Searching for the safest place to be

Posted 1:15 p.m.

Ann Spencer and her husband Everett left their home near San Luis Pass for the first time on Thursday, as the rains came down.

It’s a beach house on a peninsula

just south of Galveston, a few hundred feet from shore.

They decided to go first to Alvin, then returned to San Luis Pass to check on their home, elevated with piers so it sat 20 feet above sea level. “It was fine,” she said. Then the skies opened up Saturday — the drained streets filling with a foot of water in just hours. They slept with windows shuttered against the slanting rain, sweltering in the humid heat, their power long gone.

So they headed to a hotel in Clute, she said.

Several days later, they returned to their home to try to get power restored. She looked out at the Gulf and gave a start. Where was all the water? “We’re seeing sandbars we’ve never seen before,” she said. “We’ve never seen water that low on the Gulf.”

It had all dropped on Houston and the surrounding area, she said.

When they first left their home, all the places they’d planned to evacuate to were now under water, which is how they ended up at their Clute hotel.

“We went to Alvin. They got flooded,” she said. “Friends in Sienna Plantation said, ‘Come stay with us.’ They had to evacuate to Waco. We have friends in Orange — now look at them.”

They had planned to grab some groceries — if they could find any — and head back to their beach house. But now they can’t get back there.

“You can’t go east. There’s flooding to the north, and river flooding to the west,” she said on Thursday morning, sipping orange juice. “It’s ironic that the safest place is a beach house 20 feet above sea level.”