For homeless, a terrifying night under siege
HURRICANE HARVEY /
HOUSTON — Before high winds and heavy rain began to lash this city overnight, Roy Joe Cox tucked into the spot under the freeway that he calls home and assessed his hurricane supplies.
Four hot dogs. A bag of shrimp. A couple of cupcakes. His American Tourister rolling suitcase, fitted with a spare pair of jeans and not much else.
“I have no place to go and it’s going to get bad,” he said Saturday, his T-shirt blowing in the breeze. “A hurricane is coming and I don’t know how I’m going to live through it.”
Some didn’t. At least two people were reported dead in and around Houston on Sunday morning and emergency services workers were responding to large numbers of distress calls as catastrophic flooding hit the nation’s fourth-largest city and a metropolitan area with a population of more than 6 million.
The National Weather Service issued repeated flash flood warnings throughout the night, and dry city streets turned to speeding rivers in a matter of minutes. Emergency lines were soon filled with people stranded on highways and residents began sending desperate tweets directly to officials.
Emergency responders completed more than 1,000 high-water rescues during the night. “Travel across the area is severely hampered, if not impossible,” said an announcement from the Weather Service.
City officials urged flooded residents to head to their roofs, not their attics.
“We need help it’s like 12 adults and 10 toddlers....can you please call me,” one man wrote to Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez on Twitter.
“Many neighbors are screaming for help,” wrote another.
“Where?” the sheriff responded. “Keep calling 911.”
For the city’s homeless, many of whom did not seek cover before the storm in shelters, it was a terrifying night. Many, like Cox, live and sleep under Houston’s elevated highways, in lowlying areas that are among the most dangerous when it comes to flooding.
The Red Cross has opened shelters and the city’s homeless outreach team has spent days trying to get people a place to stay. Officials have urged residents to get inside, saying failure to do so puts the lives of emergency responders at risk.
But several people under the highways said Saturday as the storm swept in that they would attempt to stay put.
Cox lives on a slip of cement between traffic lanes under the Southwest Freeway, across from an adult accessories shop called Katz Boutique and a taquería called Tepatitlán, and not far from a Shell station where he uses the bathroom.
He said he liked the spot because he can sit between a thick column and a large metal electrical box. This allows him some privacy. He sleeps on a brown sofa cushion and makes occasional trips on foot to a Walmart about a mile away. To eat, he “flies,” which is his term for panhandling.
He began his day Saturday in that Walmart parking lot, in search of a blanket that he hoped would protect him from the storm. With just a few coins in his pocket, he said he had planned to steal one.