Pray for Houston

Most people have spent the weekend trying to get out of Houston. I’ve spent mine trying to go there.

In addition to being a contributor to the Resurgent, I’m also a professional pilot based at Houston’s Hobby airport. My flight schedule had me taking a trip out of Houston and all the way to Alaska on Thursday. I intended to return quickly.

We were watching Harvey, then a tropical storm, as I left. We stocked up on food, water and gasoline before I went to work and left my wife and children at our home in a small town northeast of Houston. We considered evacuating them, but they decided to stay home since the storm was forecast to hit in the Corpus Christi area, hundreds of miles away.

As it turned out, Harvey did not hit Houston directly, but the “dirty side” of the storm certainly did. For most of Saturday and Sunday, the storm’s bands hovered over Houston, barely moving, but dropping torrential rains. By Sunday night, my wife reported that our town had received 20.6 inches of rain. Forecasts indicate the possibility of another 20 inches to come over the next few days. Category 1 Harvey had turned into a monster.

Of course, my flight home was canceled. Over 24 hours of travel, the closest I could get to Houston and home was Dallas, where I sit in a hotel room writing this. Both of Houston’s primary airports are closed, as are most roads in the area.

My family is unable to evacuate at this point. We live on a county road and both ends are currently flooded. We are lucky in that our house is high and dry. Others are not so fortunate.

In the three years that I have lived in Texas, we have seen floods every year, but nothing like this. Texas storms are unlike those that I have seen anywhere else. It is not uncommon for a large storm system moving inland from the Gulf of Mexico to dump four to five inches of rain on our house within a matter of hours. Harvey dwarfs even these storms.

If there is a precedent for a hurricane to move ashore and simply sit over a city for days on end, I don’t know of it. A more normal storm would move inland and, cut off from the warm water that energizes it, slowly die. Harvey doesn’t seem to want to die.

Miracle of miracles, electric power and cell phone coverage seem to be intact in most areas. I have maintained contact with my family and checked on friends who are scattered around Houston’s immense metropolitan area. Social media has shown its value as people post road closings and reach out to bolster each other’s morale as the water rises. Some have been evacuated, most are sheltering in place. There is little choice but to shelter in place at this point unless you have access to a boat or a helicopter.

Houston is a flat area. Flooding is common even from much smaller storms than Harvey. There is simply nowhere for such large amounts of water to go. The situation will get worse. Water is being released from over-full reservoirs that will further swell the Houston-area rivers. The San Jacinto, the Trinity, the Brazos, the Colorado will all be swollen for weeks.

The indomitable Texas spirit shines through as Houston-area residents pull together to help one another. But, as independent as Texans are, the Lone Star State cannot cope with this disaster alone. Texas will need help to recover from Harvey.

With the area currently inaccessible, what Texas really needs right now is prayer. Thousands of people are stranded and in danger from the rising waters. Many more have lost their homes and possessions. Jobs are being lost as businesses flood. Rescue forces can’t reach everyone, but prayer can.

And still the rain continues. If the forecasts are right, it won’t stop for days.

Many in Texas are realizing what is really important. If you can escape the flood waters with your life and your family, you are blessed. Material things can be replaced. Lost lives cannot.

At times like this, we realize how fragile modern life can be. One day things are normal, the next can be a fight for survival. Man does not control his own destiny, no matter how we might pretend that we do. The forces of nature are far beyond our control. This is as true in modern America as it is anywhere else.

What we can be certain of is that God is control. The God who created the seas and walked on water can also calm the storm and make the floods recede.

Pray for my wife and children. Pray for Houston. Pray for Texas. Pray for America.

How Churches and Individuals Saved The Day During Hurricane Harvey

I had always assumed that FEMA was the primary source of aid for victims of natural disasters such as hurricanes. If my experience in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey is any indication, I was wrong.

After I returned home in the middle of the storm, we were isolated by flooded roads for a couple of days. Once we could leave our neighborhood, we made our way to our church, which was serving as a shelter for storm victims, to offer our help. After another day or so, with several storm victims leaving to go home, the evacuees housed by my church were moved to another church down the road that was an official FEMA center for relief supplies. My family and I spent much of the week following Harvey’s departure volunteering at this FEMA center a few miles from my house.

What we saw changed the way that I viewed relief efforts for natural disasters. It was not the government that offered the most assistance to those in need. It was private volunteers, both local and from around the country, and private donations of supplies that kept the center in business.

The center was staffed entirely by volunteers. There were people who drove or flew in from Oklahoma, Arizona, Kentucky, Iowa, Missouri and California to offer their assistance. These people took time off from work and paid their own way. The only medical professional at the center was a registered nurse from Arizona who paid her own air fare to come and help.

In the first days, the center was staffed mostly by local volunteers. After a few days, we started to see more Red Cross volunteers and help from the outside. Red Cross would bring shipments of prepared meals, cleanup kits for houses and comfort kits for those in need. In the days that I worked there, I never saw a single FEMA representative.

Most helpful were the churches and their members. Local individuals would bring in food, clothing and other donations. Churches from out of state would rent trucks and trailers and fill them to the ceiling with pallets of water, food, clothes, school supplies, toilet paper, tarps, diapers, pet food and cleaning items such as buckets, bleach and mops.

One truck contained several large boxes (about three feet long by two feet wide and two feet high) that were filled to the top with individual candy bars and chewing gum. As a note to potential donors, while this was appreciated, chocolate candy bars are not the most practical emergency ration for Houston in August where temperatures are normally in the high 90s. This advice also applies to Florida.

We would frequently see large military helicopters such as CH-47 Chinooks and UH-60 Blackhawks flying overhead. The center director told us that the government was flying supplies into Houston and then they were distributed out from the city. We received some supplies from FEMA, in particular several boxes of tarps, but the vast majority of relief items came from the charity of local individuals and churches from around the country.

When the center needed items such as diapers and baby formula, it was concerned citizens who brought them. When we gave out so much food that we almost ran out, it was churches who trucked in enough to allow us to restock.

Through the entire ordeal, I was amazed at how responsive people from around the country were to the specific needs of our little FEMA shelter in small town Texas. We put out requests for specific supplies on social media and the next day they arrived.

FEMA requires shelters to have round-the-clock security, but this was also left to volunteers. After some items were stolen, we heightened security at the center. Volunteers, most of whom also worked all day at the shelter or full-time jobs, took guard duty shifts at night. After the initial thefts, guards armed themselves with personal weapons and radios. In the wee hours of one night, a guard discovered a break-in. The perpetrator fled into the darkness when the guard chambered a round in his shotgun.

As volunteers had to return to their normal lives, the center director requested assistance from the national guard in protecting the center’s residents and supplies. As of this writing, two weeks after Harvey, security is still in the hands of volunteers.

Granted, a natural disaster the size of Hurricane Harvey taxed the ability of FEMA to deliver aid. The storm ravaged hundreds of miles of Texas coastline and caused flooding all over Houston, the fourth largest city in the country, before moving on to Beaumont and Louisiana and wreaking havoc there as well. Our area, a small town on the northeast side of Houston, was far from being the area hardest hit by the storm, but there were still many people who had lost everything.

If it was up to the federal government or NGOs like the Red Cross to offer aid, our town would probably still be waiting for help. The destruction simply covered too much ground and affected too many people for even the federal government to effectively render aid to everyone.

In some cases, people were even afraid to be helped by the government. Wes, a volunteer who came from California by himself to help, told of finding a family of illegal immigrants in an area where the water was estimated to have been 25-30 feet deep. They had gone for days without food or fresh water and were afraid to approach government aid workers for help. Without Wes’s compassion, they might have died after surviving the storm.

When massive need for help overwhelmed the system during Harvey, it was the American citizen who stepped up to help. It struck me that this is the way it should be. If Americans, particularly Christians,  offered more charity to each other on a regular basis, there would be no need for the entitlement state.

We can rise to the occasion during an emergency. It’s a pity that we can’t do so every day. 

Originally published on The Resurgent