Sam Speights’ desperate effort to stay alive
Sam Speights takes medication for extreme anxiety and panic attacks.
But there’s no pill for a hurricane — especially when he ventured into it at the height of its fury.
“You don’t see the flying debris until it’s right in front of you,” said Speights. “You can’t see it coming.”
Emergency officials co-ordinating triage in the coastal city of Rockport, where hurricane Harvey barrelled into Texas, said Sunday they considered it almost miraculous that the number of confirmed deaths from the storm in their area so far is only one person and two in the state of Texas.
Speights easily could have been a victim. His wife and 15-year-old son had fled along with nearly everyone else on his street, a line of trailer homes on a slight rise about five kilometres from the Gulf of Mexico.
He did not go and did not say why. Later, he decided to go.
But he was unable to get a relative or friend to come and pick him up or to find a ride out — he hunkered down with his six dogs, a husky and five rat terriers, in his three-bedroom lime green trailer.
The wiry 37-year-old with gold-capped teeth and deck-of-cards suits tattooed on his fingers made it through the storm’s first lashing Friday night.
His world exploded, after the calm of the storm’s eye passed, in the fury of swirling, sustained 200 km/h winds.
People who rode out Harvey in devastated Rockport, where emergency management spokesperson Bill Terry estimated Sunday it would be three to four weeks before essential services could be restored.
He described how their houses felt like they were breathing. Speights’s trailer was absolutely panting. First the tin canopy tore off over the living room. Then the ceiling peeled up in his son’s room.
“I was sitting on my couch and it bounced up and down twice. That’s when I decided it was time to get out.”
He put the rat terriers — Tex, Rocky, Buck, Angel and Itty Bitty — in a room and looked out toward the street. “I said, ‘Oh God, I’m going to die.’”
He grabbed his husky, Nanook, and headed outside. The drainage ditch roiled with water. The storm surge was close to two metres, and had nearly filled it.
“I almost drowned in that creek,” said Speights, whose only light was his cellphone’s flashlight. “I was worried about a big wave coming and dragging me out to sea.”
He could barely see. Something hit him in his right shoulder, he recalled, rubbing it as he stood next to his neighbour’s toppled mobile home, its steel base twisted.
Nearly every mobile home on the block was tossed, flattened or pierced and vacuumed by Harvey.
First Speights made for an open green corrugated steel vehicle shed and sheltered there until it started crumpling. Then he ran past another three houses to a concrete bunkerlike structure his landlord had heavily reinforced with rebar. It was locked. Next to it stood his landlord’s pickup. “I grabbed the door handle,” he said. “Thank God it was unlocked.”
“I got in there, locked all the doors, pushed down the emergency brake and rode it out until about 4:30 (in the morning).”