I knew it was going to happen again yesterday but nobody would listen to me. Everybody thought i was paranoid…dramatic. Its not like last year, they said. See, the bridge is still there. Yes its flooding but this time its not up to the bridge yet and this time we have bridge officials and the fire department and the electric company all posted up and in place, monitoring things, ready for action. So, this time we are aware of the situation and they’re going to manage it. They’re going to coordinate and let water downstream at the right rate and we’re not going to flood like last year. That was a catastrophic once in a lifetime historical event. I also heard this one: “God wouldnt do it to us twice.”

Im high functioning autistic. Im good with pattern recognition…statistical probability…things like that. I went to the dam and had a look at the water. I stayed for an hour and noted the rate the water was rising, climbing the road. I drove over the bridge a couple times and had a look at that water. Then i looked up how many feet the river had risen in the last 24 hours. Then i looked up how much rain had fallen in the last 24 hours in my town, in the 24 hours before that in my town, and then did the same for the town directly upstream and the towns downstream. I looked up the projected expected rainfall for the next 24 hours in my town, then the following 24 hours, and studied the concentration hourly of when throughout each day that rain was expecting to be falling. Then i did the same for the town directly upstream from us. After examining the forecast projections and noting the bridge employees, the sheriff, the fire fighters, the water vehicles, and the inflatable boats…i decided that they were poised for action and must have assessed the same thing i did and decided to stay home on wednesday. It was supposed to rain all through wednesday and thursday in both my town and the towns downstream and upstream of us. However, wednesday there was a 60 to 75 percent chance of rain every hour and we were expected to receive up to 6 more inches that day after we’d already had 6 inches two days in a row. The river was already swollen and the dam road already flooded. I figured a steady rain all throughout the day, every hour, would give no reprieve and no water would soak into the ground. Oversaturated, it would just travel along on top of the limestone rock and become runoff. Thursday had a scheduled forecasted break in the rain overnight followed by a 30 percent to 25 percent chance of rain until 5 pm when it kicked back up to 60 or 70 percent all through the night on thursday. Looking at this, i decided i was not comfortable leaving my town for work on wednesday morning and even though i was completely dressed in scrubs with my gait belt and pulse oximeter in my pockets and my lunch packed, i asked if i could have the day off and work saturday to make it up instead. Well, weather doesnt always follow the projected forecast. The river rose and rose as it continued to rain wednesday but when i went to bed, though the water was chocolate milk colored, churning, and full of white peaked rapids, it was still a few feet beneath the bridge leading in and out of my town. It was not up to the bridge yet. I was being told that i was overreacting and dramatic when i pointed out that the forecast continues to indicate a schedule of steady rain and upstream from us their community is drowning in flood water and will undoubtedly be letting down more water our way in an attempt to stop their own bleeding as communities are buried beneath flood water. They are going to try to empty their portion of the swollen angry river in our direction. So i accounted for our rain, our runoff, their rain, and their runoff. Here’s where things went awry for their plan of “we’re not doing last year again.” Overnight it did not lend a break in the rain. In fact the break came early. We had a short reprieve in late afternoon. Then overnight, instead of a light misting associated with a 25 to 30 percent chance of rain, we had another rager of a storm with lightning and thunder everywhere. Once again, san antonio got more tornados for the third time in 4 days. At 12:30 a lightning bolt lit up our world and the power went out. It came back on a minute later. At 1 am lightning cracked the sky and the power went out again. I waited for it to come back on. I waited and waited and waited. The room was dark and silent save for the blibbering baboon of an australian shepherd driving me crazy destroying shit left and right, drooling all over everything, trying to become one with the rooster pen in the bathroom because maybe its not raining in there, and dragging her butt all over the floor. If i crated her (which i had to do shortly because i couldnt control her anymore once the lights were out and i couldnt see her, she just filled the one room tiny house with a tin roof/ceiling with the noise of her barking and growling. I plugged my ears with the blanket and lived through it. She did the same thing last year too. The aussie is not great in a crisis. She thinks its her job to create a diversion by making more chaos to take your mind off the impending disaster. When i realized how long the power had been out i knew it wasnt coming back on. This power outage was likely not lightning related and more the probability that the power poles had gone down the river again. I knew better than to go see before dawn. You dont go out when its flooding and you cant see the flood water until you’re in it. You wait for dawn. So i waited. 2 am came. No power. No sense in getting up to get ready for work if you cant run the shower or cook anything. I reset the phone alarm and went back to sleep. I should say, both wednesday and thursday we all received plenty of “this is a deadly flood warning, do not leave the house unless you are fleeing flood waters actively.” Notification. It was helpful to me. I used it to tell work why i wasnt coming and gage the seriousness of the situation, so i think they did that way better this time. They gave us an abundance of information this time, including an alert every time the river started rising and by how my h it had risen in a period of hours. Thank you for giving us the info we needed to make good decisions. Now did everybody make good decisions this time around? No. And ill get into that. I understand why they didnt make good decisions but just cuz i understand it doesnt mean i’d recommend it or condone it. So, i reset the alarm every hour and woke up to see that there was still no electricity in the house. At 6:30 am i knew the sun would be up shortly and i grabbed my purse, flip flops, my phone, and an umbrella. I used pieces of plywood to make it through the mud and water to my car under the carport. I managed to get in only to realize i had forgotten my glasses. If i was going to go check the river i might need to see it. I went back to get them and on the way off the porch slid in the mud and landed on the edge of the porch stair. Honestly i mostly caught myself with my right hand and wasnt hurt at all so it could have been way worse. When you live alone you dont actually have to cop to the embarrassing things you do if you just dont mention them but let the record show that i am capable of carelessness when in a hurry and am fallible in a crisis as well. I drove over the creek to get to the flat part of town where i could check the river level and when i did so i noted that the creek was higher, wider, and more choppy than it had ever been during july 4 of last year. That scared me. Id never in 7 years seen that creek go over the road and now it was a foot from doing it and moving FAST and angry. That creek separated me from the bulk of my town. The creek was so wide it looked like a flooded river at this point. Trees were in it so it definitely had left its banks. I made a mental note that i should hurry about checking the river and then once on the other side of this creek, not check it again. I drove down to the flat part of town and even in the darkness of an overcast dawn i could tell large debris such as whole trees was being carried over the bridge. A fire truck blocked access to it. I could see the flood waters raging over the bridge. I decided to check the dam and to my surprise there was no barricade barring me from doing so. I turned left beside the local tavern on the main street and in the headlights i could see the river. I should have had to drive down that road, turn right, and drive down that road to go check the level of the river at the dam but the river was right behind the back of the tavern and there was just enough room for me to do a quick and decisive u-turn and head with purpose back over the creek to my house in the hilly part of town, up high. As i drove over it i realized this would be the last time i could go over that creek without getting stuck on the other side. The rapids were a foot tall, the water was so choppy, shooting around each curve and between tree trunks. It was chocolate milk in a blender on pulse. I drove over it quickly and did not leave the hilly area again. From my house, i continued to monitor the rising river levels of the Guadalupe and pedernales, various nearby creeks…. I monitored what percentage of each town was now under water with each passing hour. Social media can be a helpful thing when you need real time information. People started facebook post threads called “whats it like in your area” where they’d post the question and everyone would comment their area, the amount of rainfall received, the amount the body of water they were near had risen, the roads closed near them, and their best picture of what was going on. After putting all this info together i started getting a mental image of what was to come and i realized it was going to be worse than last year. I realized it was time to go for the people on the river in multiple towns and to my surprise, the fire department had realized what i realized an hour before i realized it and given the evacuation order an hour before i said “Go! Get out.” This strange thing happened where people did not want to believe we were doing this a second time and i seemingly couldnt force them to live in the reality that we were. I spent all morning pacing my tiny house on the phone yelling at people, bullying them into getting their butt in gear and taking action. We can cope later. We can grieve later. We can make sense of it later. Right now its time to call 911 and get a boat rescue because the bottom floor of your house is in the river and you’re cut off from roads required to escape by flooded bodies of water. I talked to people who had driven to other cities to work and told them it was time to go home while they still could….be with their kids, their animals, because once the water takes out the road, it may be a while before whats left is drivable, even if the water recedes. Sometimes it takes all the asphalt with it and leaves a big hole in its wake. I saw the writing on the wall that families were going to be separated and stranded in different towns from each other. I tried to tell them to go home but they thought i was overreacting not coming to work. They did indeed get stranded and have to wait at a shelter until flood waters receded to reunite with their children.

Im pretty good at pattern recognition and statistical probabilities. There’s plenty of stuff i dont know jack all about but if i stay home from work cuz i think the river is going to flood today…maybe i was twelve hours off but if i do that you should assume something big is coming down the pipe because i dont just call work and tell them im not coming without probable cause and a just reason. Im not paranoid. Im observant. Tuesday my neighbor pleaded with me to stay home from work and tell them im not coming and i said, “that’s not how this works. I have no statistical evidence the river is going to flood today. Therefore i have to go to work. If i call in every time its raining they will fire me.” I went to work. Wednesday, i did not. Had the forecast done what the projection said it would do….there was a high likelihood wednesday would have been the day. But we got a break and then wednesday night in the darkness we got a rager of a lightning storm that dumped more buckets of water on us and just parked and rained. Thursday morning i got a text from someone in the town upstream that let me know the river had risen 34 feet in 4 hours. It was exactly what i thought it would do when you combined the amount of rainfall we were supposed to get upstream and in our town, the already saturated ground holding standing water already, so anything new would be 100 percent runoff, and the rate at which water could be let down the river without flooding the people downstream since we just had a concrete wall and no method to control how much water was let through our area. If they opened the flood gates upstream…we would be getting whatever they released in full force over our little joke of a dam (a few feet of concrete wall). We received two more alerts when it started raining hard again that the river was rising once more. It was scheduled to rain all day. What was once 25 to 30 percent was now a 60 to 75 percent chance each hour.

I talked to the people who were on the river and on the fence of “maybe it wont get any higher than this…” or “well its coming in the kitchen but i have to be here with a broom to keep it from getting to the carpeted rooms in the back of the house” and i told them “its time to go.” People are reporting theres a waiting list for 911 rescue so call now and book a boat or helicopter rescue and it’ll likely be there by the time you need it and are on your roof.” I told them not to wait, to give the firefighters and cajun navy the window of time needed to rescue them alive and not dead. Lets go, lets call 911 now when the water is ankle deep in the house and the roads are impassible, or when the water has taken the downstairs but not yet the upstairs. So many people told me “well what if the water level goes down and then the rescue was all for nothing…” then it goes down!!!! Better safe than sorry people. You cant bank on the idea that the river will go down while theres two active warnings its rising again, its raining now, and theres more rain in the projected forecast all day. Schedule the rescue and if it turns out you could have stayed and not died but just have been wet and covered in propane, chemicals, and sewage….then tell me “i told you so” later. Get safe people. Dont gamble with what ifs when it comes to texas rivers and creeks during flooding. The odds are ever against your favor. Play it safe. Call. Get the rescue. Evacuate.

So i spent wednesday trying to warn people of what was likely coming, early morning thursday trying to convince people to evacuate or go home and be with their kids and animals while they still could, and late morning thursday trying to get their address or convince them to call 911 for rescue or just turn around and find a shelter rather than drive through flooded creeks trying to get back to their houses. Then i took a nap, exhausted from peopling and charging my phone on the small lunchbox sized generator just to have more juice to argue with. Several people wanted to talk to me on the phone just to get a picture of what was going on because they were interested or they were worried about me and then wanted to catch up and it was not personal but i limited these calls because i was trying to conserve phone battery so i could argue with those who refused to leave with what battery i did have and they were stubborn as heck so i had to keep plugging it into the generator and charging it up again. At some point texting and cell phone data internet access stopped. I could call, but no longer text or access facebook, where i had been monitoring all the situations and statistics in nearby towns. I took a nap because i was tired of listening to the one am radio station that comes in on the weather radio if you perch it high at the top of the window with the antenna extended up and to the left. They were talking politics and i was over it but it was the only thing that ran on no internet and triple a batteries which i had a lot of. Last year the program was at least baseball, which i didnt really give a flip about but at least it was more pleasant to listen to the announcer describe the progression of the game than two people on opposite sides of the political spectrum prattle on about stupid things with enough venom to vaporize a country, were it tangible.

I was cut off from the lower part of my town by the creek and the rest of the world by the river. My coworker said, “well what will you do, how will you survive?” I answered, “Im a homesteader. I have water, food, and ammunition. Im good.” This is of course after the prerequisite statement that i was on a hill on one of the highest points in the town…one of the reasons i bought the property in the first place.

At half past noon i woke up to the sound of the window unit running and the presence of lights. The electricity was on! As it turned out, when i had checked the electricity company outage map the night before, there were over 1,000 people without power upstream, where our electric company is located, and 31 houses in my town. I knew a power pole had likely gone down the river somewhere. What i didn’t know was that a barge had gone over the dam upstream and taken out the poles and lines with it as it went over. To their credit, in the middle of worse flooding than last year, it went out at 1:00 am and was back on at 12:30 pm the following day. I didnt have to toss all the food in the fridge like last time. I later found out the use of a drone to restring wires during active flooding was behind the quicker response time.

The chickens pens are still a flooded muddy poopy mess and the young chickens are riding the top of the chicken coop like it’s noah’s ark. The dogs stay in the house with me and go out when theres a break or some slack in the rain.

The flood this year actually is worse than last year but ive only heard of two deaths so far and i think thats just due to daylight and a better warning system. Unbeknownst to me until yesterday, same for a lot of people in nearby towns, we have flood alarms now. Nobody knew what they were but i figured when i found the concrete tower with the red light and the source of the whining buzzing noise, thats probably what that meant. Two more people in different nearby towns called me and said something similar.

The fire department flooded again. All the new donated stuff is ruined. The governor declared a state of disaster. All those rebuilt houses that volunteers helped make are full of water or carried away. The roads are washed out. There is a feeling of “but it cant happen twice” and “who is going to volunteer this time?” People arent going to keep coming if we require help to clean up and rebuild once a year every july. Also i cant see people ever looking at the country’s birthday celebration the same again. This year we celebrated on the 11th. Every time we try to do july a historic once in a lifetime flood happens. When i tell you there were people who would rather die in their houses than do this again….there were people who would rather die in their houses than do this again. It’s a problem. Do i know what to say? Do i have words to make it better? No. All i can tell you is shitty things happen and we have to just take life one foot at a time. Left, right, left, right. Just keep walking. Life is a series of moments and you’re winning the game if you’re still playing. Its as simple as that. As long as you are still taking steps, focusing on walking, you’re still in the game. It wont do you any good to sit at a table and rub your head and ask “why” over and over again. In this realm, we dont get the answers. Shit happens and you have to live through it. We do what we gotta do. Get your people, get your animals, and get safe. A new round of rain just arrived. Im gonna wrap this up and go pay attention to that. But for serious, worry about why later. For now, get your people, get your animals, and get to higher ground. We’ll sort everything else later. For those that would rather die than do it again….just know you’ll be adding to your family’s already insurmountable trauma if you make them live through this crisis again, but this time without you. Dont make one more thing for them to mourn or make sense of. Stick around and be there for each other. We may never know why. We dont have to know why. Focus on the moment at hand and when you’re done with that one, God will give you another.

We are quietly licking our wounds without the volunteers this time…everyone that i know who lives on the river has had enough and made the decision to leave. Those who dont live on the river are just piling the debris and burning it. Fence is getting mended or replaced slowly. Roads are being repaved. Bridges are on a list for rebuilding or repairing. Theres no strangers here this time and i have to say, as helpful as they were…they created an environment, no fault to them and their beautiful souls, where it was easy for looters and rapists to hide amongst them under the guise of volunteers. so, without them, the houses dont get rebuilt but i dont have to lock everything up, keep the curtains drawn, and be in by nightfall with a loaded rifle by the door so there’s that. As far as why did it happen twice? I dont know but the one thing i can tell you is that each time a circular rain formation, kind of like a less organized more spread out hurricane visible on the radar, turning ever so slightly in a circular motion, simply parked over our area and rained steadily for a week. So, if you see a disorganized spread out system parked and moving slightly in a circular motion on the radar….assume we’re having a historic flooding event. This is Texas. We get fast moving, furious pop up storms that are moving from one direction to another in a straight line. Whatever this disorganized circular thing that doesnt move is….it equals FLOOD.