A renewed faith in humanity
Posted: 10:21 p.m.
Heeding tornado warnings on her phone, Nancy Garza, 40, spent a sleepless night with her poodle Oreo in the closet of her Dickinson home and woke up Sunday to 12 inches of water. She called 911 but could not get through.
By noon, her brother-in-law, Dennis Britt, was headed up Interstate 45 towing a borrowed and broken flat-bottom boat that he’d rigged up with a new battery and spark plug.
Britt, 57, of Santa Fe, and his brother-in-law pulled onto the shoulder of the highway and launched the boat in a ditch onto a feeder road, wading and yanking it over bridges when the water got too shallow. But the jerry-rigged engine petered out as they slowly began the three-mile journey to Garza’s subdivision. “We finally pulled over,” he said. Two men who’d come up with their boat from Galveston pulled up to see if they could help.
“We saw hundreds and hundreds of cars flooded out. Homes flooded out. People just dazed,” Britt said.
On their way back to the car with Garza and Oreo, they passed some people wading along who wanted to go home and rescue their cats. On the way back from the cat rescue a man asked for a ride to pick up insulin for his father. The Samaritans from Galveston completed that journey, and then dropped off Garza, Britt and the dog with Britt’s brother-in-law who was holding down the broken boat.
“It was a long day,” he said, fighting off tears but it gave him renewed faith in humanity. “It makes you feel good to know that people come together when there’s a situation like this. When people need to forget about the bad stuff in the world and forget about politics and they just help each other.”