For some overwhelmed by flood, ‘there’s nowhere you can go’

Let me put on some clothes, Margaret Conerly said to herself in Sunday’s wee hours, after stepping out of bed into an inch of water.

“Lord, I can’t swim,” she thought as the water came up. “If it rises any higher, Lord, you know I can’t swim.”

Conerly, 66, dialed the 211 help line, but all she got was a recording prompting her to register. So, she tried 911 around 1:30 a.m., and the phone just rang and rang, overwhelmed by the tens of thousands of callers seeking rescue as Tropical Storm Harvey dumped inch after inch of rain on Houston overnight, sending bayous over their banks and into homes citywide.

The city’s non-emergency number? Busy.

Conerly, a retired surgical technician, had to stay composed on account of her blood pressure — couldn’t risk getting upset at the police — so she focused on calling and praying, calling and praying as the water seeped in through the morning, up and over her thighs.

Last time this happened, 16 years ago during Tropical Storm Allison, Conerly’s husband was alive, and she was at work. He had known what to do.

Now, she stood in the Houston Gardens home he had bought her, alone with her floating furniture.

Police finally called back at 9:53 a.m. It was another 20 minutes before a truck appeared outside Conerly’s window, but it passed right on by. “Maybe I need to be outside?” Conerly grabbed her 13-yearold Chihuahua, Tyko, and opened the door to her flooded northeast Houston neighborhood. She heard the Coast Guard and waved her arms.

Through chest-high water

Eventually, Houston police came for Conerly’s neighbor in a city dump truck.

“What about me?” Conerly asked. “Somebody going to come for me?”

Police beckoned her down the street, through chest-high water that would soak her changes of clothes and purse, which held a Bible and two weeks of medicine.

Into the muddy bed of the dump truck Conerly went.

Hours later — it was hard to know how many, but sometime Sunday afternoon — she arrived at the Greenspoint area’s rapidly-filling Red Cross shelter, already stretched past its intended 500-person capacity.

There were no cots. No blankets, either.

Harvey’s deluge had sent the nearby Greens Bayou roaring out of its bank early Sunday, pushing out scores of residents yet again.

Most apartments in low-income Greenspoint are located in a flood zone, and roughly 2,000 of them were inundated last year in an overnight storm known as Houston’s Tax Day flood.

Saturday night into Sunday brought another round of evacuations from the newly repaired units south of Bush Intercontinental Airport, and still more trudged through floodwaters late into the day, with help from their neighbors.

“We’re registering at least 100 an hour,” Jerry Fennell, shelter manager at the M.O. Campbell Center, said Sunday afternoon.

Beyond a cot and blanket shortage, flooding also was preventing the Red Cross from getting enough food to the north Houston shelter.

Conerly spent the night not really sleeping on two chairs, wrapped in trash bags. Tyko was locked in a cage outside.

Did not want to leave

By Monday morning, rain still coming down, Conerly was one of more than 2,000 people who had taken refuge at M.O. Campbell, and food was being rationed. Only young children, adults 75 or above, sick adults and pregnant women could get a meal.

Conerly craved a hamburger with mustard and onion rings.

She had been given a blanket but hadn’t warmed up yet.

“I’m not a little bit cold,” Conerly told a member of the Texas State Guard who came by to check on her. “I’m a whole lot cold. I’m a whole lot hungry, and I’m a whole lot sleepy.”

Sometime after 11 a.m., Conerly finally claimed a cot.

Little more than an hour later, Fennell of the Red Cross announced that buses had arrived to transport flood victims downtown, to another shelter at the George R. Brown Convention Center that had more resources.

Lee Anthony Gibson, who had ridden the dump truck in with Conerly from Houston Gardens, seized the opportunity.

“I believe we’ll be able to get the help we need,” the 25-year-old said.

Conerly, however, opted to stick with the shelter she knew instead of decamping for one she didn’t.

She still hoped she would be able to leave within the day — any motel would do — but knew that probably was not going to happen.

“If it took all that to get in, just think what it’s going to take to get out,” she said.

Conerly wasn’t sure where she would start on repairs once the water receded.

She had thought about moving from her home of 35 years, located within the 100-year floodplain, but did not want to.

There were good memories in that house. Plus, the whole city was underwater.

“There’s nowhere you can go to escape this.”