Rooftop rescue after Instagram plea hits live TV

IT TOOK eight hours and an impromptu live appearance on national TV, but Houston resident Iashia Nelson (photo inset) was finally rescued Monday from her rooftop.

Nelson, who came to the city in 2005 after being displaced from Louisiana by Hurricane Katrina, had to climb onto her neighbor’s roof with her son and about 30 other people as flood waters rose.

“I lost everything. I have nothing but the clothes on my back,” she told ABC’s “Good Morning America,” which contacted Nelson with a video phone call after seeing an Instagram message she posted pleading for help.

“Still needing help y’all. Please,” wrote Nelson, as she posted a short video showing gushing floodwaters a few feet below the edge of the roof.

Nelson said she called 911 but didn’t know when rescuers would arrive.

“It’s water everywhere and we have nowhere to go,” the desperate mother said. “We just want to get out.”

After her appearance on national TV, members of the “Cajun Navy,” a group of volunteers with boats, showed up.

All the children in the group got in one boat and Nelson and the other adults were put in another, she said.

Taken separately to the George R. Brown Convention Center in central Houston, Nelson was able to find her son by mid-afternoon.

Sharon Gilleon, 72, who lives near the city’s Barker Reservoir with her husband Byron Gilleon, had to be taken by boat to safety just after dawn as waters lapped at their back door — something that’s never happened in their 29 years there, she said.

“It’s the unknown that made us feel we ought to get out of the house as much as anything,” Gilleon told the Houston Chronicle.

“We’ve never had to evacuate before but we don’t live on the upstairs floor, where none of the windows open anymore ... and it’s supposed to get worse, so it seemed smarter to go,” she said.