Most of us at DST grew up in our wonderful city of Houston, and all of us have gone through events some will never experience in a lifetime. One of those events was a hurricane that ushered in a 500-year flood which damaged and destroyed over 200,000 homes. This has never happened, in Houston’s history and – hopefully – will never happen again.
Hurricane Harvey was a devastating storm that left carnage in its path: flooding homes, cars, and roadways for days. Not only did we get 60 trillion gallons of water dumped on our city, we had levees that needed to be opened to prevent further devastation. This act itself caused even more flooding and damage. The hits just kept coming. In the aftermath, many Houstonians were forced to discard everything in their homes because of the damage from water.
But even through this major catastrophe, it did something that that was simply amazing.
We have seen many storms hammer the East Coast, fires spread like crazy on the West Coast, and we watched our neighboring state of Louisiana get demolished by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Something that never changed, though, is that when others needed helped, Texans were always the first ones to report to those areas offering our help. Hundreds of trucks lined up to head northeast to get power up as quickly as possible when a winter storm wiped out thousands of homes from electricity in 2012. Something that has never changed, and hasn’t over time, is how resilient our country is.
With Hurricane Harvey, almost all of Houston was underwater on day one of the storm. We saw four days of non-stop heavy rain, unable to see the very real damage until after the storm had fully passed.
Here’s the amazing part: not even 24-hours after the storm dumped 60 inches of rain, Houstonians were gathering their boats, kayaks, bass boats, and pretty much anything that would float, out into the heavily flooded streets. We showed the entire country, and the world, that we could work together to make sure we took care of our neighbors in need. We showed that Houstonians and Texans are resilient.
It has been almost a year since Harvey, and we will continue to persevere through hard times, whether it is a hurricane or another catastrophic event. Texans are, and always will be, resilient.
More on how Harvey directly impacted the DST family and how we were able to help.
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