In one Texas town, hopscotching for food and water
BEAUMONT, Texas — Carrie Chambliss climbed into her husband’s truck Friday and drove a winding route some 70 miles, plowing through deep water, to get from her home in Mauriceville to a grocery store in Beaumont that had “barely anything” left.
For the second day in a row, Beaumont was without running water. With the city choked off by the floodwaters that have swamped smaller towns surrounding it, its grocery stores are quickly running out of staples like bread and eggs while lines of cars snake around a park where officials were handing out bottles of water. Residents are being urged to boil their own water — if they have any.
Chambliss was among the many in this part of Texas who, if they had not fled for drier ground, have gone days without electricity or water. She also has not been able to get to her job, as an X-ray technician in Orange. And her family was worried about her son, who has a brain tumor. He was to have surgery in Houston on Friday, but it had to be rescheduled.
But at least she still had her home to return to, unlike many in her husband’s family. “His parents’ house had never flooded,
and it’s gone,” Carrie Chambliss said. “His sister’s house has never flooded, and it’s gone.”
For many here, the last few days have been spent on a series of roads to nowhere.
About 1,000 people were evacuated from the towns surrounding
Beaumont on Thursday night and more evacuations are expected, Gov. Greg Abbott said in a news conference Friday.
He also said that the Neches River was about 7 feet above the previous record, and “it will continue to remain at or near that high for about the next week.” The flooding “poses an ongoing threat” to the region, he said.
Volunteers, many coming with their own trucks and boats, have been swarming on Main Street in Vidor, across the river from Beaumont, where the water was deep enough to stall buses and launch fishing boats from the road.
It was there, in the parking lot of a car wash, where Melissa Bergin loaded her “menagerie” on to the back of a military-style truck, along with the rest of her family: her pigs, Parker and Penelope, a 15-year-old Boston terrier named Diva and a parrot. Another passenger brought a poodle.
The water had climbed to about 5 feet in front of her house by the time she left, she said, and it had
started seeping inside her house around sunrise. “We’ve never seen it like that,” she said as her terrified pigs let out piercing squeals. “None of our neighbors have. A lot of them have been in the neighborhood a good 30 years and they said they’ve never seen it.”
Like many other residents, her family left with whatever possessions they could carry stuffed into garbage bags. “We just left it all there,” Bergin, a retired accountant, said, “and we’ll go back with a hope and a prayer.”
Residents have been stocking up on water since early Thursday when Beaumont first announced it lost access to clean water, part of a broader concern that the state called “the biggest threat to public health at this time.” Dennis Johnson had collected 26 gallons, which he was loading into the back of a taxi. “I don’t want to take any chances,” he said.
Authorities set up locations to distribute bottled water — the heat index in Beaumont exceeded 90 degrees Friday, according to
the National Weather Service — and reported heavy demand. National Guard officials said they were moving resources east of Houston as conditions deteriorated in places like Beaumont.
Some in the city said they are concerned about what might happen in a place in such dire and immediate need.
“I just worry when you got people that are desperate — no gas, there’s lines for blocks to get in grocery stores, they’re out of water, they’re out of food, desperate people do strange things,” said James Love, a retired professor of criminal justice.
With severely limited access to water service in Beaumont, one of the city’s hospitals, Baptist Hospitals of Southeast Texas, said that it had transferred 110 patients since Thursday and that it hoped to move another 83, including 14 newborns, from its main wards Friday.
“Our ER is cleared out,” said Mary Poole, a spokeswoman for the hospital. “Our dialysis is gone, and almost all of our ICU is gone.”