An old-fashioned Tweet

Posted 11:14 p.m.

Miguel Moreno’s parakeets told him his apartment was flooding.

“I was like, ‘Why are they chirping so much?’ And then I saw the water coming in from the bottom,” he said, taking one hand off his mop handle and waving toward the front door. Blue and Green, his parakeets, were still chirping.

The apartment he shares with his mother flooded on Memorial Day two years ago, but Harvey was worse.

Moreno and his neighbors in the Colonial Oaks Apartment in Oak Forest, rolled out of bed as the water started seeping under their doors in the early morning hours Sunday and moved their cars into a long single-file line on the crown of Judiway Street.

“It’s bad when you wake up and you’re sloshing all over the place,” said Sylvia Moreno, rubbing her cheek. “And it’s not done yet.”

Several flood victims from the Colonial Oaks walked down to the Valero station at 34th and Oak Forest Drive, the only business open for miles, to grab food, cigarettes and beer.

Waiting for them there was station attendant Luis Valadez, well into his 21st hour on the job.

Valadez was supposed to end his Saturday shift at midnight, but

the station is less than a mile east of White Oak Bayou, and the roads were impassable.

So there he stood Sunday afternoon, ringing up chips, soda, smokes and beer.

“I just stayed here. I didn’t even sleep,” he said. “I just sat down in the office. There were quite a few customers showing up in the middle of the night.”

Valadez wasn’t sure how he would cross the bayou to get home.

It was a problem he shared with customer Johnny Kaen, who needed to catch a Sunday night flight out of Hobby Airport to Cambodia, where his wife has a caesarian section scheduled next week.

He had driven overnight from Dallas, where he was working, and had been driving around Houston since 5 a.m. trying to cross the bayou.

“I’m trying to get home,” he said. “I’ve got to make this flight.”

The bayou was an equally pressing problem for Orville Wood and Ellen Leo-Wood, whose home in the 1800 block of Du Barry was one of many in the area to take on water.

Leo-Wood had seen her home, less than half a mile east of White Oak, take on water during Ike and Alison, but Harvey had matched those storms with at least two more nights of heavy rains expected.

Her home’s converted former garage, which sits a few inches below the rest of the house, had flooded. But just four houses closer to the bayou, the water was waist deep at the curbs.

As Orville brought their dog Dakota back from a walk — he had been drenched by a downpour for naught, as the Husky had again declined to defecate — Leo-Wood tried to find some humor, musing with neighbors about whether they should all open their garbage cans for flood prevention.

Perhaps a million garbage and recycling bins citywide holding 96 gallons each couldn’t hurt, they figured.

“If we still have 24 inches coming, we’re going to get water in the house,” she said. “We’re just going to do the best we can.”