When ordinary boaters did extraordinary deeds
1 year after Harvey: ‘If someone needs help, you help’
AUSTIN, Texas – There was no official call to arms, no bat-shaped beacon in the sky, no alarm buzzing on iPhones.
Still, hundreds came from all corners of Texas and beyond, pulling a variety of boats – flat-bottom fishing boats, airboats, inflatable rafts, canoes – and launching them into floodswollen Houston neighborhoods to rescue residents by the hundreds.
Images of rescuers in private boats pulling trapped Houstonians from homes are lasting icons of the floods that ravaged Houston during Hurricane Harvey a year ago last Saturday. The Category 4 storm came ashore in South Texas, then stalled over Houston, unleashing more than 50 inches of rain on the greater metropolitan area –
the largest rain dump in U.S. history – displacing thousands of people and directly killing more than 60 people across the state.
As official search-and-rescue teams in Houston were overwhelmed – some of them trapped in their own homes and fire stations by the fast-rising water – others quickly filled the void. As we commemorate the anniversary of that event, it’s those everyday folks in their weekend boats who most stand out.
I covered Harvey’s landfall in Rockport, near Corpus Christi, then raced north in pelting rain to cover the disaster unfolding in Houston. As I arrived, I was stunned to see Houston’s major highways and neighborhoods under water. It was an apocalyptic scene: people crawling out of submerged cars; homes and businesses swallowed by floods; boats motoring down what were, just days before, city boulevards. Through it all, the rain kept falling.
Brooks Bonin, 47, drove more than
100 miles from his home in Orange, Texas, in the driving rain with a team of buddies to push his airboat into the dark floodwaters of North Houston. They launched around 8 p.m. Sunday, Aug.
27. By 2 a.m., they had rescued more than 300 people, he said.
The next day, he raced back to Orange through flooded roads as the waters began rising there.
Brooks, who owns an environmental cleanup company, told me this story a week later as he motored me around Orange in his airboat. The city was submerged. As he showed me apartment complexes and government buildings swallowed by floodwaters, I asked him what would motivate him to drive to Houston on the skirt tails of a major hurricane, even as floods threatened his own home.
“We had the boats,” he told me. “We had to do it.”
Perhaps the best known among the fleet of citizen responders was the Cajun Navy – an informal group of rescue boaters that operates out of Louisiana. They came from everywhere in Texas, too – from Orange to El Paso, Dripping Springs to Dallas – as well as Florida, Nebraska, California and a bevy of other states.
In Houston, as Harvey’s rains continued, those who had access to a TV or radio knew that the city’s police and fire departments were overwhelmed. Emergency calls jammed the phone system. Trapped residents pinpointed their locations using Google maps or Facebook, and boaters navigated the unknown neighborhoods using iPhones and walkie-talkie apps.
Soon after arriving in Houston, I was pinned down in a 10-block radius in West Houston. Water had overrun streets in every direction. The nearby Buffalo Bayou had overflowed its banks and flooded neighborhoods. Rescue boaters would launch from a nearby golf course and into flooded streets.
Here, I met Brett Scherer as he readied a 16-foot aluminum flat-bottom fishing boat to go into the neighborhood. Scherer said he prayed after seeing images of the Houston floods from his home in Dripping Springs. “God told me to get down there and do something about it,” he said.
Scherer, 35, performed rescues for three days, sleeping in the cab of his Ford truck each night, and helped dozens of people reach safety.
There was one subdivision that was blocked by debris. He tried to reach the homes there three times with no success. He was preparing for his fourth try when I met him.
I called him recently, curious to hear his thoughts after a year’s worth of perspective.
He said the disaster taught him that terrible events bring people together in amazing ways. He also learned he’s not cut out to witness such calamity: He cried each night during the rescues.
Scherer never reached that subdivision, but he got a phone call a day later that rescuers were able to get to it and evacuated everyone. Relief washed over him.
“I was raised that if someone needs help, you help them, and you help them to the best of your ability,” he said.
One death is too many in a natural disaster, but I cringe to think what the toll would have been if people such as Scherer hadn’t rallied to Houston and other towns as the waters began to rise.
After the floods, some on social media suggested building a statue to memorialize those who showed up in their weekend boats to save people from the floods.
I can’t think of a better way to commemorate an otherwise terrible event.