VALLEY SENDS HELP TO HOUSTON
City native in Texas holds out hope that home will be spared
WOONSOCKET – City native Kristen Nault Swartz has been living just outside Houston for almost a decade now, and she’s spent the past week waiting for the Brazos River to crest – with her fingers crossed.
“We’re not really going to know whether our house gets flooded or not until tomorrow,” Swartz said in a phone interview Thursday. “That’s the thing I’ve realized about flooding conditions. It’s bright and sunny outside but it gives you a false sense of security because for some people things are getting a lot better. For other people the insecurity is just starting. As the water recedes, all that water ends up in other places.”
Swartz is the daughter of Roger Nault, proprietor of the former Heritage Coffee Shoppe on Main Street and a former member of the Woonsocket School Committee. He now lives in Narragansett.
A research analyst in sociology at Rice University in Houston, Swartz and her husband, Richard Swartz, live in a subdivision in Missouri City, about a half-hour outside metro Houston – a city at the epicenter of what meteorologists are now calling the worst flooding on record. A lazy
Hurricane Harvey stalled out over the region after making landfall last week, dumping more than 50 inches of rain across the region in a few days.
With the toll still rising, there were nearly 40 floodrelated fatalities as of press time yesterday and estimates of the property losses are as fluid as the Brazos River – in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
When she looks out on the battered state of her own neighborhood, Swartz says a word comes to mind: surreal.
“You’re driving along and everything is fine and all of a sudden my husband and I see massive devastation,” she says. “A shopping center under five feet of water, cars submerged or homes where the only thing you can see is the roof. You know there’s a house there and you can’t even see it because all you can see is the roof.”
Swartz said her subdivision was under a voluntary evacuation order until Tuesday. Residents were told to clear out when a nearby lake started rising, with the water edging uncomfortably close to the subdivision.
She and her husband created makeshift sandbags out of bath towels and put them around the house and moved all their belongings upstairs. Then they got in their Subaru Forester and drove to a hotel about an hour away.
“Along with all this devastation the emergency personnel have been amazing, people are really helping each other,” she said. “We wouldn’t have been able to make it on our own. We asked for help from the locals to find out which roads we could use, which roads were passable.”
With the rain tapering off, the Swartzes decided not to stay away. They came home the following day – even though they knew the Brazos River was still at least a day away from reaching its highest point.
Roger Nault says he is keeping close tabs on his daughter’s situation.
“Everything was so fluid,” he said. “One minute you could speak to her and the next minute on the news something happened. My biggest fear was when they were told they had to leave their home. It was the exact same day a police officer died trying to get to work. That was my biggest fear, when they were on the road.”
Swartz says she doesn’t have to go far from home to see properties that have been wiped out by the flood.
“Just five minutes away,” she says, “but we’re dry for now.”
She hopes it stays that way. Follow Russ Olivo on Twitter @russolivo