Harvey leaves small town in shambles

Evacuees warned to stay away from Rockport

ROCKPORT, Texas, Aug 27, (Agencies): Robert Zbranek ignored warnings to evacuate this coastal town of about 10,000, determined to ride out then-Hurricane Harvey on his 38-foot cruiser, one of three boats he had moored at a local marina.

But after taking a battering as 130 mph winds roared ashore— and watching a sailboat he’d been living on sink in the storm — Zbranek abandoned the cruiser and jumped into his car, parked on the dock, during a brief calm as the storm’s eye passed over.

“Everything I owned,” was in the half-submerged sailboat, Zbranek said Saturday afternoon, motioning toward it with a beer. He said he didn’t realize Harvey, which came ashore near Rockport, Texas, as a powerful Category 4 storm, would be so powerful, despite a mandatory evacuation notice and warnings that the storm could be life-threatening.

“I’ve never seen anything like it and I’ll never see anything like it for the rest of my life,” Zbranek said. “It was a real eye-opener.”

Rockport, the Aransas County seat where Harvey came ashore, was a mangled ghost town on Saturday.

The streets were a mess of precariously leaning and toppled power poles and dangling and fallen power lines. Roofs were ripped off homes, some of which were impaled by trees. A trailer lay on its side, blocking much of one major intersection. Wood ripped from houses was strewn along Route 35 on the town’s exposed southern end.

Harvey’s relentless winds also tore the metal sides off the city’s high school gym and twisted the steel door frame of its auditorium. The windows of some police vehicles had been blown out.

And pieces of 100-year-old oak trees torn from their roots impeded emergency vehicles, as crews arrived from neighboring communities to begin searching for victims and cleaning up.

In Arkansas County, where Rockport is located, one person died after being trapped inside a home that caught fire, Aransas County Judge C.H. “Burt” Mills, Jr. said. He said another 12 to 14 people were injured.

In related news, for residents of Rockport who heeded warnings and evacuated the Texas beach town ahead of Hurricane Harvey, local officials had a simple message on Saturday — stay far away.

“Please do not come back, there’s nothing for you here,” said County Judge C.H. Burt Mills at an impromptu briefing hours after the Category 4 storm devastated the state’s Gulf coast, killing at least one person in Rockport, 30 miles north of Corpus Christi.

Rockport, home to about 9,000 residents, looked like a war zone on Saturday afternoon. Winds of up to 130 mph (209 kph) had sheared dozens of houses in half, peeled the roofs of hundreds more and blown out thousands of windows.

“Quite a few people decided to stay here, and that was a big mistake,” said Mills, who presides over a court in Aransas County, which includes Rockport.

One of them was Frank Cook, a 56-year-old contractor, who said “all hell broke loose” when the storm arrived.

“If you have something left of your house, you’re lucky,” he said while driving around town in his pickup truck to inspect the wreckage.

Eloy Lawrence, 49, who was walking on Market Street on Saturday afternoon with a cooler, was one of the lucky ones.

After weathering the storm overnight in a friend’s RV, Lawrence was checking on his mother’s house nearby, which he helped his father build 36 years ago.

“Oh Lord Jesus, please let it be OK,” he said as he came up the street. “It’s standing!” he said with relief when the house came into view.