometown, is the fourth largest city in the United States with a population of 2.3 million, and a metropolitan area made up of over 6 million people. We’re a pretty flat city, but we have a larger footprint than some US states. We are global leaders in energy and medicine, and according to Houston’s government website, we were an “independent nation, Houston would rank as the world’s 30th largest economy”. We speak more than 90 languages, our food is excellent, and we are a home to anyone that needs one, from immigrants, to the tens of thousands of Hurricane Katrina refugees who found a new home with us. We are a city of new beginnings and survivors. Anyone who knows me knows how viciously proud and protective I am of my city. And I have never been more proud of us than in the past few weeks.
As a child, I watched the destruction of Katrina from afar. And from the survivors, I know that my shell-shocked response to this disaster is a privileged one. Even before the rain stopped, caravans of full of heavily equipped strangers were on the way into the city trailing rescue boats, and stretching for miles down what are now impassable roads. So many people have opened their hearts and their homes to our community. I feel so proud to know so many people I would now consider heroes, and others who have been so strong in the face of absolute adversity.
But while Houston was healing, and starting to pull things together, it seemed like the rest of the country was looking for someone to blame. On the left and right, it appeared everyone wanted a head to roll, something to be responsible for the swirling mass of wind and rain that interrupted their regularly scheduled news hour and caused the devastation the country couldn’t look away from. But in reality, Houston became a very public canvas for certain factions seeking to spin our narrative to their advantage. Reactions ranged from ignorant to absurd across the political spectrum.
Factions of the left decided that Harvey and Irma were expressions of nature’s own wrath upon the Trump-loving regions of Texas and Florida, conveniently ignoring the fact that both Miami and Houston are historically left leaning cities. Factions of the right, when faced with criticism of Trump’s performance following Harvey chose Obama as a point of comparison, vehemently condemning his unpresidential reaction to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Where was President Obama during Katrina? Probably golfing, decided Twitter, in stunning ignorance of both basic subtraction, and the length of presidential terms. A newly elected senator of the same name however, was in Houston helping resettle refugees.
And of course everyone had something to say about climate change. My favorite reaction probably came by the way of Ann Coulter in a late night tweet: “I don’t believe Hurricane Harvey is God’s punishment for Houston electing a lesbian mayor. But that is more credible than ‘climate change.’” Former mayor Annise Parker responded in the only appropriate way, confirming via Twitter a few days later that she could, in fact, control the weather.
In all cases, the narratives hurt. These were the things we saw online, the questions my friends and family had to field as we tried to escape from the reality of reconstruction. And something similar is happening in Puerto Rico now. All the focus on defining and respecting the flag, and what it means to be an American in the contiguous United States has led us to ignore the Americans right outside our door.
The story that I have told is one of destruction. The story I hope to tell soon is one of reconstruction. Resilience and new beginnings are a key part of Houston’s story, and as I mourn for my community and everyone touched by Harvey, and now Irma and the other storms ripping through the gulf, I know that we will persevere. So many people chose Houston as a place to start their lives over, and I know that they will do so again. It’s hard to accept that we will have to find a new normal from now on, and that my city will not be the same when I return. However, the stories that I have heard from my family and friends, of people of all walks of life coming together to support each other and help their city heal give me hope. But part of me worries that the rest of America will get worn out. As the ink on the sopping maps of Texas, Florida, the Caribbean and now Puerto Rico bleeds together, it’s easy to forget those for whom these disasters will define the next several years of their lives. We still need your help, but we are not here to support your narrative, or to be another prophetic bullet point in anyone’s agenda. The road to recovery will be long, hard, and in some places, probably still underwater for the next couple weeks. We can’t do it alone.
Madi Bangs ‘19 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at m.bangs@wustl.edu.