it's a category 2 hurricane out here did the western eye come ashore yes it did it came right across right down over top of us right there there is the hurricane landfall project truck it's all set up strapped down we're going to turn all the switches on in just a little while standing outside of the Chevy Tahoe we are getting into the eye wall of Hurricane Jean right now more came in on shore here along the southeast coast of Florida these little bullet cams right here that we will use to record that

surge hello again and welcome to another edition of stories from the hurricane highway i am your host Mark Sudith very excited to be back here with you again as we continue our journey looking back at Hurricane Harvey up to part two now
the catastrophic flood that would happen for a good deal of southeast Texas going to cover all of that some amazing stories for you coming up here in this episode so very excited again to have you listening in so let's do a little recap here just to make sure we're all on the same page we'll start with the late evening hours of the 25th of August 2017 harvey ends the drought of major
hurricane landfalls wilma was the last late October 2005 harvey comes along August 25th
2017 makes landfall as a category 4 near
Rockport and um Fulton in Texas there

lots of stormchasers over at that hotel can't remember the name of the hotel doesn't matter but uh I was not going to be one of them carrie and Todd and I two
different vehicles i was in the Tahoe with all the weather equipment on it we went out to Sentin and watched on radar
scope the eyewall the western eyewall and we decided once it got too close and
we could start to hear that hurricane force roar outside and the power started
flashing you know it's getting dangerous it's time to go so we we did we left we went on back uh went to Alice to our
Hampton Inn hotel and yeah put a few
more tweets out was monitoring the equipment as best I could unfortunately these darned hurricanes coming in at night really causes a lot of problems i
think that's very obvious but you know the cameras don't see anything so that's a real bummer and remember we only had five of these cameras had five Logitech camera systems uh in these Pelican cases
the Storm cases the IM 2075 model or

whatever again a little bit bigger than a lunchbox I suppose and we had two of
them deployed one was down on the Oso Bay with the weather station the weather station did great clocked a lot of great data on the southern side of the circulation of Harvey the barometer with it all that everything worked fine the video stream was fine it ran as long as
we needed it to something like 30 hours but it got dark and so what are yo going to do nothing uh and I certainly wasn't going to put out any other cameras i certain I thought about Rockport talked about it with Carrie and Todd and I like well we could run over to Rockport uh and put one out you know before it got dark on um that Friday night the 25th but what are you going to see once the power goes out nothing yo know so I figured let's hold on to the
uh the cameras that we've got the other three and I know I talked about this a little bit in the last episode but this is part of the recap setting the stage for us here um if we could not get the
two cameras back that we had put out for any reason at least I would have three
for the part two saga up in the Houston
area i knew that's where I was going to try to cover this was the greater Houston area this would literally be the Super Bowl of flood events uh in the
nation's history i mean that was coming and we're going to talk about all the details behind it as we go forward so
got a good night's sleep much needed and
uh again that's why I chose Alice pretty far to the west there away from the circulation and by the way uh let's just
start at that morning i get up 7 8:00 in
the morning there on Saturday the 26th and Harvey still a hurricane 80 miles
per hour moving very slowly you could ride a bike faster than Harvey was moving um let me take a look here the um 7 a.m central time advisory that's right around the time I got up and this is now Saturday August 26 2017 i'm going to
save this as image number one for you to refer to if you like there it is and it's like just a bunch of circles there's no cone of it's it's the circle of uncertainty or the hazard uh area

whatever you want to call it the uh the the forecast circle cuz it was so slow
so there was no like well it could be
you know way up here in 3 4 days it was it's it was you look at the picture you'll understand uh Harvey was going nowhere quickly and that was going to be a big problem already raining a lot over
south central Texas down there along the coast near Corpus up to Port Lvaka those
areas and all of that was going to gradually make its way up into southeast
Texas affecting Galveastston Houston yo
know Harris Chambers counties and then eventually Bowmont Port Arthur southwest Louisiana all of that was coming but we start the day I get up and my very first
tweet of that morning um around 8:00 uh

central time basically laying out the plan i said quote "Our plan for today is to retrieve our equipment and then make our way back to Houston anytime we have connectivity we will stream live." End quote that's what I said that was the that was the plan of the day and a few people were excited that I was alive they were they were very nice oh man hadn't heard from you in about 10 hours getting a little worried glad you're okay that all makes us feel very good when people have wellw wishes for me and
and by extension our team and uh my next
post was you know look as we travel uh
we'll take video and pictures of any damage and I'll post that as best I can i also had the drone our handy dandy Phantom 2 quadcopter and uh I try to deploy that but remember Harvey is still a hurricane
it's gradually winding down gradually filling as they say the pressure is coming up but it had a big windfield
spreading out all that energy raining from time to time especially on the north and east side of it so it was going to be a challenging day and speaking of the plan what we wanted to do was obviously get to the equipment down on Oso Bay first which was pretty easy to do there was not a lot of damage not a lot of power lines down anything like that cuz this would be the southern side of Corpus Christi southern side of Corpus Christi Bay so we did that first went out there snatched the camera box and the weather station uh took it down off the the I-beam that it was splinted to and all that equipment did very very well i said that before but I'll say it again it did it did great it's very proud of it it's just nighttime you know like at least we had good data um so after that I thought why don't we

try to get to Rockport we heard about from all the chasers and their tweets how bad it was and it was a category 4 eyewall and all that stuff and in fact and I know I talked about this in the last ep episode as well but I want to re-emphasize Tim Marshall uh famous
forensic meteorologist and engineer all those things does a lot of surveys after hurricanes especially really windy winds
intense hurricanes and tornadoes so he
and Dr josh Worman talked at the 2018
National Tropical Weather Conference and
you know they showed all their findings and everything but one of the pictures that they showed were these SUVs like
suburbans or something that were lofted that's their term for it good scientific way to put it thrown through the air
into like trees and stuff down in Rockport and Fulton uh just to the north of Rockport I think where Fulton is and uh that was like very revealing like
yeah see that's that's why Carrie and Todd and I didn't go there not lofting
me anywhere that's not that's not good so this thing definitely had a punch down there we wanted to go document that and see what was up um and see if we
could put the drone up as I thought and and in 2017 there were not a lot of drone pilots yet there was a few some of
them were already getting very good at it but there were not a lot now almost
any stormchaser that's pretty dedicated to the to the craft they have a drone and they're much less expensive generally uh but anyway we head up there and along
the route we're taking 35 you know let me pull up the Google Maps because that's going to be helpful to to keep uh
keep up with where we are and how we get to where we need to go so let's just punch in Rockport Texas there it is thank you very much the Google all right so yeah we're going to get out of the uh Corpus area we grab the the weather station from Oso Bay and
we're going to come up around Corpus Christi uh through Portland and we get over to Gregory and then you come out across uh like the uh Aranzis Pass area

just northwest of there and we're on that Highway 35 that coastal uh highway
sometimes it's four-lane divided sometimes it's not and boy when it wasn't woo I'll tell you all about it believe me um and we wanted to get up there you know to the Rockport area which by the way to describe this to yo Rockport sits on the mainland side if
you will it's almost like a peninsula down there it really is um and I tell you again there are so many bays in Texas it's ridiculous that's
what makes it so difficult to deploy equipment it's very hard to do but I already talked about that so you got Aranzis Bay and then you got the island
out there San Jose Island Port Oranzis
uh and Harvey made landfall right across that area with Rockport and Fulton being
in that eyewall i mean they were blasted so some of the worst surge came into
Capano Bay down on the southwest side of
it near Bayside and whatnot um and then
filled in all these little other areas there's uh what is that trying to look like port or pot bay can't really read it on the Google maps but there's all kinds of little waterways that kind of finger their way in uh to the Texas coast they're just carved in there and man the surge in
some of these places must have been just monumental now luckily the barrier islands out there did take the brunt of most of the surge but these inland bays
yikes seriously so we want to make our way up to Rockport so along the way taking video and I'll just describe some of these videos heavy equipment getting moved already um lots of flooding
already on southbound i posted a video let's see what time this was this is on uh this is about 11:15 a.m central time

um and Highway 35 south which is what I

was filming as we're going north was pretty flooded uh from the very heavy rainfall from that eyewall and uh traffic moving slowly some traffic out there mostly big pickup trucks and a few emergency vehicles but um yeah we get on

uh into uh Rockport and we were I don't want to

say stunned because by this time I'd seen quite a few hurricanes and it takes a lot to stun me and what happens in Houston definitely did that usually it's something that I haven't seen before that'll stun me but the damage was pretty extensive we drove around Rockport uh Carrie and Todd had this
little gizmo i think it was from DJI that would record on a little gimbal thing so it's nice and stable like a steady cam and Todd held it out the
window and we drove through very slowly
a lot of damage structural damage trees down signs down all that stuff typical what you would think of in a a powerful hurricane um and we made our way over to the waterfront and one thing that I wanted to see for myself it wasn't just
a gawking tour you know I think in a lot

of cases that can be very disrespectful but I had a purpose here i wanted to obviously document and share i think that is important uh since we're already in there and we do have connectivity and we know what we're doing and all that good stuff but then the scientific side I wanted to look for storm surge
uh evidence right then and there and get that information back to the National Hurricane Center and the National Weather Service Corpus Christi and yo know what folks the beauty of how easy it is to do that way back in 2017 even

you just tag them on Twitter social media twitter was most people were on Twitter then and government agencies and so it was very easy to do especially if I had pictures a high watermark whatever but then secondary to that but also important I wanted to see ah I could
have had a camera here had it been daytime what would I have missed so that

was the other part of it is the forensics of it you know let's look for storm surge evidence high water marks boats way up you on like five streets over whatever and that would also tell
me "Oh man I wish I had a camera here
and I wish it was daytime." Like yo know what I mean it was kind of like justifying my decision not to put a camera there even though it was nighttime you know that whole struggle do I put one there despite it being dark whatever the case may be I I needed to know for myself so
there was that side of this as well and we did we got down to the waterfront there was some storm surge evidence but
nothing at all like I was expecting and

um I don't think I mean there's no tweets i didn't say anything like hey National Hurricane Center or Weather Service Corpus like there's no tags i
just said how you know it was a little damage down here or whatever like it was
there was nothing shocking put it that way certainly no big storm surge uh
markers you know so we leave uh that area and we did some

extensive uh video believe me and I put the drone up and um I think I shared that put it on my FTP server i we didn't
have Dropbox back then but I tried to get that to the Weather Channel ASAP and
I think I was able to uh actually there's a funny story behind that i just remembered remembered no I did i just remembered i didn't even forget you know my expression I remembered later i remembered right now we'll get to that in a little bit because it is actually pretty funny uh how I got the video to the weather channel uh but we leave Rockport and we head out 35 and you get
out there on that little peninsula um that sticks out as Capano Village and
you've got Capano Bay on the northwest side and then you have the Aranis Bay southeast and then you go across 35 on this bridge and you get into Lamar and Holiday Beach and this is where things started getting very interesting and
this like really is the start of holy

crap like now we started to see the evidence of this massive surge from Harvey in that right front quadrant and
it was not in Rockport and Fulton and all that so we again cross over Capano

Bay we come out and uh we're in Lamar in that area and 35 is pretty much covered

in surge and we're very cautiously

driving along we could see the pavement
it's only about a foot deep so it had been receding obviously but it was so
vast like you look out like you're driving across a lake everything was flooded so here's a picture of it but I did post a picture uh quite revealing
and um this is uh let's see what time this was these are important these timestamps so almost 10 minutes to noon there on the 26th and uh here's a nice
shot this will be picture number two and
there we go so what do we see and I
really encourage you to look at this picture so I probably got out because there's like no traffic well there's a red truck in front of me but you get the idea there's very little people out there so I get out carrie by the way I
want to make sure I mention this he and Todd are behind me in Carrie's truck his Ford pickup and I'm in the Tahoe i'm leading the way and um so I get out and I take this picture right down the center line of the highway and you can see it's just flooded and you can see the power lines are leaning right to left and you notice there's a cow on the right hand side and
you know obviously that's where the ditch is i guess it gets lower over there this would begin
the string of events over the next hour
or two as we drove towards Port Okconor

that were really haunting um and we'll

get into that in the next block here i'm going to you know take a break here and do the little musical interlude but what I would start to see and we'll talk about this in the next block as we kept traveling really bothered me because I started realizing you know look you know these hurricanes they affect people we all worry about that certainly but the
effect to and in this case the ranch
industry and animals I had never seen
anything like this before and we'll pick that up here after the

break

heat heat

all right back with you now stories from the hurricane highway continues we are up to Saturday the 26th of August

2017 mere hours after Harvey makes

landfall and it is starting to die away
as a hurricane over South Central Texas
just inland from the coast and uh we're making our way up 35 north of Lamar
after crossing Capano Bay and we're out
there on 35 just like amazed at what we're seeing the evidence of this storm surge and we were just getting into it we we had no idea Carrie and Todd and
myself as to what we were going to be seeing later we didn't know what to expect we had just gone to Rockport and
seen the destruction there and again I was kind of marveled at the fact that there was very little storm surge evidence in Rockport but the eye went
right over them and I kind of thought about that i was like well the eye went right over it's usually to the north or to the right of the eye where you have onshore flow in that right front quadrant where the worst of the damage is from surge that's typically the case
so we we didn't see that in Rockport so
but you know as we kept going north on 35 um we saw that one scene that I I saved
the picture for you uh that covered it picture number two of of the flooded roadway passable you know and I want to emphasize we were very careful about this and uh really took our time yo know try to practice what we preach turn around don't drown very methodical about it driving very slowly stopping and getting out anywhere where it looked like the water was covering the road completely but it was only about a foot deep at at worst in most locations and it was not flowing and so that made a big difference but nevertheless off to the side was in that one picture there was a cow and like I teased at the end of uh the first block you know what we
were going to see going forward was very disturbing indeed but as we kept moving along again we're in Aranis County and
we passed the airport and a lot of the sheet metal and the hangers was just ripped open planes tossed about very small airplanes i posted a video of that
uh on Twitter that afternoon um very

significant wind damage and look again these are not strong buildings by any means they're sheet metal and steel framing and whatever for their airport hangers and so forth but uh it was it
was something else to see you know all this damage out there and um that was
nothing though compared to what was coming so we keep on moving north along
35 and I'm going to refer back to Google Maps here and there's an area um St

charles Bay comes off of uh it's like an

appendage of Aranzis Bay i told yo there's lots of water down there there's Mission Bay Capano Bay St charles Bay
Carlos Bay there's bays everywhere uh

and so St charles Bay kind of extends

north uh paralleling 35 and you get out into this open countryside area of 35
and the surge was able to work its way across the barrier islands up there and
then across all of this marsh and wetland and just inundate miles inland
and I cannot imagine what it must have been that night you know the night before as Harvey made landfall so as we're moving along came across there's a couple pictures here uh of just sadness
these two uh cows that were dead they
drowned and uh they were on the in either in the road or on the side of the road i'll save one of the pictures uh if you're sensitive to seeing animals perished you know you might want to skip these um it it was hard you know cuz I I

love nature i love animals and this was tough to see and they had the little tags on their ears so it's part of a uh a ranch operation of these freerange
cattle out there and they're dead yo know and it was it was hard and the wind
is blowing luckily it wasn't raining too much you can see in the picture if yo do in fact look at it at least the rain had stopped where we were um but the
wind was still howling with this thing and you know the surge to for these cows
to drown like this you know they've got to be I don't know 5t tall at their
shoulder maybe you know like not a cattle expert but they're not short and so for the water to come up high enough to overwhelm them you know it had to be 3 or 4 feet above ground level and yo
know cows are heavy um I mean I don't
know and the water probably was flowing you had some velocity to it and the wind
got in there and they probably got exhausted and so their heads probably would go down into the water i can't imagine and that was hard to see and um

I kept on going again we're on this 35 and and at this point 35 is two lanes not divided highway it's just yo know one lane north one lane south whatever it's a two-lane road and
definitely one of the most viral video tweets whatever that I have
ever put out was on this day August 26
2017 i was driving along and I could see

up the road it's very flat out there and we were at a part of 35 that was not flooded it was you know lot of lot of water on either side but the roadway was clear and I could see this thing something in the road and I is that a person up there you know wearing like a dark hoodie or something or a rain jacket i wasn't sure but they were in the southbound lane of 35 whatever it
was this figure and I drove up on it and I realized it was a cow so I uh rolled

my window down i slowed down and took the iPhone out and passed by and said

hello i was like "Hey." Like I don't know it's weird talking to a cow but I was like "Hang in there." It was just so strange this this disheveled poor disoriented cow and he

had his head down or she and uh it was
it was just a moment i was like "All right you know hang in there uh
hopefully somebody will come rescue yo i mean it looked like it was doing okay
energy-wise and I posted that uh on
Twitter and I'm going to look at the stats here this this was insane for back in 2017 um it had uh 467,000 impressions and since it's a
video you know 467,000 people saw it and

48,000 engagements so lots of engagement with it retweets and comments and so forth uh

and just like wow and several news
organizations contacted me um wanted to license the video people

and it was interesting too cuz I got a lot of flack from people relatively i
mean any video that goes viral I don't care what you've done how great the accomplishment is there's always going to be somebody that's a negative Nancy people were literally upset with
me that I didn't put the cow in the Tahoe to save it um it was bizarre yo

know and I had to like respond to that at least I felt like I had to i know what they don't read the comments but I do read the comments i think it's important that's what engagement is about uh but yeah I'm like no I I can't
put the cow in the Tahoe what how would I even do that and um luckily some of the people that were following me and some of the retweets and so forth there were different organizations and so forth that got notified and tagged or what have you and um I don't know what eventually happened to this cow but at least when I passed by it was above
water and seemed to have decent energy and you know she was looking around and it was just a moment it really was um
and then I saw a couple of these mobile
weather stations from probably Texas Tech or somewhere uh stick nets as they're called um I saw one on it's a 2
m deal it's a yellow tripod with an RM young animometer on the top and we saw one of these out there and I said "Hey it looks to be in good shape." So I tweeted that out um and we didn't have any good bandwidth out there for streaming so I wasn't able to do anything live but we kept on uh making our way up um towards uh Tyvolei on 35 and I'm going to look at the Google Maps here to just keep up with everything and that is a long
stretch too especially when you're having to go so slow all through that open area and again it's out there on the west side of you know Madagorta
Island is out there and these big bodies of water san Antonio Bay which I bet that rightfront quadrant just flooded
all that farmland out there easily i
imagine it was under several feet of water Friday night so yeah we we
continue north uh towards Tavi and I
posted you know as much video as I could there was a lot more damage uh power lines down you name it and not a lot of
structures out there but any structures that were they were usually made out of metal steel framing and sheet metal and so forth and they were blown to to bits
literally and we would encounter yo know more cattle once in a while um yo
know like it was just it was hard because I felt bad for the animals yo
know I don't know what they know but yo know I got a heart i was like "Wow that's really rough." And I felt bad for the ranchers because they may be in it as a business and they're you know these are probably going to be um beef cattle right they're going to harvest the meat at some point let's be honest about it
but I don't think that they don't care you know like it's it's still whether or not you look at it as their property i mean they have a number on them cow number 44 or whatever but you know it
has to hurt them that man their cattle
drowned and so it was already getting to
be a little bit taxing you know because
this stuff does matter to me and
realizing the impacts already and we're
not even to the big flood yet right and all of that was still building i'm seeing that in my social media as I'm reading these forecasts for 20 30 40 inches of rain over the next several days maybe more and the catastrophic that word catastrophic getting used in
weather service messaging for our friends up in the Houston area you know and all that was going to be coming so we get in and through Tyoli we get out
to the area north and east of there um
somewhere around that point is uh where
Mike Ty had wrecked by the way just somewhere along that stretch on 35 um and I know we passed his car as we

were driving through there it was still upside down or whatever on the southbound side in the in the mush um
and uh so we're going along here's another picture I'll save for you said evidence of storm surge along 35 uh and all that grass all that stuff
they call it the rack line um I mean it
is it's just like old brown grass reads

and stuff and it gets lofted up in the air by the surge or not in the air but you know it's floated and then when the water drains away it settles down and you know there had to be several feet of water there for just all of this mess so
I'll save this picture as well this is picture number four uh and we're just trying to get up to Port Oconor by the way that's the that's the goal here so we get through Tyoli and we turn right to go down to
Seadrift through Longmont and whatnot uh
and that's another long stretch out there of just all right what is this going to be like and um there's more cows and again I posted another one i said "Another cow." He's just or she is just standing uh in in the ditch just and actually she was eating grass i'm looking at the video right now um Oh that's kind of
funny she's just going along like "All right let me get a snack." She is she's chowing down that's hilarious well good for her uh that was a big milk cow as Brent likes to say our good friend Brent is a milk cow um so yeah lots of cattle

out there and then look I'm going to save this next picture because this is definitely a testament to the you know holy smokes of a season that we were
having which really was just starting like here we go we're going to be in the throws of it now and what was coming so this is a tweet that I posted you know I'm out there working the current mission and I've always got my eyes on
what everything else you know literally try to have eyes in the back of my head for this weather stuff and um I tweeted
this at 1:32 p.m central time and I'm

going to save the picture for you cuz boy this is you know it you'll see it i

remember it well cuz I remember thinking boy it's going to be a busy you know few weeks uh it just says too much activity dot dot dot geez and you look out there
if you look at this picture you got Harvey tropical storm now at this point sitting over the coastal area of South Central Texas and then there's some duad
and vest area whatever disturbance moving across Florida into the southeast coastal waters but then I want to draw your attention way out in the open Atlantic there um a yellow area

and yeah that would become Irma later on

so we're just getting started right i remember looking at that back then thinking "Oh my gosh I'm never going to be home." But yeah that's an interesting tweet i remember that because I was thinking literally how busy I'm going to be all right so we get back down to Port
O' Conor um spoke to the Port Oconor
Volunteer Fire Department and we were
trying to get into the area we had to get permission and so forth and they said that Port Oconor looks like it was untouched so cuz we saw them out there on 185
which goes out to Port OK Conor it's just just two-lane nothing road i mean it just goes through farmland and marsh and whatever lots of cows and reptiles and

amphibians and whatever else is out there uh and we saw the the Porto Conor

VFD and you know asked uh about it and

they said "Yeah it looks like it was untouched." And I was shocked i'm going to be honest with you i was really shocked cuz I thought for sure that Port
Oconor coming off Madagorta Bay would have been in that right front quadrant um but they said no it was looks like it was untouched so we moved along and um

got into Port Okconor and grabbed the equipment uh or you know it's the camera off the pole and um on the way down there here's
a great shot here this is at one of the intersections um says whichever university this belongs to congratulations it's still operating and this is a picture of that stick net thing i want to save this for yo because it's really cool there we go oh and you can see some of the fire trucks up there from the Port Okconor Volunteer Fire Department um but yeah we get down
there we grab the equipment and um there

was a little bit of a rack line or high water mark uh down in the Port Okconor area minimal damage i tweeted that out people really appreciated knowing that and then we were off we were trying to get up to Houston and this is where things really really started getting as
my dad used to say hairy they're getting hairy i mean golly I'm looking at some of the video here posted a lot of video for Harvey it's a good thing Twitter still has it that's amazing um so let's
see we leave Port Okconor and uh I guess we had to go back down 185 through Long Mott back to 35
Port Lvaka and then you make our way over to
Palashius i think that's how you say it and then we were going to um take our way up from there to probably

um No wait a minute i'm looking at it wrong so we we left Port Okconor sea
drift back to Longmont Mott to 35 then in Port Lvaka we took a left and got on

87 through Placeo to Victoria because I

figured if we can get to Victoria we can get on 59 and that's a pretty solid state highway for um Texas been on it
many times and that goes southwest to northeast right into Houston and we we'll be home free so it's interesting
though because on that Highway 87 I mean
it was flooded and there was a couple of
spots where we were really unsure if we
were going to keep
going we were really unsure if we were going to be able to keep going or if it was just going to be too deep and the vehicles would get swamped you know we were not in any danger of getting swept away or drowning at all because the water is just sitting there you know but we could be stuck and just be a couple of fools out there you know we don't want that um but you know we had to very
carefully go along occasionally i remember I just had soaked shoes or boots or whatever i did have my boots with me um and you know walk through it
and check everything and there was it was interesting because anytime I'd get out and walk around I I remember clearly

how cognizant I was of what else could
be in that water from fire ants to

spiders to rats any kind of rodents right to snakes gators whatever are like

like had to make a conscious decision
and think very clearly opening the door to get out of the Tahoe you're you're now out in the wild when you got flood water around you must be careful yo cannot just willy-nilly or something bad
will happen you know you jump out there's like eight inches of water and you don't think about it and there's a rattlesnake or a cotton mouth or something and it bites you or you get a bunch of fire ant bites and you get anaphilaxis you know an allergic reaction it's very very dangerous and
that's the kind of stuff we have to be so careful of in the aftermath so I told you earlier I had a funny story about getting some video to the weather channel so on one of these
areas where we were coming up either on a rise maybe a bridge or something uh

there are some elevation changes out there they're they're artificial they're like embankments that were built up over
uh a little cutth through like a not an intra coastal waterway but like a canal or something that was built there would be these rises and the the roadway would go up you know 20 30 feet kind of like a
an earthn bridge or something and there was a few of these out there and I remember on one of them we were high enough up and I got some text messages coming in and I looked at the Verizon hotspot and it had like one bar and I realized we are high enough up and it's open up here it's windy as all get out i never forget how windy it was out there it was just so constant but anyway
here's the story so we stopped i texted
Carrie i said I got to stop for a few minutes it might take a little while i want to try to upload uh the quadcopter video the drone video to the weather channel and um I don't remember how I
did that back then to be honest with yo again did I put it on my FTP server did
I Doesn't matter how I did it but I knew I wanted to get it to them and I had it on my iPhone and uh so maybe the DJI
Phantom 2 I was able to download it to my phone that would make the most sense but anyway I remember we stopped
and I uh started the process to upload
it however I was doing that i I just bothers me i can't remember what I might have been using but I definitely did it off my iPhone and it was going it was
very slow little progress bar like okay this is going to definitely take a while but it was working we we did have some connectivity we were hitting some cell tower many miles away and it was working so I knew it was going to take 30 maybe 40 minutes right so I thought all right have a snack we got plenty of food with us snacks and drinks and stuff and uh get out in the wind and you know just stretch the legs while this this phone is uploading this video i had the phone up on my dash as high up as I could get it and just leave it alone let it let it send the video and um I went back and
talked with Carrie and Todd and a couple people probably drove by ranchers or somebody who knows and um it's about
done the video is uploading all right it's about done we're gonna have to get going in a minute and I was like "All right well I need to I need to go to the bathroom i need to pee." You know yo drink all this water and whatever out there got to use the restroom and there's nowhere to go so there's nobody out there so just pee on the side of the road it's what you do no big deal
except that I did not take into
consideration uh I remember I opened the door whatever created a little bit of a like a shelter whatever just to I stand
out in the middle of the road right I remember I started to take a leak and this big gust of wind came and the way it hit the pavement and kind of came around the Tahoe and scooped up under the door it got me and the expression

pissing in the And you've heard that well I found out firsthand luckily it
was very brief and uh I was very quick
to sort of turn and avoid it and it was
Look I got to tell you these things because this is not going to be in some documentary and whatever unless you were there i remember Carrie uh he was dying laughing because he could see that I had to turn out from the door and you know oh Mark's having
some trouble over there and and wind problems we'll just say that
and so I finished up and you know uh
went back to the truck what are yo laughing at and he was like aha yo found out pissing in the wind and I was like "Yeah well you and Todd get out and you try it see how it works." Because it was so gusty and random and um so I I

found out the hard way about that so ever since then I've been you know all right we got to remember that you make sure you're blocked very well from any wind or stand as far away from uh people

so that you can just be out in the open and do whatever you got to do i don't know just Hey look this is part of the details but I got the video uploaded and
it aired on the weather channel in a pretty good time and might have been the first drone video out of the Rockport uh

area i remember I texted Tom my handler
up there at the in Atlanta i was like "Dude I got this amazing video do yo got anything from that area yet?" He goes "No not yet." I was like "All right." And I got the scoop but anyway we leave uh all that behind and we're trying to get up to Victoria and we go out through these different roadways and
uh some of them are flooded and some of them aren't and it was just this it was like a gauntlet that's the best way to describe it of cows and busted up
buildings and the flooding and and the wind and h it was just it was it was stressful it really was so we finally
get up to Victoria and 59 and we're going to go northeast into

the Houston area and the plan was I was
going to go back to the Hampton Inn out
there near Katy uh and near the Children's Hospital on West Park Row and

I had two or three nights booked carrie and Todd were going to go back to their respective apartments and we would
figure out what to do next i had three cameras that were ready to go and I was going to charge the other two back up at
the hotel so we're driving along and uh

there's obviously flood watches and warnings and all kinds of just apocalyptic messaging for what's coming and it was it was looking really really bad for Houston and in vicinity and
driving along and there's this band this feeder band that was coming in off the Gulf into Texas and it was narrow

uh fairly narrow but it was packed with
lightning lot of lightning with this thing and then the occasional tornado warning with it you get these quick spin-ups that look like little curly little like a kidney bean almost within the band and um one such radar shot I saved
plenty but one the first one here I'm going to save for you uh this was the beginning this was the beginning of like you're going to find out how bad Harvey
really is going to be very soon you know that's what was happening in my life because we're on 59 we're near Wharton
uh we had already left um Victoria go
through Elcampo Wharton um and uh

Needville it says i'm literally looking at the map and then you eventually get to Sugarland you're in you're in the greater Houston area for the most part but look at that band i mean that thing was solid red uh bordered by the oranges
and yellows it was this feeder band going into now what was tropical storm Harvey and it was dumping just
phenomenal amounts of rainfall 3 to 4 ines of rain an hour and very slow
moving cuz they were rotating counterclockwise around the circulation but then the individual cells and the band itself were moving slowly south to
north and then eventually northwest it was this very slow painful process and I remember approaching this band they're moving slow enough that we
caught up to it and um that was at 5:40
that we were getting close and then the next picture I'm going to save for yo
559 i am right in the middle of this thing this is picture number eight and
uh look at this radar scope screenshot if you can really really telling right
like you've been in heavy storms and whatever this thing I cannot I can't
describe it the ferocity of the rainfall
the volumes of rain that were falling it
was like a waterfall it really was and
you couldn't see in front of the vehicle luckily there was hardly any traffic out there at all that was good but this was
really serious and there was more of these bands coming and they were just going to keep forming and keep rotating around this slowmoving circulation of Harvey and the tweet that I put on there was raining hard enough for you and I posted some video of course I was like yuck and it's interesting too cuz it's blowing across the road at the same time still pretty windy out there harvey is still a tropical storm 30 40 mph wind
driving this rain across the road thankfully like I said very very little traffic that was great that was one benefit of you know being having a dead hurricane out there so to speak is not a lot of traffic so the next radar scope shot uh I'll save this was about 17
minutes later or so uh picture number nine for you i have gone through the band i'm almost to Sugarland and that
band is intensifying now there's rotation indicated within the band
and um you know there was a tornado warning uh issued and man it was like you got to be kidding me like we're going to have these tornado threats uh and I knew I needed to get up through greater Houston whatever however it would work to uh to get over to the Katy area on 10 to get

to my hotel uh but we got these tornado warnings and there's lightning and I
want to say a little about the lightning because I think that was a big clue as far as the instability went for this
system so radar scope shows a lot of lightning if you look at those pictures that I've saved those images there's a lot of red uh cells you know the red uh
the legend of radar scope showing the intensity but there's also a lot of little lightning bolts in there the amount of instability which is related to what we call convective available potential energy or cape was ridiculous so much instability that we had a lot of lightning and the lightning told me and this was a huge clue and some of
us picked up on it that this thing really is different i've never seen that much lightning in the bands of a tropical cyclone and make no mistake Harvey was still very much a tropical storm you know over soaked Texas
whatever is feeding in from the warm Gulf yeah it was still hang hanging on structurally as well as it could despite being inland now for almost a day but the amount of lightning I'm telling yo folks was absolutely staggering so
picture number 10 I'm going to say I did a little screen capture off the iPhone pretty easy to do when you use the video and you just move through frame by frame they've done a good job with that where you can capture the frame that you want and I posted that a cloud to ground bolt
and I just knew like you could feel it
in the air you could see it just just something I was like "Wow this next part here what is coming?" You know the landfall down in Rockport and Fulton and all the stuff I saw definitely bad yo know no doubt about it but I felt like
the next part this part two that I'm up here to cover now that'll be the big story when it's all said and done that's going to overshadow what happened with the initial landfall of the category 4 part that the flood that was coming if there was a category assigned to it and it's a shame there's not because I think it would get more people's attention they have the high risk and all that you know the pink that they show on the storm prediction well actually it's the weather prediction center which used to was called the hydrometeorological prediction center but it it was a category 5 event if if we have to label it it was going to be catastrophic and
all I had to do is just get to my hotel regroup unload my stuff start charging things and then I was going to start putting cameras out that night and
hopefully meet Carrie uh he didn't live too far away from where my hotel was and the idea was let's let's try to put something out on Braise Bayou and uh we knew we'd probably put something on South Maid Creek where we had done stuff before over on Greenhouse which is real close to my hotel i was a couple miles literally uh and then we'll figure other stuff out as needed you know and and and
try to start documenting this event so I

did I made it to the room to the hotel checked in probably you know I already
did it online or whatever i had a ground floor room was like room 103 or something and I thought that was good i don't have to worry about power outages but I was a little worried you know what if it floods or whatever uh that wouldn't be good but I mean I'd lose my Tahoe so who cares if my room's flooded right um but I'm all set i get into the room i had a little bit of time to just kind of breathe for a little bit and and focus on this next part and that was
going to be covering one of the biggest
flood maybe even the biggest flood disaster in US

history heat heat

so we're up to the evening now of August 26th 2017 i'm back in the Houston area and
Carrie and Todd are back as well both of them at their respective apartments and I'm over at the Hampton Inn on West Park Row tucked in there between Barker
Cypress Road or Boulevard whatever it's called i think it's road barker Cypress Road and Greenhouse Road um the
children's hospital's over there this massive children's hospital and that's going to come into play here as we go through this next block a lot of just
very intense dramatic things are going to start happening um but I get into the
hotel I set up the laptop move all my stuff into the room i'm on the ground floor going to be there a few days and I'm starting to formulate a plan of what to do with these three cameras that are ready to go i could charge up the battery systems for the other two that we had retrieved from Coastal Texas Port
OK Conor and down there at Oso Bay in Corpus Christi and um I was just trying

to like regroup and and shift my
attention firmly on this coming disaster
that we all saw being forecast with
these absolutely astronomical rainfall
totals that were projected now looking at maybe 50 in of rain that was in some of the forecast it was mindblowing
a true national emergency was setting up for the fourth largest city in the country you know several million people in and around the area and energy
corridor the prochem you name it i mean this was just it was not looking good
and the eyes of the world were starting to focus more and more on the greater Houston area but indeed all of southeast Texas all the way up the I10 corridor to Bowmont Port Arthur and even into southwest Louisiana because these rainbands kept feeding in off of the
warm Gulf of Mexico the instability was ridiculous i
tal I talked about the lightning before and I I could just feel the intensity of everything going

up like somebody was turning up the stove you know like I could feel it the heat the heat was rising but at the same time I was very focused on this next mission of capturing the flood with
these remote cameras now Houston is a
vast area it's It's large right i'm not

going to be able to put cameras all over the place and cover everything so I had
to be selective and go with what I knew

and I knew I wanted something at South Maid Creek somewhere over there greenhouse Road i had experience with that in the previous couple of years
working with Carrie and Jeff Linder at
the Harris County Flood Control District so I was putting the experience to use you know I was thinking Braze by Yo maybe at Rice Avenue where we had
documented stuff with these cameras doing some practice things back in 2015
2016 tax day flood you know we were
Carrie and I were were talking and um
trying to figure out how to do this yo know like what's the best way uh I even
put it on social media kind of wanting to get some advice from people you know all right I got a couple cameras here i want to put one at Greenhouse and South Maid Creek Brazou area at Rice and then
I was asking like what do you guys think where should I put another one and different people were suggesting different areas people that know the
area really well they know the flood history of Houston so let's talk about that a little bit why is it such a problem there well for one the

clay soil if you will underneath the
soil I guess Houston's muddy all right it's it's swampy it's built on top of a

big drainage area that goes out into Galveastston Bay Trinity Bay emptying into the Gulf um it's a swamp and it
it's built on top of all that all of these little streams creeks and rivers that drain out of Texas coming out of
either the hill country or the forested
areas up to the north and east of Houston everything drains down there and for some reason they built this giant city on top of it and to that uh to that
end they've engineered it to suit
mankind better by walling off and
concreting these big flood channels that's part of the Harris County Flood Control District lots of metropolitan areas of our country do that i know that Las Vegas has a flood management system
la certainly does i mean the LA River is a concrete river right um Phoenix the Maricopa County Flood Control District or whatever it's called um and you know other cities New York probably has something like that so it's not uncommon in our major cities but
sometimes they get overwhelmed you know
mankind's bestlaid plans sometimes don't work and nature
wins out and typically nature always wins right pretty much so Houston's got

this engineered flood control management
system and part of that are these two

what we call flood pools or reservoirs over to the west side of Houston through the energy corridor that area uh one of them is called Addex Reservoir and the other one is called the Barker Reservoir or flood pools they
were developed I believe in the 1940s to
spare downtown Houston major flooding by
collecting vast amounts of flood water
into these big pools that have earthn
dams around the edges and it can be
managed you know some of these what we call bayus and they're not bayus like you think in Louisiana they call it braise bayou and um what is it white oak
bayou or something like that there's just that that word bayou is used differently in the flood control management of Houston so some of these
we'll just call them waterways drain into these flood pools and again they
are meant to protect the greater Houston area so you don't have this massive flood moving downstream towards Houston

and over the years they've done pretty well uh these these flood pools and they
typically uh don't reach near the top of bank as it's called um and that's a good thing
because if they did and they ever got overt topped and these levy systems were to fail um you would have a truly
catastrophic major loss of life and economic impact that we can't even con you think about it's inconceivable so over the years people have been allowed to build
into these flood pools uh especially
Addex Reservoir uh development has
encroached into the floodpool over the years which is unbelievable and that's a whole other story why that happened the politics behind it who knows but they have they've been allowed to build in there now the Barker Reservoir has a big park several of them
including the George Bush Park there's Freedom Park down there Exploration Park lots of trails through there not a lot of building luckily right inside the
floodpool itself but Addex Reservoir has definitely seen an encroachment of development mainly from the northwest kind of blending in moving
into the floodpool from the north and the west uh over the years and that's

obviously a problem you know i mean yo can't be doing that you got Cullen Park out there there's a school there's the South Maid Creek that runs into there there's Barker Ridge and all of these are just right on the edges of this flat engineered floodpool uh again the uh the Addex reservoir there Addex A DDI CS and

then I 10 splits these two reservoirs
it looks like a causeway if you look at it on Google satellite or whatever um I
10 goes right through there the energy energy corridor and then there's my little uh West Park Row sitting over on
the southwest side of what's called the Addex Dam it's this earthn dam that goes

along the south and east side uh and and
protects the uh the areas and then it kind of wraps around up onto the north it's like a um a J on its side if yo
will or a sea or whatever it's not completely surrounded and the floodpool is deeper southeast you know the more southeast you go into the pool and then it gets shallower the more northwest yo go all right trying to describe this for you and it's massive um Highway six cuts

right through it by the way and then in
this area along Highway 6 there's a big
um park out there there's uh Patterson
Road cuts through it and if you look at it again on satellite it looks like a lot of forest and whatnot but there are these residences these neighborhoods that have been built in there over the years including one over there on the
west and southwest side literally north of the dam so it is
in the floodpool barker Cypress Road goes right in there and then you've got these apartments there is a school um

you know South Maid Creek comes in there and the dam ends at Greenhouse Road so

you have Park Row Boulevard Greenhouse
there's the dam it's literally it's called uh Addicts Dam Road or something like that and you know you can't drive on it unless you're you know maintenance or whatever but um and then there's all these neighborhoods built in there psalms Road is there there's Cullen Park uh South Maid Creek up there and South Maid Creek empty empties into the reservoir and there's all these apartments so there's dense population in there and the point of all this my
hotel is right there just to the south of the dam like

if I had a good enough arm I could throw a baseball from the parking lot of the hotel into the floodpool over the top of the the dam and I don't know what it is 8 n 12 feet whatever um and it's like
this earthn dam with a paved road on the top it looks like a levy you know a dam a levy whatever you want to call it and then and then behind all that north of me is all these neighborhoods and I didn't know that i didn't realize that until later and we'll get there so that's the setup i'm I'm nestled in there completely by accident i didn't plan this i mean I have stayed at that hotel before i've talked about that it's kind of a favorite spot out there on the west side of Houston it's convenient to where Carrie lived it was uh always very inexpensive too and very wellrun and when you travel as much as I do you tend to stick with what works so totally by
accident like coincidence that I would be staying between these two flood pools

that spoiler alert here they're going to fill up all right so just put that in
the back of your head there's going to be a problem later on potentially okay
so there I am uh blissfully unaware of
what's just north of me literally by 100
yards or so whatever it was uh planning
my strategy here to cover what is going
to be an international news story that
this massive city of Houston is going to be under siege from a cataclysmic flood

so I start getting my thoughts together and everything like "Okay what am I going to do?" And uh I get in touch with
Carrie and I'm thinking "All right the first thing I want to do is set a camera
system up at Braise Bayou along Rice

Avenue there was a bridge that goes right over Braze Bayou." And again there's that word bayou it's it's a it's a concrete channel uh well not all of
it's concrete a lot of it is um uh earthn uh but a lot of it's also concrete like some of the sides of it the walls or whatnot but it's all engineered definitely it's all shaped by man to reroute and channel everything
over the decades um that the Harris County Flood Control District and the Army Corps of Engineers have all worked to do so based on
experience from I think 2016 during the tax day flood I believe
it was maybe it was 2015 for something
but we knew that Braves Bayou at Rice
was a good spot because we had had a camera there at least one time before so you again you go with what you know so I told Carrie that's where I'm going to try to go and I wanted to see if he
could meet me there and help me mount the camera well one of these bands was
coming and where he was I don't know
probably eight miles away from me uh a
little ways down Highway 6 um kind of

just past the Barker Reservoir but not
by far that's where his hotel was his
apartment hotel and he was in that band and it was flooding pretty bad and um he had been pretty exhausted from the trip and he wasn't sure if he could get out and I was like "Yeah that's fine um I think I can do this by myself it's one camera you know I'll find a place to put it and
uh we should be okay." So he was going to sit back and watch everything and make sure the camera was running and so forth so I was thinking "All right I
better get on out there i can see the

um the bands coming obviously on uh
radar scope and one was passing right
over my location and boy the rain i was

standing in the little portico thing yo
know that drive up they got the I think it's called a portico you you drive in to check in and it's got the the overhang and whatever and uh you yo park your car under there you bring all your luggage in so I was standing there in front of the doors of the hotel looking out so I'm looking south and the rain it was like a a waterfall it was

unbelievable how much rain was falling out of the sky just drenching and we
were getting up to four to 5 in of of uh of rain an hour four to five inches an hour rain rate ridiculous we would actually go six to seven close to nine inches an hour when some of these heavier bands came in overwhelming the
system so I was waiting for this one to
pass then I would go out between the bands to try to get to Rice Avenue uh
where Braze Bayou was that was the idea so I want to save this shot for you this was 8:34 p.m right on the radar scope
there this is going to be picture number 11 and you know to the the average Joe yo look at that and you go "Oh it's a pretty good rainband over you." I can't even and by the way there was tornado warnings with it too that was that was a lot of fun all the tornado warnings radar indicated tornadoes because within these bands there was rotation uh and we're under a flood warning of course and again I was just
waiting for the band to go by and then I would hit the road get out there and go
toward uh Braze Bayou and Rice so let me
see what my route was going to be i was going to jump on 10 and uh head east to

610 which is one of the beltways around
Houston so it's several miles back to the east uh I'd take 610 and I would go
south and try to get into these
neighborhoods eventually to Rice Avenue
that was the idea um and I'm going to
try to zoom in here and find it so I can continue the the story here um and yeah

pretty simple like wasn't complex at all

just use the interstate go through get
into the neighborhood get out to Rice put the camera out and leave you know and figure out what to do next uh pretty cut and dry you would think so I left the hotel and made my way out onto I 10

there was very little traffic and it was
like a movie i I mean it was I felt like

I was in a movie and how many times I h that has happened to me while I'm working is truly remarkable like so many
different times it has felt like a summer blockbuster tentpole movie full of special effects everything's bigger than life you know what I mean like just mindblowing because it had stopped raining but something was happening as I
was driving off to the northeast several
miles away that looked like

uh explosions it was just this massive
constant flashing just bam bam bam bam
bam like something like it was being carpet bombed but it was flashes and yo
so it wasn't there was no like little small mushroom clouds it wasn't bombs and it was not explosions but it looked like it it was these flashes and the low clouds really exacerbated it and made it much more prevalent but and it was like
it would be blue and then it would be like orange and then yellowish and it was just constant for several seconds just bam bam bam bam bam bam like I'm trying to like emote this to you and I'm
seeing it in the distance and it lit up the sky and it was just surreal and like

what in the world i I had no idea what it was uh obviously some kind of a substation or something had water
intrusion and was shorting out i It had to be something related to the power system but it was not good like really
it was like man Houston is just and this is just the first few hours that's the other part like we got a long way to go and then this next band is coming and I can see it on radar scope
it's coming up and the lightning in the distance is just constant and again that
instability and this this next band was even more intense and so I had about 20 to 30 minutes between these bands maybe 40 something like that and I got off of

610 and uh wanted to get down there onto
Braisewood and then work my way up to Rice Avenue go over to this bridge mount
the camera uh kind of like Carrie had done in 2016 he's the one that put it out there back then just the year before whatever it might have been 15 but I think it was 2016 for the tax day flood in all honesty but um uh I got off and

went down the off-ramp from 610 and immediately

uh I could see the water down on the surface streets where Brazewood is and
that was Brazou there okay and I was like "All

right well this is not good." like the water's already up and Brazewood you know which is in the Meland area roughly it was already
flooded several inches and I could tell
looking down the street the direction I wanted to go that it was worse like the median disappeared and they got trees and everything on them and little oak trees and whatever and I'm like well I
can't and I texted Carrie I can't get to
Rice i'm gonna have to figure out where to put it right here and so I I walk
over to the bayou brace bayou uh and 610

goes over the bayou so it's elevated again you get off the off-ramp you go down and I had parked the Tahoe up on
the median this grass median which is three or four inches higher and the water was literally coming up fairly

steadily not rapid it wasn't like a flash flood where oh boy like minutes later and I'm done but I could see it coming up you could watch the water advancing so the clock now is ticking
faster i got to get this camera set up
so the first thing I did is took some video i posted it to Twitter and I'm just like I mean I said this is bad and we still have a long way to go and it is just a raging torrent uh Braze Bayo
going across Brazewood through the
Myland area going under 610 but here's
the thing there's a lot of here's the things believe me so you come off that off-ramp and to go back to my hotel I

would need to turn left under
610 so get on Brazewood do a U-turn

basically because the Houston area they got these like service roads and it's
complicated it's very complicated uh so
I'd have to get on Brazewood and do a U-turn and go back on 610 going the
other way get back to 10 and go back out to West Park Row all right that was the idea uh so keep that in mind and the

water's coming up so I'm I'm trying to keep all this in the back of my head time's ticking the lightning's flashing there's a few cars that were coming through they were like "Nope not doing it." So they would turn around whatever but literally the sands are moving through that hourglass very quickly now because the water is rising very very
fast so I get the camera ready and it is
again the Logitech Ustream Broadcaster i
get it running in the Tahoe verified everything i'm not coming back out if something happens this is a one-time shot i verified it's working carrie yo
know he he looked at it on on the the app and everything else and yep it's working it's great good so it's on Ustream it's going i walk it out uh and

I remember I was wearing flipflops or slides whatever they're called honest to goodness that's what I was wearing i my sneakers must have been back at the the hotel drying out or something um walked
across the the mush of the grass and whatever and trying to figure out where am I going to put this thing and there's like a some kind of a uh steel pole with

like a big uh don't walk sign whatever
for the you know for the intersection and it's a fairly h it's a probably 6 inch in diameter steel pole and I thought that should be enough to hold
the camera i'm not going to be putting it up high there's no ladder like I don't have time for any of this so I had to put an L bracket on the pole first
with Gorilla tape to hold the weight of the camera box cuz there's just me i don't have somebody to hold the box while I strap it and again remember this is 2017 i had not quite yet met Brent

who had introduced me to the idea of spring-loaded uh very easy to deploy ratchet straps we didn't have those yet and I was incompetent with a regular ratchet strap i could just never figure those out so we were using zip ties and bungee cords and to this point they were doing just fine so just a little note there uh so time's running out man the
water's coming up and you could hear the roar and then off to the distance to my south and east is this next band and the
lightning in that thing I'm telling yo it was like the advancement of an army like the next wave is coming the next line right it was it was bad like woo

like I could feel it the the pressure and so I got the camera up there put the
little bracket and the bungee cord holds it first then I put the zip ties on and lock it down literally had to chain everything and put the lock on and boom it's good to go it's aimed out towards
uh bra by you you can see 610 in the frame it was actually framed up really nice and it's running and it should run for about 30 36 hours something like that and I was good to go i was like
"All right let's go." So I walked back over to the Tahoe which is on this uh on
the median i drove up on the median there like I said in the grass and the water now has come up and the median is
in the water you know by an inch inch and a half whatever and all around lower

like to get back or do the U-turn to to to go back on 610 the other way was
already too deep it's just the way the intersection is it's not completely uniform um so I was stuck you know so I

drove back onto the off-ramp going the

wrong way I don't know 10 20 yards up
the off-ramp off to the side and just
kind of sat there and texted Carrie the Weather Channel was calling they wanted to do a hit with me with Brian Norcross who was on there uh and Rick Nab i don't know if Brian I think Brian was there it was definitely Rick Nab i do remember that um I can't remember if Norcross was still at the Weather Channel in 17 he probably was but I know Rick Nab wanted me to come on Dr nab and talk to him yo
know they had gotten the feed they were seeing the shot and even though it was dark there was still plenty of light out from the street lights and everything so it was a pretty good shot and I knew that in the daytime it'd be amazing but I'm stuck i'm like what am I going to do i cannot go on to Brazewood and do this
U-turn or the Tahoe will get swamped and there was already a car swamped near where I set the camera
up just some you know sedan whatever somebody's regular passenger car and the water was coming up is already inside their doors and it was abandoned the the flashers were on they took off and this big line is coming like dude time's running out so Carrie said "You're going
to have to just go the wrong way on 610
like I don't know what to tell you." So
uh like just for a second you know go up the off-ramp make sure nobody's coming and then turn right and get back on 610
the beltway and see where you can go all right that that should be fine there's not a lot of people out clearly with the
this catastrophe that's unfolding so I
took some more video couple more cars came down the off-ramp the water's coming up and by this time it's coming up so rapidly you really could see it creeping up the concrete like you could just sit there and watch it advancing it was bizarre and very very ominous so uh

we all agreed look yeah we got to go the other way like we can't it's flooded you're going to get stuck down here you're going to get swamped and um so I
went up the off-ramp the wrong way very cautiously up to the crest of it looked
you know back down the traffic you know upstream nobody's coming if there was I
let them go by what have you and then I made the right turn and I get back on 610 good i'm I'm okay so I'm driving
along 610 and the band starts coming in

and the rain and I mean it was like hell
unleashed once again unbelievable rain
rates just blinding blistering rain like a
waterfall unreal absolutely unreal and I
uh the weather channel called we're going to do a phoner that's what it's called do the interview over the phone so I pulled off to the shoulder way off out of the way did the hit with uh Dr rick Nab several minutes describing everything there's lightning and thunder and just this roar of the rain and we
talked for a long enough time and yo know the prep and everything and I sat out the rest of the band the band went ahead and moved through it was done they don't last too long 30 minutes tops and

but still you know you can get four or five inches of rain in just 30 minutes it's it's it's just bananas how hard it
rained and this made everything worse and now there's another band coming they just kept they kept going it was endless
these bands would form come up sweep into the area and move on out rotate around then another one form it I I can't It It is one of the most incredible meteorological things I've ever witnessed it really was so I get
back out in the traffic and we're going
along and all of a sudden we're realizing and again we there's few people truckers mainly and and 610's
pretty wide i don't know what it is four or five lanes it's It's pretty wide it's Houston right so we're driving along and we're realizing hey what the hell
there's people coming at us the wrong
way they're in our lane you know on the left side they got their flashers and they're not going 80 miles an hour but nevertheless why are people coming back this way against the grain what is wrong like that's not good

so for whatever reason somewhere down the way 610 uh once it gets flat again
it was underwater it must have been a dip or something but everybody was
coming from that direction because it was it was blocked off from flooding and

so uh we got to the jam of it wasn't a lot

of traffic and we all turned around and
started going the other way too so there's this line of us going the wrong way on 610 trying to get back to I 10 but the

band that had come through rolled all that up so even just a few minutes of driving the wrong way and you got truckers and everybody coming our yo know the other way the right way and they're flashing out what are you all doing it was chaos you know and we're
all like as far over as we can get just hoping making sure everybody's paying attention but this was the situation it
It was absolutely mindblowing i'd never seen anything like that so I flipped around

and was like I can't do this like I there was something going on in that direction and you know to where I was trying to go i thought what I need to do

is get back on the correct way i think I got nervous honestly there was just too much traffic coming down 610 that I

didn't want to get hit head on i mean I was like "This is not working there's got to be another way all of Houston is not underwater we're getting there but it's Yeah so I said "Let me put my my
the geographer in me let's get that thinking cap on." All right so I turned around obviously very carefully and was
now going the correct way with the flow of traffic the very next exit whatever it was uh I took it and you know very
carefully off the off-ramp get down to the surface streets looked around left right what have you it's fine it's It's wet but it's not flooded okay and we're in between those bands and I got a little bit of a respit here so I pulled off looked at the Google Maps on my phone and conferred with Carrie a little bit and just thought let me take the
surface streets here and just weave my way back over towards West Park Row
however that'll work out it took a while but that's what I did and I was able to avoid the flooding i just couldn't get near any of these bayus these streams you know like White Oak or Buffalo Bayo or Braze Bayou whatever i had to just make sure I didn't get near any of those and using the Google Maps I was able to do so but what was so weird

was all the road close all the little uh
negatives the like the little dashes that Google puts the little red minus things you know it's like road to close whatever man Houston was just shutting down you could just see all over Google Maps red red red red red closed done
whatever it was it was It was out of
control and it was only like 8 hours in
right we're just getting started i made my way back to the hotel uh I'm trying to see when that happened i get in there
um yeah I said uh I'm looking at Twitter
now and and by the way that whole last part there was all just it was nice it was a stream of consciousness not looking at Twitter and whatever just remembering stuff bam bam bam and now I'm looking at the Twitter uh I posted the links to the um the feed there live
camera feed from Houston along where Braze Bayou and Brazewood next to 610 there's the Ustream link um and then I tweeted that people are driving the wrong way on 610 because they are trapped it is absolute pandemonium out here i posted a video of it i finally was able to get back on 10 and then make
my way over to my hotel and here was

what was ironic to me this will forever live in this brain of mine remember way
back in the first part of the whole Harvey saga here when I was talking about the uh the trip out and that I
drove through Memorial City the night that I arrived after I had dinner with
David over in Bowmont at the Longhorn and I got into Houston and and whatnot 11:00 at night the first night and I talked about Memorial City and how it had the blue outline of the buildings and it was like this beautiful city within the big city well I remember that i remember driving in that night and oh wow look at that it's all blue and the outline oh cool so I saw it again as I

drove back to the hotel on August 26th
into the 27th now now it's after midnight and I took a video of it and
I'm going to do a screenshot of this uh
this will be picture number What are we up to uh let's just make sure like 11 or
12 but I'll do a screenshot from the video because it's just too I think important or whatever and to me it was just one of those moments the rain and
you won't be able to appreciate it like I did i mean I realize that but the irony was now there's no traffic i'm the
only one out there there's Memorial City
it's all outlined in blue it's still beautiful it's it's a neat you know whatever metropolitan thing i just thought it was cool and here it is it's
raining so hard that that I 10 is empty

and I'm the only one out there trying to get back to my hotel there was just something about that that stood out to me and I will never forget that so anytime I ever go out to Houston for anything and I go down 10 and I go through Memorial City even on a nice day I remember that moment because the rainfall the windshield wipers couldn't keep up and like I said the road was just it was like you're driving on a a river it was nuts uh so let's see what
time that was that I posted that video this is at uh midnight 9 minutes after
midnight now on the 27th wow so it took

that long it took almost 4 hours to do all this to get out there

put that one camera up but boy was it a
good one i mean that was a really really good location i um stayed up very late
that night uh the water was just
absolutely pouring out of Brazwood we could watch it from the
camera and what was really really neat about this I want to make sure yo understand look Harris County and the TransStar folks that handle a lot of the traffic and everything you got the flood control district and then you got TransStar they have a bunch of cameras i don't know 6 700 of them maybe more but they're all up high some of them had good views certainly because they have so many but my camera was right there
i'm 5'8 the box was maybe 5 foot 10 off

the the concrete of the sidewalk so it's
it's right there where we live that was the perspective and there's audio and
you could hear the roar of the water
through the shot and it was remarkable
and I thought man when we see this the next day once the sun comes up this was
North Brazewood Bayou or Boulevard on
Braves Bayou north Brazewood
uh right next it parallels Braves Bayo it's you know it's just a scent and duck for this kind of stuff and when you're talking 6 to9 inches of of rain an hour
then what are you going to do so I got back to the hotel uh I tweeted it out i
c I got in touch with the hurricane center Jeff Linder at Harris County Flood Control District Weather Channel a lot of social media a lot of work going on to make sure people were watching this um and then I was like "All right well I got to get some sleep because this is just unfolding worse than uh I thought and I

got to figure out what my next play is." But I was done for the night i would try to figure out you know what to do next um on uh Sunday and uh you know can I

even get around so we'll wrap up this
block with that you know that uh got some sleep and you know the water kept
rising and it was hard by the way it was hard to to like not watch it you know because it just kept getting higher and higher and higher and people were saying on social media that your camera is going to go into water or whatever but uh finally turned in got a few hours of sleep because once I got up on Sunday I wanted to make sure I got up near first light if I could so I wanted to see how high did the water get and then I had to plan you know what am I going to do on Sunday you know the second full day of this epic flood event that was starting to unfold here in the greater Houston area

so as the night of the 26th turns into the 27th there Saturday into Sunday I stayed up pretty late tweeting at people looking at the cam you know myself the one cam shot that I had set up there along Braves Bayou in the Myland area
just in awe of the situation and these rainbands kept coming they kept forming harvey's now back to tropical storm strength it's you know it's degenerating and uh weakening in terms of its windfield and its pressure but the bands just kept on going and they would form drop three four five inches of rain per hour very slow moving and move along and then another would form it was just over and over and over and I was chatting with different people Eric Blake from the National Hurricane Center my friend Taylor who was at the hurricane center at the time at the storm surge unit remember that name by the way Taylor Trogden it's going to become very important he will as we go forward over
the next many episodes you'll see um but
I had known him I think I met him that year at the Mississippi State University
Severe Weather Symposium come to think of it and um we had stayed in touch and

would interact on uh Twitter through direct messages and so forth but everything else we did was out in the public you know me responding to a post that he would have and the same thing with Eric Blake at the hurricane center and Eric wanted to know you know where the camera was and I said "Well hold on let me show you." And I put it on there a little Google Street View shot i'll save that here for you this is picture number 12 I believe it is and uh it's
just a screen capture of Google Street View on a non-c catastrophic day and yo
can see Bray Bayou back in the background and the streets over there it's on North Breezewood so you know here's where the camera is this is the view that it has on a good day is what I was trying to convey there and just talking back and forth especially with Taylor um who was down in Miami at the time as of course would be uh Eric Eric Blake both of them hurricane center forecasters and personnel um at the time
taylor has since moved to Colorado now he does work with uh CIR i can't
remember what that stands for but he's doing research and operational stuff still in the weather enterprise but no longer at the hurricane center but back then he was and we're talking back and forth and um I responded to one of his
tweets as he was saying about how dangerous these bands were i said yo know yeah I'm seeing it it's surreal i'm safe at my hotel way out here between Highway 6 and Katy Texas i should be
good to go here hopefully and that's an interesting word there that I put hopefully because I still wasn't completely aware of my surroundings that to my north like I said before by not

even 100 or 200 yards it was very close
was the southwest side of the Addex Reservoir and then to my south um a
little bit farther away I don't know a mile or so maybe two miles was the northern part of the Barker Reservoir both of these flood pools that's the other term for them were starting to fill up and we'll come to that we'll all of this will start to they're just there's a lot to go through trust me so I finally went to sleep after you know
again just marveling at this shot uh
from Myland and what it was seeing i
thought man when I get up tomorrow what is it going to look like the camera could be underwater i mean this was truly a catastrophe in the making uh so
I did i got up at about 7:30 the next morning it's now Sunday August 27th and
quickly took two screen captures posted
them on Twitter i'll save these pictures for you as 13 and 14 now the first
picture is what it looked like you know moments after I set it up on Saturday night braves Bayou was certainly up 10
or 15 ft cuz it is it's a flood channel and you know it has to rise and then it spills over the bank it gets to what we call bankful and then it spreads out and
in that case it would spread out all into the neighborhoods and as we now know it was truly devastating thousands and thousands of homes were flooded now a little side story for you after this was all over in the weeks later whatever it was I got an email from a man who
said that his father gentleman I think he said he was in his 70s or 80s he lived by himself he was on oxygen in the Myland area and this guy his son was
following my work and saw that I was putting a camera there and was probably watching on Ustream and and certainly seeing my post on Twitter and he got really concerned about that that yo know kind of like storm surge man if Mark's putting a camera that must mean something bad could happen so he got up with his father he's like "You need to evacuate you know this guy Mark that I follow is setting up a camera." And his dad was probably like "What what are yo talking about you know I'm staying here i'm fine you know people can be stubborn
sometimes certainly." Whatever the reason is the guy didn't want to leave and his son said he told me in this email that he went out there in the middle of the night uh after I got the camera up and you know the water was still starting to rise but he you know talked his father into coming with him gathered some things and he took him somewhere wherever the guy lived that was not going to flood presumably and in the end he said the bottom line is the water came up several feet into his father's house and the electricity was out so his oxygen system would not have worked and he would have eventually died cuz he was highly dependent on the oxygen i don't know all the details of it but I remember that email that he said you know you literally saved my father's life and I want to thank yo and that really stuck with me like there was just such an amazing thing to hear because I don't know that stuff like that could be happening in real time necessarily and this flood event just
knowing ahead of time what I might be able to do based on what Carrie and I had been doing in 2015 and 2016 really was literally paying off
because apparently we saved somebody's life this guy's father and um that just
really meant a lot to me so we're now up to that morning of uh Sunday the 27th
we've got these two side byside photos on Twitter again the first picture uh I
saved these what is 13 and 14 moments after I set it up and then the second picture was you know 7:45 or whatever
Sunday morning and everything's underwater uh the camera is probably 3
ft from the water getting to the camera lens uh all the roads are underwater in the area now certainly the uh 610 which
is elevated up there uh was not I mean
we'd have huge huge Noah type problems

if the water was that high right um but
you know all kidding aside it was very serious was flooded a lot of different places along Buffalo Bayou White Oak Bay you name it I mean Houston was in bad
shape and we were still looking at another 20 in of rain coming absolutely
it was just mindblowing so I'm going to
save another picture for you here this is a good one this is a Google Maps uh
shot picture number 15 with a marker
that shows exactly where the camera was and I hope you take a look at this braze by you cuts through the middle of the shot from left to right you see South
Rice Avenue where it goes over Braze that's where I wanted to put the camera originally i was going to come down 610 from the top get off of that exit go
down North Brazewood and then there's Rice Avenue that's where Carrie had put a camera during I think it was the tax day flood of 2016 um and we worked together remotely
you know uh me directing him if you will
from North Carolina back in that event and again we knew that this would be a good spot but serendipity you know that that term there intervened fate
intervened and I couldn't get up there we already talked about that so I put the camera where you see if you're looking at the the screen capture there from my iPhone the little marker the pin

that's where the camera was right there at the corner looking across that big
intersection where 610 curves around yo have South Post Oak Road that parallels all that and that whole area all that
you see all those residences in there
would be if they weren't already underwater by several feet hundreds and
hundreds if not thousands of homes with

nasty water you know this is not a
beautiful pristine creek that's coming down out of the Alaskan mountains or something i mean what you know flood water's yucky anyway you know wherever it comes from and that that it's in a big urban environment horrible so that's
where the uh the camera was and I had to figure out all right what am I going to do next i cannot you know I've got four
other cameras i can't go around Houston houston's too big it's dangerous i could be in the way i don't want the Tahoe to break down or any like I have to stay close to the hotel but I don't want to just give up and not put any more cameras out i still want to document the story but I have to be very careful about it so I'm certainly in touch with Carrie he's kind of stuck at his apartment todd is stuck and the water's coming up around his place if I recall uh I don't remember exactly where he lived in Houston i think it was farther down 45 um maybe down there near Let me look on
a map real quick just to give you an idea i want to be as accurate as I can so Carrie was down off of Highway 6 near
Mission Bend area of the Houston area um
south and east not by far of the Barker
Reservoir but um Todd was down I think
near oh let's see maybe Deer Park um

anyway the southeast side we'll call it uh of Houston and um the whole area yo

know was impacted one way or the other
any of these little flood channels that were snaking through the city were impacted some much worse than others as you can imagine so what I decided to do

was go over to South Maid Creek again

I'm out there on um what is it west Park Row I think is
what it's called i do believe that's the name of the major boulevard because yo got I 10 that goes through there and actually the northern part of Barker Reservoir is real close to I 10 just
looking at Google Maps here but yeah West Park Row you got all those hotels uh that are out there there's Highway 6 i'm just trying to get my bearings here um and you go down to greenhouse and then that cuts up to where South Maid Creek is and I wanted to go over there and just see how things were going which
was not far at all um like a mile
whatever it was very close so I drove over there and got to Greenhouse and it

was headed um toward South Maid Creek
and I I knew immediately well that's not happening cuz I could look across and everything had that brown sort of
chocolate milk look to it flood water murky uh cream colored flood water and

it had spread out all across i mean it was it was done like I'm not going to be able to to see the actual bridge or

where Carrie and I had the camera in
2015 for some testing 2016 for the tax day flood right near the bridge at South Maid Creek itself no I'm not even going to be able to get close so I pull off into this uh church parking lot that was it was as close as I could get and yo know what I did come on i put the drone up perfect opportunity now that being
said I do remember a lot of people were starting to fly their drones out there and they had various what are called um

what are they TFRs uh the little flight
restriction and I think that's what it's called um and but but back in the day
2017 we didn't have the automated stuff in the app and the geo fencing you know they were just telling people um yo know these temporary flight restrictions these TFRs because there was rescue helicopters and they didn't want drones bumping into these helicopters now all I
wanted to do and I didn't know if I was in a TFR at the time i want to be very clear about that but I do know that eventually it became a problem and that might have been once we got to later in the day Sunday or even on Monday but that's just a thing i remember that that was the first time I had heard of drones uh becoming an issue perhaps and yo know they just didn't again want any incursions into airspace of rescue
helicopters cuz they were starting to rescue people uh with Blackhawks and whatever else it was really starting to get bad and we're only really about a day plus into this thing so I put the
drone up about 100 ft flew it out over I
think it was the Phantom 2 so it did have the stabilized little camera deal on it and so much much better than the early days of the drone uh I got my shots that I needed of Greenhouse and the surrounding neighborhoods back there into the floodpool um and posted a
picture on Twitter of course and I will
save that for you here right here right now picture number 16 that is Greenhouse
Road south Maid Creek has spilled all out there there's people i don't know what they're driving they're like in these dune buggy things driving through there and um you know hey look better
luck to you good luck right like if the
road's not there who knows and that's the biggest problem in the flood waters is people driving through thinking they know the area and maybe something's collapsed a culvert or whatever it is very dangerous especially when yo cannot see through it and that is the exact situation with this murky water the clay subs soil whatever of the
Houston region mm- It is it's like coffee with cream in it you just can't see through it oh the road's still there it's good you know okay no you couldn't do that um Oh that's hilarious and
there's actually I mentioned the drone stuff here's a uh uh a post um from uh

me talking to somebody on the Twitter there trying to see who I was talking to because that post is no longer there this is old enough now that some some people that um I was referring or talking to they don't have an account anymore so I said uh he must have been his name is Bill uh let's see if he still has his account yeah uh Bill is a retired meteorologist and he was asking me I guess about the TFR and I said 100
ft or lower and then keep a keen eye and
an ear to this guy uh respect for yo
know all that i'm on board anyway I just thought that was interesting that the drone thing cuz I posted the picture and then he must have asked something about it although I don't see his original question yeah it's not perfect how Twitter archives everything but most of the good stuff is still there now while all this is happening in the Houston area and I got my hands full with what
I'm doing back home in southeast North Carolina and indeed the southeast coast as a whole they are dealing with invest
area 92L it was a disturbance that moved
out of the southeast Gulf if I recall across Florida now it was well on its way to developing and I'm like I can't believe it and so I posted let's see what time this was first of all uh 1:30
that afternoon Sunday the afternoon I said uh peeps back in North Carolina etc
92l is well on its way to developing i'm going to be in Houston and won't get back in time but keep an eye on it i
hate missing these things right but there was nothing that uh nothing I could do so yeah we'll get back to 92L
because there's an interesting tweet coming up um as I did my homework for all this I saw it oh I remember that tweet there's an irony to it you'll you'll hear um so different people are
asking me about the camera there in
Ireland because the water is getting higher and higher and we're starting to hear things banging into the pole the steel pole that it was on again I think it was this don't walk apparatus so
probably like a 6-in steel pole however high it was whatever um I know I took
pictures of it eventually we'll probably get to those on Twitter and I'll save it from when Carrie and I went back and got it later but we'll get to that uh but
anyhow stuff's bumping into the camera box andor the pole because the water has now risen basically 6 feet above the
sidewalk where the camera was because I
put the camera right above my head that was about as high as I could do it just standing there flatfooted Saturday night and I'm 5'8 so

the camera is several inches above me so the lens was about 6 ft above the deck
as they say in this case the deck is the sidewalk so different people are watching obviously on Ustream and um
they were asking you know what was that noise so forth and so on and you know we were sure the camera was going to go underwater you know like it just
really look like oh the water's coming up so fast this thing's done it's going to go underwater and we could only imagine how bad the flooding was in the

Myland area so different people asking where I am so forth and so on um and
then there's a moment here this is Sunday afternoon i'll save this picture a boat uh goes by on the camera this is
picture number 17 it was one of the swiftwater rescue boats you know one of
those thick inflatables um it's kind of hard to see but if you look at the picture right in the middle there's the boat and different rescue boats just different regular you know johnboats would go by from residents in the neighborhoods it
was bizarre it really really was so I
thought well um what I want to do is get

a camera running uh at some point out on

Greenhouse I cannot get to the bridge in
South Maid Creek itself that ship has literally sailed it's way flooded but if

it's just going to keep on flooding and now we're getting close if it comes down Greenhouse all the way back to West Park Row then it could start spilling around
the southern part of Addex Reservoir and it could get close to my hotel so I needed a little bit of a um a watchdog
if you will so I told Carrie I said "At
some point can you come out here if it's
safe and maybe between bands or
something?" Cuz again the rainbands just kept coming and coming um and help me
just come with me to set up a camera
i'll put it on a tree or something maybe a block back down towards West Park Row
i think that would be east so a block east of this one intersection out there that was already flooded beyond South Maid Creek and that would give me I don't know 100 yards buffer that if the water came past the camera you know it's
getting close to uh West Park Row in Greenhouse and we're going to we're going to have some big problems if it starts coming towards me you know I would have to get on I 10 and because I 10 was elevated enough and hopefully just evacuate west go to New Bron Falls
or San Antonio or something i had to start thinking about that and he said you know yep just let me know and if I can get out there I'll do so but man these rainbands here's a picture the
radar scope says 3:39 p.m i'll save this for you this is picture number 18 look at that that just kept going and going and going every one of it was just started Saturday morning before I ever even got there all the way through the afternoon into the evening we've already talked about all that and here we are you know these bands just kept on coming it was ridiculous so then

with all that going on at um 5:00

Eastern time roughly National Hurricane Center puts out potential tropical cyclone 10 because we're up to the 10th event or storm or whatever you call it that it is a weird way that they do that but that's not the topic of today's discussion but it was PTC 10 that might have been the first year they started doing this i don't know but whatever um
PTC10 was up and uh there it was you had
the um and I'll save this little snippet uh screenshot from the hurricane center homepage their uh their track map picture number 19 uh it was right off the Georgia coast
ptc10 forecast to become a tropical storm scrape along the Carolina coastline there and then eventually go on out into the Atlantic and I said um

that 92L which of course is PTC 10 at

this point will soon be Irma and how it
left its mark in Southwest Florida cuz there was a couple pictures that people sent me of some flooding ironically right uh down in Southwest Florida as the disturbance that was 92L moved across Southwest Florida and into the Southwest Atlantic so man and I said this I said you know I'm going to miss it it's unreal and it's still only August but I think the irony of the tweet which I said uh 92L which is soon
to be Irma left its mark in Southwest Florida and the tweet that I referred to is not available cuz the person doesn't have their account anymore years later but the irony of that of course not it did not become Irma it never became a
tropical storm and we all know what happened after that right right so that that was just interesting tweet there uh
it did not become Irma irma's coming later so by the evening people are asking about um you know how things are
looking and what's the forecast so forth and so on um I said how's everybody
doing are we exhausted yet you know need you to hang tough you Harvey still sticks around probably through Wednesday you know the nation is mobilizing to come down i mean we saw it was all over the news it was a national story international story really and um other
people that lived down there said "Yeah this one guy weatherman space that's the Twitter handle yeah Mark it's bad here man i'm out here in Cyprus in a safe spot for now how much more rain is on the way?" And I looked at everything and it was incredible to type these words maybe another 20 in it was It was

unbelievable it really really was now luckily for the time anyway the camera
there in my uh the water did get real
close you could hear the water on the bottom of the box that gurgling sound the the the flood water made it to the bottom of the camera box because yo could hear it you could hear it splashing so it was only about 6 in from
reaching the camera lens itself and then it finally started going down we could just notice by looking at very subtle things and the bands had started to relax just a little bit so I took that
time to do a quick escape down I 10 to

the west and I did I went out to New Bron Falls which was not impacted at all
to speak of uh I went and got some dinner i don't know what it is 2 and a half hours away something like that um straight down 10 and I went to a Target and I got some more supplies is I had to get some socks and I think I got a couple of t-shirts cuz I was running out of dry non-stinky clothes and I got a
bunch of water and things like that um and I came back so it's about a 5h hour driving trip plus 90 minutes for something to eat somewhere shopping at Target and whatever and I came back pretty late Sunday night but I remember as I was driving down 10 out west
through Katy and beyond all these buses
that were coming in I mean it was just bus after bus in a big convoy with Texas

I just call them state trooper you know escort um it was incredible and they
were coming in because they were going to start evacuating people i don't know how many people you can fit on these buses but there was like 20 of them in a row rolling in these black and white buses u and I'm looking at a video of it now that's how I remember it so vividly that That's helpful isn't it but I posted that video on Twitter as I was heading west uh so I did I went out there and had a little bit of a reprieve
um a good hot meal and then I came back and that was what was interesting about this is Houston was not completely cut off but there were areas of it that were
you know so if you were in my stuck yo know there was areas all around some of these bayus as they're called the flood channels uh but Houston was not completely isolated you still had 10 that went through there and the beltways there's several of them but it was really bad i mean trust me it it it wasn't like we were an island there were
ways to get in and out but moving around Houston that was problematic anytime yo needed to get into surface streets yo know if you wanted to go to Friendswood or Sugarland Myand whatever Cypress no
you're not doing it yeah it was just very very difficult and then these bands did keep on coming one after the other after the other so uh I get back from

that it's pretty darn late in to the
night of uh Sunday the 27th and I'm

trying to see when I can figure this out
um when I did this i know I I I wanted
to put the camera up that night uh out
there yeah here we go i'm referring to the buses uh let's see what time I posted this
um saw the buses this is 11:35 that
night so I got back before midnight i was talking to Tim Bruno my friend Bruno there on the Twitter um about the buses
and so forth um and hold on let me just

see what else we got here a couple of interesting tweets from people
um all right so just reading through stuff because I know at some point that night I wanted to get out there and uh
put at least one more camera up and uh

preferably uh out there again uh close

to South Maid Creek where it had spilled out as it was approaching West Park Row
and you know sorry for the like I try to do this in real time i don't know everything off the top of my head and the Twitter as a good guideline for me but I'm reading through everything i'm trying to figure out the timeline of when I did this um so we get into the 27th to the
28th and so yeah I'm standing out uh so

I saw all those buses this is this is why it's important to read through all this this is where it this is where it all comes together okay so I saw the buses as I was heading west several
hours earlier they were all coming east into Houston now it is now after
midnight it's literally just 12:03 i'm standing out in front of my hotel i can see uh the interstate out there from my hotel and there was at least a hundred buses that were still going west out of
Houston so they had come in they obviously rendevued with other buses that I didn't see and they packed up all these evacuees and they headed to San Antonio and then eventually they would go on up to Dallas and so forth cuz I was talking to people on Twitter about this because it was surreal when yo
know again I saw the 12 or 20 whatever it was that came in and then many many hours later I'm just happened to be standing outside and I saw a whole bunch of them leaving the other thing that I saw and I wanted to mention this uh when I when I knew I was going to do this podcast series there were different stories I wanted to make sure I I noted
of very remarkable things uh over my career that really stood out to me and this next little snippet is one of those so remember setting the stage again of where my hotel is it's the Hampton Inn on West Park Row um near Greenhouse over
there near Katy Texas and it's real close to the uh the children's hospital uh it might have a formal name but it's this big hospital very large campus and
they've got a helellipad and all that stuff um and you remember a lot of stuff's flooded airports are flooded bush hobby they're closed done what I
remember so vividly over the course uh

of Sunday evening into late Sunday night
cuz I'm up late you know got work to do and whatever we're we're we're locked in here not much sleep going forward
believe me uh but I noticed um different

cars would pull up SUVs whatever into the the portico thing of the Hampton Inn and um hospital employees would come in and out and they looked like doctors yo know they had the scrubs on and I mean they could have been nurses but you know what does a doctor look like Mark but I just thought and I remember I asked somebody i was like "Hey if you don't mind me asking do you work at that hospital over there?" I know kind of an obvious question and they're like "Yes sir yeah I am i'm a I'm an oncologist or whatever." And I just flew down from um
Dallas or you know from San Antonio whatever i said "Flew down what do yo mean?" I said "You know there's helicopters landing over there." And I remember hearing choppers from you know time to time and I thought it was just news choppers which some of them were or
rescue helicopters that kind of thing but some of them were um just regular

helicopters or I don't think they were like air ambulances but they were fing
through the air doctors in and out of
other big cities so that the doctors

that were and nurses that were at that
hospital either they couldn't get there or they were exhausted and they were yo know starting to get you know it was traumatizing you know and they needed to keep everybody crash so we did we'd had we'd have several hospital personnel coming in and out and every once in a while I'd hear a chopper coming in and I'm telling you it was like right out the door you could see it all you know all I had to do is walk down the street 20 yards and I had a plain view of the
helipad and you would see uh a couple people come out and then they would go into a car and the car a few minutes later would pull into the Hampton Inn and sometimes a couple people would get on the chopper and it would leave and they would take them back to Dallas or San Antonio or whatever the case was but it just all started really hitting me like this is very serious like there's there's children there they've got all kinds of uh problems whatever it is that
you know cancer childhood cancer yo know burn I don't know like and the
personnel you life has to go on everything has to go on and it can't yo know normally so it was just really
bizarre to be in on all this and see it and at the same time in my hotel room
I've got it on the local TV and I'm seeing uh the coverage there from KHOU
and KPRC and others um the press conferences with Jeff

Lindner the uh meteorologist there for the Harris County Flood Control District and how serious it started to look come Sunday night they really started talking about the flood pools Addex Reservoir Barker and what they're doing and yo know possible evacuations and it it just

started getting more and more serious and it was at that time late Sunday night because they were showing big maps that they had printed up in their GIS department and then they had graphics on the screen and I realized at that moment
oh I'm in between these two reservoirs kind of on the corner but yikes like it
it just didn't dawn on me like I told you until that moment and I thought oh wow this is all I need because one of
the most profound things that I heard Jeff Lindner say on that press conference and I thought it was just perfect cuz you got to be honest with people you cannot sugarcoat stuff yo know people say you see it in movies well there's an asteroid coming we can't tell everybody they'll panic i don't know maybe an asteroid coming we would but there are certain situations where I believe you should trust the public that's that's my stance on it and Jeff Lindner and all the different people now look there were probably mistakes made I'm sure i mean humans are not perfect but this was not one of them this this was terrific jeff said when one of the reporters asked about uh Addicts Addicts
Reservoir cuz the worry was that it would keep filling spill over collapse
and then we have an absolute calamity
the likes of which we've never seen thousands of people would die and it would probably be you know a trillion dollars of damage i mean it was it was like a nightmare and so somebody asked you know basically is uh is Addex Reservoir in jeopardy of failing more or
less that's what the reporter asked and instead of Jeff tiptoeing around well he directly said "All I can

tell you right now is that it is currently filling up faster than we can empty it." And I thought that honesty
was spot on and the reporter said "Thank
you." You know okay and then he talked about the different measures different ways they were trying to empty it different spillways and so forth those details I don't recall but I remember
thinking all right so there's different
regions of the floodpool it's not completely like the dam that goes around it is not you know I'll just make a number up 20 ft high all around the wall
the dam is higher on the southeast
corner than it is on the southwest corner so the water tends to sort of pile up over there more farther away from where I was and it kind of backs up from there so it's deeper if I remember
correctly on the southeast side of the floodpool than it is as you go north and west all right is like 109 ft 112 ft or

something i think this is above I remember seeing diagrams and those numbers in there and I know it wasn't like a 100 foot wall of dirt but maybe we're talking about above sea level i don't remember exactly i don't I'm not an engineer but I do know that they had diagrams of it and you would see yo know like where I was it was 10 and something feet and then farther to the south and east it was higher by 10 ft whatever that meant it still had a ways to go but as Jeff said it was filling up
faster than than they could empty it and that was a problem so it was at that moment that I decided all right I'm going to put a couple more cameras out uh and I want to have one down there

along Barker Reservoir so I got on the
Twitter started asking people "What do you think?" Um there's no way to get in touch with Jeff forget it you know and I didn't want to bother him anyway so I said "All right Carrie if you can come up and meet me at the hotel we'll go out

to a greenhouse and put a camera probably on a tree or something right in the middle of the road right on the um it's a four-lane device they got a median down the middle with trees on it." And uh and so I can keep an eye on this flood because if and and this is where it became important like okay if
if Addex Reservoir cuz I'm on the west side of it starts backing up all the way
and it kind of was if you think about it cuz South Maid Creek spills into Addex
Reservoir and it was already spilling out you know as it were but if it got worse or really started to accelerate I'd have a camera there and if we really did start seeing seeing the water flowing you know like a flash flood deal
i was calling 911 like you know I was
probably overwhelmed or I would certainly tweet it and tag everybody I know in the business and I thought this would really in this could truly be like a watchdog an early warning system yo know like if if the southwest corner collapses or anything you know as long as I'm awake uh we'll see it and luckily
since Ustream was public somebody would see it and they would they would put it out there oh my god you know look at the water this is something's happened so I wanted an early warning system i really did i think I thought it could be very beneficial uh for my safety and for everybody else around there I guess so he said "Yep let me figure out how to get there." And you know again the bands were starting to let up a little bit but they were still coming so I said "Well
I'm gonna go ahead on over there because it's literally a mile away or whatever and start working on it." So I drove out
uh I got a camera ready and I drove out
and uh I pulled right up there drove up onto the median there's nobody out there but I just didn't want to be in the road and um you know shine the headlights onto this tree and uh I was like "Yeah
I'll just put a little bracket on there and the camera will be you know 5t above
the grass whatever." I mean literally right there and I'll bungee it and zip
tie it on and uh hopefully it'll work
you know I knew the batteries and everything were were new run 30 hours whatever but you know you got to do what you got to do you got to improvise so I was sitting out there between the bands it was very light rain and just misty and I started working on it and I'm trying to get everything on there and get the the little bracket first it's this little L bracket that supports the weight of the camera when I don't have somebody to hold it for me and so forth and I'm sitting there working and I hear in the distance a gunshot it was clearly
a gunshot and I was like "Oh." I looked
around you know like like a rabbit right who's eating grass look up what is that
and I waited and pow i was like "Oh
that's not good." I was like "hm" and it
sounded like it wasn't too far away off
to my right and there's a little neighborhood over there it's flooded I thought but why is there gunshots and then I heard another one i thought um no no no no no no no
like maybe they think I'm a looter i I like who knows i mean people are starting to stress out and I And I didn't hear anything i didn't hear like pow and then somewhere else close like they're missing me like they're shooting at me but they missed no I didn't hear that but it was unnerving so I got in the the Tahoe i left the camera sitting there on the grass at the tree trunk and I called
Carrie like "Carrie dude you got to get out here soon are you close?" "Yeah I'm on my way." I like "I hear gunshots so when you come down the road put your lights on." He's got these amber lights for the um the amateur radio work that he would do as an emergency coordinator i was like "I'm going to stay here but uh please hurry i needed backup." So it was a few minutes later and he came down i could see his lights and it turned out that it was nothing i mean I don't know who it was what they were shooting at but it was definitely gunshots and so he was there and uh we got the camera running on this uh tree trunk and I tweeted that i said I literally attached the camera to the trunk of a tree and you can see that it is a little bit windy out there and um it was it was swaying just a little bit so got all that set up and um went back to the
hotel and um Carrie decided to just stay
there that night um I had a king bed in
my room so he stayed out on the sofa got a couple hours nap out in the lobby we were by the way fast friends with the staff at the hotel they were terrific got to know people management you know different night workers day workers whatever uh different residents that were there at this point right we all became residents it seemed and I was keeping everybody up to date on the potential of really bad flooding that we
might have to leave quickly get in our vehicles head back out on Barker Cypress
get on I 10 and get the heck out of there like if something started happening to Addicts Reservoir um I was doing the best I could to keep people updated you of course everybody was tuned into the news um and it was
chaotic it was it was like I said in and out with medical personnel um people
were starting to really worry you know this was turning into what we had feared but had never
been through before this is one of those moments where you can say that what we were all experiencing and remember we were only up to Sunday the 27th we're getting ready to go into Monday and uh
it's still going but this was truly an unprecedented event

all right so as Sunday turns into Monday the 27th into the 28th I got some sleep
trying to figure out what I'm going to do Monday now still got a couple cameras I can put out uh before I went to bed though Sunday night I did do another video discussion and I even said yo know this is right off of Twitter that I know it's late but it's time to post another video discussion concerning Harvey and the new tropical system that was out there that of course was PTC 10
off the Carolas and things were just I
mean it was just nuts we even starting to see a little bit of a signal there growing as it were uh that we had get yet another system down in the deep tropics we'll get to that i mean the the
everything was just absolutely climbing in terms of the the heat in the oven so
to speak right the the flood situation in Texas we got a system off the Carolinas more stuff brewing i mean it was just bananas it's one of those things again 2017 stands out as such a
big season for so many people and we
were just getting started this was the beginning of this big siege that was coming so overnight of course I put the
camera out there on that tree trunk uh
right down there on Greenhouse looking towards Maids Creek South Maid Creek and
uh my little early warning system got up in the uh late morning of now Monday the
28th lots of stuff happening social media the news you name it um I looked at that camera and it was a little bit windy out there the center of Harvey still a tropical storm moving over the area still very heavy rain moving in except it wasn't in intense bands
anymore it was more just this large shield of a couple of inches of an hour
of rain but it was certainly not letting up you know we were not seeing an end to this just yet still rain and and occasionally you'd get a thinner not quite as intense band but it was still very much going on and uh then I shared a graphic on the Twitter there uh I said
for my followers back in the Tarhill state not a big problem but it is something we should be prepared for and what that was of course was PTC 10 and
I'm going to save this picture for this is picture number 20 it's an infographic from the National Weather Service Wilmington uh this was just off the Georgia South Carolina coast top winds were 35 it was potentially going to develop that's what that means into a
tropical depression or more it wasn't quite organized enough yet but it was getting there so flood watches were up tropical storm watches and warnings were up the uh excessive rainfall outlook
even had southeast North Carolina in a moderate risk you know if that's severe weather everybody goes crazy oh it's a moderate risk uh I mean it was This is what I'm saying man was bananas it was I couldn't believe that this was happening
you know and it wasn't like the 2017 season was forecast to be this unbelievable hyperactive year remember we just kind of lumbered our way into it it it looked a lot different in April and now here we were at the beginning as I said of of this siege that was coming and Harvey was the start um so one of
the things I wanted to do as I learned more and more about these reservoirs
um we had the Addex Reservoir to my north and then of course the Barker Reservoir to my south and southwest interstate 10 splits those two we know they're both filling and they're they're going up a little bit more than they're being emptied jeff Linder and company they're all working as hard as they can core of engineers Harris County Flood Control District everybody working in concert to try to manage this so one
thing I wanted to do is get a camera up
on Addict's Dam looking at the reservoir

in case it did just keep on filling up
and it overtopped the dam which is basically an earththen levy into the
area where there was all these houses and so forth you know clearly I wanted to be able to to uh watch that as again a part of history
a little bit of an early warning system uh be able to share it with the media the public and and I want to emphasize once more that Ustream and how we were
were able to tie that into our Facebook our YouTube a good friend of mine that I
had known for several years and we started working more and more together sort of behind the scenes during Harvey was Mike Cornelius from Orlando uh he's
a programmer for a big gaming company
and uh so he knew a lot of back-end stuff and he helped out with some things we were able to get these feeds out for
anybody to watch and of course they were monetized so I'd at least earn a little bit of income i mean I got to be able to pay the bills right um but they were starting to get a lot of notice out there from people in the weather service people at the National Hurricane Center even more you know folks in the media it
it was this project started to really
gain traction and we'll talk about how that helped things evolve as I move through here all right so this next idea that I had I got to get a camera i still had a few of them with me there's uh a couple
of them deployed the one down in Myland on Braise Bayo which is going to run out fairly soon here and the flood waters there at least were level if not coming down and then I had the tree cam up on Greenhouse monitoring South Maid Creek which of course as I've said has already spilled out now I want to take a third cam and put it on the Addex Dam and keep

an eye on the reservoir so I went over to Highway 6 and that's a pretty big highway it goes up and over the dam and then across Addex Reservoir out into yo

know northern northwest areas uh beyond
and and Highway 6 is a pretty big thoroughare that cuts through the west side of Houston uh between Memorial City
and Katy so I get up there to Highway 6

they don't have it blocked off or anything there's no reason to now what I'm going to do for this picture because um it's video but what I'm going to do is take a screenshot this will be picture number 21 and show you what this looked like so

picture number 21 uh is Highway 6 okay and it's underwater

like feet of water it's not even close

and it was coming up so like if yo drive up over the dam because again it's a big levy and highway six goes up and over it and then you come down into the reservoir uh the the reservoir Addex Reservoir was coming creeping up the road and they had
no barricades of any kind no like road

closed nothing because duh you know I
mean really like I I kind of liked that i thought that was perfect why close it
off when you can clearly see it is
underwater you know like common sense should prevail and you know nobody was going to drive over there nobody should even be driving around anyway now that
being said it was very easy for me to
come down West Park Row which is just to

the north I think it would be it's always hard to figure out the orientation of how Texas works because the coastline is oriented southwest to northeast it's just weird but anyway I could work my way down West Park Row from my hotel and it's only a couple miles down West Park Row which was just
south of Addex Dam so it's dry you know there's no flooding there and then yo get to Highway 6 and it was really easy to do so very few people out you know so
it was it was easy to get around so I drove up there and I knew exactly what I

had to do i had to get that camera running so there was a um I don't know
some kind of a utility pole not sure it
was just some metal pole steel pole few inches in diameter it met the the qualifications for being a mounting platform and I got that camera running and it's looking west down the reservoir right
straight down Addex Dam and it was going
to show us what was happening and yo could see and I'll save a picture of this too uh when we get to the the screenshot of it eventually i'm sure it's in there somewhere that'll be picture number 22 and if I don't have it handy I'll find it and you should see what its view was all right so picture number 21 is the screenshot showing the
view of Highway 6 that I took with my iPhone all right picture number 22 is
going to be a picture that the camera had looking down Addicts Dam looking
down the reservoir towards the west and you'll notice there's all these apartments back there they're just densely built and they're on the south

side of the floodpool so they're not built in the floodpool but if Addex Reservoir overtopped the dam Addex Dam

and spilled down in there it's game over it would be the cataclysm you know like it would it would rank right up there with anything in US history world history probably we
didn't even want to think about it but we had it i sent the link to Jeff Lindner other people in media so forth and so on at least we could monitor i had 30 hours that this camera would run
all right so as I'm on my way back down

to the hotel again going back west down
West Park Row I come across Barker
Cypress Road which also goes up over the

dam but Barker Cypress Road when yo
come over the dam you come down and there's neighborhoods in there and there's apartments there's retail there's a gas station car repair place you know that they have built into the southwest part of Addex Reservoir i talked about that in one of the previous blocks and I could see all of this activity going on people parked along the the sides of the road going up and over the dam and people coming out and
they were carrying stuff luggage clothes

and some people were notably uh crying
like you could it looked like you yo could tell they were upset and I realized and there was people driving up with boats uh big rubber boats some of
them were little bass boats whatever the case may be and I thought "Oh this is
something's happening." So I parked in
uh a nearby hotel parking lot along West
Park Row there it's a couple hotels that were parallel or or whatever to to my hotel the Hampton Inn and I walked up over the dam to look down into the floodpool and to see what was going on and it was just an instantaneous oh my god like h like no

I've I got to cover this and I didn't
have time to go get another camera running i felt like this is breaking news um something bad is happening here
i've got to cover it so I get to the
Tahoe drive over to greenhouse i probably texted Carrie and I'm like I got to relocate the greenhouse road camera it's already running and I'm going to put it inside the floodpool on Barker Cypress Road the water was
already coming up like it had made it to

almost to the dam and it was filling and
again I can't show you a video here and and by the way I want to mention because I will certainly mention it later and I'll put a link to it there is of course a full documentary on 2017's hurricane season
tracking the hurricanes 2017 and all of
this video is in there but of course these are the exquisite details that you get
outside of said documentary that's what this podcast is for all right the details behind all that stuff so uh yo
you you do want to see it i mean it is I'll never forget that just looking down in there and thinking dude this this is all filling up there's like this whole world north of the dam of all these
people that are uh having to evacuate
and deal with this and then to the south of it everything's quote unquote normal
i mean it's raining and a little bit of ponding water but there's this disaster unfolding on the other side of this wall basically this flood wall you know the dam so I went down West Park row turned
right on Greenhouse uh drove up to where the camera was on the tree and the water was coming on down greenhouse but again it wasn't too rapid so I wasn't too worried but I just felt like this is a bigger story so I unclipped everything zip ties bungee cords whatever and uh put the camera in
the Tahoe right up on the dashboard live
it's still running and took it
down to uh back to Barker Cypress Road so I
turned left off of West Park Row onto
Barker Cypress and got into the line of
all these cars that were paralleled there were rescue people i mean there was all news media um and and you know

gathered everything I needed zip ties bungee cords the L bracket the Gorilla tape the lock and chain i had to have everything with me and and this is huge

huge huge huge i put my hip waiters on
that Carrie and I had gotten in 2015 for

the flooding that came in with the remnants of Patricia i had those with me
and I put those on and again that comes all the way up to uh my hips so the
entirety of my legs are covered and these are good thick hip waiters i put
those on i get everything ready it's raining it's windy it's not that excessive 6 in an hour rain thank goodness but it was still raining pretty steady and I grabbed the camera i grabbed all my stuff i had a raincoat on got my iPhone with me locked the Tahoe
and then I started walking up the
incline there it's not too steep but I walked up the incline that that yo reach the top and there's the top of the dam and I come down the other side and I
start walking into the flood and the
water is just flowing across the road

filling up as South Maid Creek and all
this rain and however else the dam fills up or or the reservoir fills up luckily I hadn't reached the top of the dam yet but that's what I was wanting to monitor everything's filling up and you could you could see it i took video of it oh my goodness it was just remarkable and
all these people are walking with their
stuff you know you get a small group two or three people somebody by themselves they were evacuating and if
they couldn't drive out they just had to walk their stuff out because everything behind them was flooded all the apartments back there this was bad and I

could see the effects like this was this
was not a drill as they say this is not a movie set this was real and I walked

up i'm trying to figure out where am I going to put this camera so I keep going up a block two blocks and I get to this intersection there's a gas station there and there's a good lamp pole you know light pole steel light pole and uh I don't know it's probably 10 in um across
you know nice big thick one and um that was it i was like "This is where I'm going to put the camera." So I put the box down the camera case down it's still running the whole It's just running the whole time and I put the L bracket on had to dry off the lamp post a little bit or whatever it was the steel pole uh to get the Gorilla tape to
stick i put the L bracket on and then I
held the camera in place with my head got the bungee cords you know I did everything I needed to do got the zip ties on tighten that thing down put the chain on there with the lock and yo know so nobody walks off with it and a few people came over like "What is that?" I was like "Oh it's a camera it's going to monitor the flood it should run for I don't know about another 20 hours or so because the um the the time it was
on greenhouse had already eaten up about 10 hours so I knew I'm probably going to have to get back in here you know before this runs out and switch the batteries out to get another 30 hours and so at
some point I'm going have to come back over here so I got that thing set up got it running told the Weather Channel Tom up there in Atlanta I mean this thing's on Ustream it's out there for anybody to
see and it was just this moment and I

even tweeted that i said "This is incredible to see."
And I just kind of stood there i took some some video um and just looking
around just taking it all in there's people on mattresses their own rafts their like it
was it was like nothing I had ever
experienced before and so I just kind of stayed for a little while walking around checking things out like taking it in like witnessing this disaster and I felt like sort of this

overwhelming sense of sadness that yo
know this is going to change things for
so many people and just on the other side of the dam it's fine you know like

again there's puddling of water but
restaurants are open some you know a few of them life is it's not normal but
inside this flood pool and I started thinking why are people even why did they build in here what is going on like
it really was very confusing how could
this be happening you we are in the floodpool why are there structures here you know it started really sinking in and uh I walked out went back to the
Tahoe and just kind of sat there feeling just kind of melancholy as they say kind of depressed like you know what is
happening like did these people know it
just a lot of feelings came up that yo
know this is not right it just wasn't it just it didn't feel good this shouldn't be happening and uh I went back to the hotel and just kind of gathered my thoughts maybe uh
called home or something i don't recall but it definitely affected me it shook me as they say right and I just kind of
thought you know wow this is this is just not I don't like this
you know this is it's not fun anymore and you know what I mean by that like this is as close to hitting home as it
can because families are being affected
and I was glad to be documenting it i was glad to be able to have these cameras out that people could see what's happening and I was very glad that it was out there on social media uh for people to be able to watch because they appreciated it people that had loved ones there you name it so that camera
stays there and all kinds of people are
tuning in hundreds and hundreds of people watching online if not thousands and more and more people taking notice uh a lot of people sort of
congratulating me and thanking me how important this is and boy you've come a long way with it um it was just nice and
I kept thinking you know we have to do
something with this uh we got to make this bigger we got to be able to just cover everything and do more and get
better at it and you know we're going to need more funding you know this I I got a little bit of a relationship with the Weather Channel it wasn't permanent there was not a contract so to speak um I don't really have a big sponsor or partner like I did with Lowe's we're kind of in this in between i've got the app but it's a pain in my rear end and it doesn't really make a lot of money like what are we going to do like I do have a a foundation of supporters and a lot of fans out there so I was just starting to think about it you know maybe maybe we can really do more with
this crowdfunding idea with Patreon
because I had started Patreon um in uh 201617 somewhere around there
but just didn't really do a lot with it yet had a few members but the wheels
just really started turning because of all this that you know we're doing well the we that we had me Carrie was
helping Todd you know this little rag tag team if you will doing the best we can what if we had I in my world what we would consider unlimited funding you know not millions of dollars i'm not looking for a a startup you know like a tech startup deal hey we're going to go to Silicon Valley and we're going to raise hundreds of millions of dollars no I just needed enough to not be restricted and to be

able to have the best technology and maybe get some more people to help out in the field and you know let's let's let's make this bigger and better and we
can affect that word with an a affect
people in such positive ways like this
really started that so that sort of bad feeling I had turned into a positive
that you just think about what we could do with this if we put even more into it and the bottom line is it takes money to get things to happen that's just the way it is either donating equipment i thought about that we could get people to crowdsource and crowdfund equipment
and anyway it just set off a little a little bit of a spark all right so
picture number 23 let's see what uh time this was this is
the evening time now on the 28th 9:30

wow uh picture number 23 is a radar
scope screenshot and again it's not quite as
bad as it was certainly but we're almost
through day three here and you know if
you take a look at this this picture the screenshot that I saved of of radar scope from Freeport all the way down at
the coast up to Galveastston Texas City through Pasadena
Houston north up to Spring southwest to
Sugarland you name it all of Southeast Texas still just socked in to all this
rain just a steady heavy rain one or two

inches an hour just raining and raining
and raining and we were getting miserable you know we well I'm visiting

obviously but you know what I mean like it was really starting to get old and
watching these cameras now we're up to the nighttime and we get into the 29th
of August Tuesday the 29th
ironically that day the 28th and this is what was really special about all of this on the 28th of August
2005 the very first major hurricane

landfall live streaming remote cam
deployment was made in the history of the world and no one has ever proven me wrong and I have certainly looked and I still believe that uh we were the first
Watkins Mike Watkins and myself uh and that was in Gulfport Mississippi for Katrina in fact that night of the 28th of 2017 I did a little screenshot off of our YouTube documentary of it and I'll save that picture as picture number 24 it's a grainy not very good picture
but there it is nevertheless and the tweet was 12 years ago right now
Watkins Track that's his Twitter handle Mike Watkins and I began to set out the first camera system for Hurricane Katrina it weighed roughly 80 lb in the

picture you can kind of see there's me
there's the steel light pole on Highway 49 and Gulfport the camera box is down
there wedged between the concrete bottom of the light pole and this planter this concrete square planter the black Pelican case and then there's like a little gray box on top of it that had the barometer and the weather station in it from Davis all that the battery everything weighed about 80 pounds so my next tweet was coming now 12 years later this night

two camera systems are operating uh I
guess the Maryland one had gone ahead
and run out of batteries by now that makes sense so we have two operating to cover the historic flood in Houston and they weigh each of them weighs you know individually less than 5 lbs and they run for about 32 hours so
even in just 12 years we had come a long way you know uh so we get into those

late night hours uh I'm just hanging out at the hotel watching the cameras um

especially the one there inside of Addex

Reservoir on Barker Cypress Road because all the lights were still on you know there was no power outage the one up on Addict's Dam looking down the reservoir there were some lights but not enough to really see and of course the news media the tweets everything coming out from Jeff Jeff Lindner and Harris County Flood Control District luckily the
reservoirs were not rising rapidly and the rain rates were coming down it looked like we were going to get out of this without one of these reservoirs failing and the whole thing collapses it was a little dicey there for a day but it didn't look quite as grim as we got into the late night of the 28th into the 29th so lots and lots of tweeting and talking

to people engagements online people just so impressed with this project you know and really it getting the recognition I think that it deserved after all these years uh with
different ups and downs and so forth but you know being able to capture this in a
metropolitan area like Houston
uh was just very very important and I wanted to make sure people understood that I was not just about the sensational coastal shots of the worst
surge the highest wind and that's it the
so-called money shots you know that this
project was for the long hall it's for all the impacts the inland flooding
obviously the coastal stuff i mean the surge cams were what they were kind of initially known as remote cams surge cams you know whichever you prefer or I
preferred or what whatever right but it it was working and we had a big audience
lots and lots of people national coverage um and we were still the only people doing this even after 12 years

to my knowledge no one had been setting out these cameras like this you know it was still kind of difficult and you know
like I just it I couldn't believe it like we still had the monopoly on it but it was also important that it was working and it was serving a purpose and it was just really fulfilling to get to
that point and have all this engagement on Twitter about it so as we move along
way in the late night hours there lots of different pictures I'm putting out um and I'll save these for you this is nice it says subtle but steady rise in the water levels along Barker Cypress Road where numerous people have been evacuated by boat and big trucks so I'm
going to save these pictures for you the first one picture number
25 is the sort of before picture during the daytime and picture number 26 is
what it looked like late at night there when I did the screenshot and the water had clearly come up uh a couple more feet it is definitely gradually rising
but luckily it wasn't rapid and so forth
now one thing that I had done that I don't have any I'm trying to look in here um when did this happen was it the
29th yeah okay i knew it was coming i just couldn't remember exactly when but that's what the Twitter timeline helps me figure out so this actually be good to take another break here as we get into the 29th um but uh yeah so
overnight in the 28th continuing to monitor everything wondering when will it all end hopefully all of this will finally uh start to abate uh but it's

definitely not over yet and I'm just kind of going through and uh reading all this so we get into the 29th and I'll wrap this block up here um let's see what time my first tweet was when I woke up oh I was still up at 1:00 in the morning tweeting to people um so I go to
bed and you know again what is the world
going to look like what's it all going to look like when I get up on the 29th
and um also we're starting to see more
and more chatter about another system
out there that had come off of Africa a
big tropical wave big pouch of energy and that was starting to rear its head
that we might go from Harvey straight to
another system in very short

order all

right back with you now stories from the hurricane highway continuing as we get to the last segment here of the Hurricane Harvey saga we are up to August 29th 2017 and uh again it's 12 years to the
day since Katrina made landfall and we
are now dealing with another epic tragedy and uh many many tens of
billions of dollars of damage lives ruined lives lost just a calamity of epic
unimaginable proportions unfolding and
I'm in the middle of it documenting absorbing it observing you know
remembering and just like this was part of what I wanted to do when I wanted to study hurricanes the full impact again
like I said in the last block not just at the coast and here we were so the
first tweet of August 29th 2017 the sun
begins to rise as the water does the same here along Barker Cypress Road and
it was a reference to the camera and I
got to say again how awesome it was to
be able to just put these out there and if a million people had tuned in great
the Ustream infrastructure their cloud system it's called a content delivery network they could handle it you know that was fine and it was such an honor it really was to be able to just share it with everybody and uh because it was

important it really was and we even put the attics camera the addicts reservoir camera off on the dam on the Facebook page for easy sharing uh Cornelius
really helping out with that so
um the water luckily wasn't rapidly
rising which was you know clearly a good thing but I will save a couple of uh shots for you here this was from the
first shot would be from 5:00 p.m and luckily I annotated these when I posted them way back then so picture number 27

is 5:00 p.m on August the 28th along the
Barker Cypress Road from that camera and
then the second picture that I'm saving of this little series here picture number 28 is 8:00 a.m roughly the time I
got up and started taking a look at everything and clearly the water had come up several feet uh but it wasn't by

now it was I think evident that it was not going to over top the the uh the dam
and if you look at the picture especially the 8 a.m picture you can
clearly see down the road and then yo you can tell at the end of the picture there you go up and over the dam and and
once more I want to also try to draw your attention to the fact that where we are here the dam is lower in elevation

and so if you're looking at this picture and if you're not looking at it I'll try to describe it again the attics dam it's an earththen levey it It's not uniform
you know it's not like it's 15 ft high from the ground up all around it for
whatever reason they built it in so that one corner was higher than everything else so the water I guess would all go to that it's it's engineering i don't know but where we are here it is lower

than farther to the uh east I guess um

but that being said uh it was still flooding pretty significantly backing up into all those houses and so forth and the water was still rising don't get me wrong it just didn't look like it was going to do enough to over top i think that a couple of the spillways were having some issues maybe you know there there were some problems but we weren't looking at total failure where they're going to have to figure out how to evacuate hundreds of thousands of people or you know some calamity like that like it was bad but it could certainly have been worse so
um I'm trying to figure out also when
I'm going to leave you know uh I got

this other system coming i've been here for a while we're up to the 29th and
just trying to figure things out so I even tweeted that i said I'm still in Houston but that may change later today we shall see i have prepare prepared a
video discussion for today so what I want to do I'm going to find that discussion on YouTube and let's just
play a couple minutes of it and see what I was talking about let's see what time this was this would have been around 9:00 in the morning on August 29th 2017

good morning Mark with hurricanetrack.com here with your hurricane outlook and discussion for Tuesday August 29th 2017 i am still in

Houston Texas where I have set up two camera systems one on the Addex Reservoir which is the subject of a lot of attention today and for the next several days more than likely and another camera over on Barker Cypress Road please be sure to visit my Twitter
Hurricane Track for those links uh they are streaming on Ustream they also are streaming in our app so if you have our app Hurricane Impact you can check the
video section and they are linked in there and they will stay up for most of

the day the one on Barker Cypress Road
will likely run out of batteries in the next few hours but the one on Addex Reservoir should go until nightfall tonight just want to make you aware of that then we have our system out here

93L that looks poised to develop into our next hurricane the global models are jumping all over this and if we look at the 5-day forecast for u these systems
here you get an idea that's what this looks like uh moving into the Atlantic the open tropical Atlantic and then of course it'll all come down to what kind of highway and you know off-ramp system

is out here is it going to be something like this will there be more to the west or as some of the models are showing more towards this way uh in the long long range so obviously we're going to be watching this and as Harvey the storm

fades away and certainly not the story uh once Harvey the storm fades away our
attention will definitely be on this next system off the coast of Africa so
Harvey still a tropical storm and it actually was back out over the Gulf of Mexico and forecast to hang around for
several more days eventually making landfall in southwest Louisiana so it had come across died off came back
became a category 4 made landfall down there near Rockport milled around over the central inland areas of Texas and
then finally got back offshore redeveloped into a tropical storm and was going to eventually head back into Louisiana with even more heavy rain what a legacy this thing was it was just extraordinary and we weren't done and to
that end I knew that I had to go ahead and start looking at a time to to leave Houston because I'd been here for a long time resources are starting to run out
and I got to get home we got to see what this next system might do that's way off the coast i talked about that in the the video discussion there you know off the coast of Africa that would go on to become Irma of course yeah I had to be ready for everything but I wanted to
keep watching the Barker Cyprus camera

as long as I could so the idea was to take a couple of batteries go back over there walk through the flood water again and switch out the batteries i wanted to at least get that done uh before the end
of day on the 29th so before I did that though um I'll save a couple pictures
here we were still certainly watching the uh Addex Reservoir cam up on the dam
not a lot of of change on this one thankfully but this is that shot I was telling you about and um I want you to go if you can look at this please do
because you can clearly see the reservoir the dam the earth and dam and then all these apartments and you know
it came kind of close like the water is not supposed to be there at all the floodpool filled up it did what it was designed to do but this was a very close call so the first picture was from uh the afternoon of the 28th by the way this is picture number 29 4:45 p.m on
the 28th that's the first picture and the second picture is 8:40 a.m on the 29th the water had come up a few feet it's hard to tell I know but if you look at them back and forth back and forth you'll see it picture number 30 is from August the 29th and uh you know the water definitely had come up some um I
mean several feet in fact there's these fence posts in the shot there's one two

three of them and the one on the uh 28th
is right there at the water's edge and then if you go to the shot of the 29th that one's underwater it's It's submerged and now the second fence post
the middle fence post it's almost in the water's edge so that was a pretty good literal marker of how to keep track of
this but that's the thing i I wasn't sure you know are we completely out of this mess and going to avoid an absolute
beyond imagination catastrophe or what
so I wanted to make sure I before I left that I at least had uh the Barker Cypress Cam reloaded with some new batteries and I would go ahead and try to leave on the 30th and Carrie could go
pick stuff up he could work with Todd once things uh dried out and he could grab the cameras and um and rescue them
you know from where they were located and we only had a couple out there uh as it were so um I went back over down West Park Row

got back up on the uh the sort of the on-ramp if you will to go up over Barker Cyprus you know the dam there Addicts Dam and into the reservoir and boy I'm telling you what um it was a completely different scene like I got there there's a big line of cars i parked in the parking lot of the hotel all kinds of military vehicles
those big what do they call them like a deuce and a half you know where they can go through the flood water um National Guard was there police fire rescue s yo know swiftwater lots and lots and lots of people so I head out there let's see what time this was uh this would be
10:40 in the morning on the 29th of
August and I said on Twitter FYI I'm
going to switch the batteries own the Barker Cypress camera so if you see it go offline for a few minutes that is why
I didn't want people to freak out uh so there I am i'm in there and uh I just
take lots of pictures and lots of video with my phone because it was wild and
just look at some of these picture number 31 one of those high water rescue
vehicles moving through the flood water going in to get people out there was even a helicopter that came in there's a video of that that I posted and they were rescuing people that just couldn't get out you know like it just I don't
know that it was necessarily life-threatening but people just they were stuck i mean it was life-threatening if you were not able to walk through it all but people were literally going by on mattresses
um floating whatevers again it was more
and more people cuz the water was still gradually coming up and I'm walking around in there and I took video and posted it of just how nasty the water was it had that sheen on it like oil and

gasoline and it's murky and just But I

got those hip waiters on and I'm here to tell you I didn't get so much as a drop of water on my skin you have to avoid that you really really do that could be
very very dangerous but you know I
switched the batteries out and I'm just watching all these people dragging their
possessions behind them um it was again

one of those touching moments that thinking about all the families that were having to deal with this and these are working people they're living in these apartments they're just trying yo know I don't know what in the world any
developer or real estate or anybody hey where are we well this is a flood pool what is that ah don't worry about it like how do those conversations even go
it's ridiculous i And I felt so bad for these people and here's a great picture one of the alltime telltale like yo
talk about a picture that sums it all up this is picture number 32 and it's right from the iPhone i'm in the flood water
and it's just all the search and rescue people waiting for those that are coming out of the flood i'm looking back towards Addict's Dam and you can clearly see the rise of how the levy goes up or the earthn whatever you call it and that's just a great shot you know I'm not a a photographer it's not going to be on the cover of Life magazine or anything like that but for me that's my
Harvey shot like oh my gosh like and and
it was still happening you know the water was moving around it was still maybe not threatening to go over again
and just flood all of Houston but it was so bad inside these neighborhoods uh it
was just a very touching thing once again and I I said that seeing children
consumed by fear and uncertainty it's on
their faces and it was really hard for

me to digest uh and here's another one
uh this is a great picture i said "People are coming together all kinds colors nationality you name it they're helping." And it was just look at this picture this is extraordinary uh I had to like stand back and zoom in um on the iPhone there
to get this shot picture number 33 just literally dozens if not maybe a

hundred people uh waiting to help waiting to receive
people there was the grassroots efforts
church organizations that were coming in and they had warm clothes they had food
they had water they had hotel lodging buses lined up i mean there was a concerted effort there really was and the response was very very heartwarming
in what was otherwise a very heartbreaking um you know situation it really was so

uh there was also pets people asked me
could I tweet out uh maybe people could
bring some some food and snacks for pets people were evacuating their pets so I said "If you're an animal lover please bring out for help uh dog biscuits treats water whatever you can do for the furry friends of ours you know that would be great." Um so people were evacuating and it was just about time
for me to do the same you know that I had done just about as much uh as I
could do and it would be time to go by the 30th so I said on Twitter I'm going to leave the Addex Reservoir cam running until uh just before nightfall uh of the
29th there i believe this is a Tuesday now the 29th and uh I would plan on
leaving on the 30th and so um it starts

to uh get dark and I go out and uh get

the camera uh off of Addict's uh dam uh

after just after sunset it was a beautiful sunset i remember that uh kind of a purple sky the clouds were finally
breaking most of the energy from Harvey was now moving up into the Northwest Gulf heading into Louisiana and it
looked like I could finally get out of there uh on the 30th so I finally get uh

another good night's sleep pack everything up and it's it's pretty much time to go uh so I I I do just that i
get up on the 30th and I make my way to
meet Carrie um down at the Myland camera cuz I can

get there the water had come down enough and so I meet him over at um Bray's
Bayou and were able to go get the camera
but I'm just looking through everything here through my timeline i did want to save um this shot this is cool this is
the um the sunset from that camera yeah

there it is this is the 29th uh heading into the 30th i do want to save this for you sorry I'm just trying to make sure I got everything covered picture number 34 that is the sunset and um I remember how
vivid it was and uh once the sun got
below the horizon those clouds that yo see in the shot they lit up with this like purple and then like an amber
auburn color whatever it was just phenomenal um but yeah so we get into

the 30th and it's time for me to uh to

go and we uh Carrie and I went over to

the um the Myland camera there on Brazo

we got that one that was pretty easy to do water had come down several feet and
then we went back up to Highway Six because we could finally get over there and it was still under so many feet of water i'll save this picture for you too what a great shot really underscores what I was telling you there there's Highway 6 and you can see the road sign and there's a boat under it
and it's not that much higher than the
the the head of the people in the boat these are just different folks out there i don't know what maybe they were rescuing people from neighborhoods back there who knows but uh gosh what what a

just amazing uh very disturbing oh this

is Wow speaking of disturbing so that
was um the picture I just saved wow i can't

believe I I found this picture I just saved was 35 this is 36 so there you go

good old Google Street View to the rescue um check out literally the same view on
street view i forgot that Google even way back in 2017 had this capability so

that's what it looks like uh you got the flooded picture and then what it looks like on a sunny day i tried to approximate it as best I could as yo can see there the Google Street View shot that I saved you'll see how much water there was there's actually somebody walking on the Google shot that's amazing anyway um I got to get out of there i
got all the cameras uh that I could i want to leave Barker Cypress running because it's still flooded in there carrie and I couldn't get in there even if we wanted to and they had closed it off at this point they didn't want anybody going in and looting and whatnot again inside the flood pool of Addex Reservoir what the heck right um but it was a challenge to get out of there really was and uh um I said on Twitter

as I said I'm I'm ready to leave Houston it said "Time to head out of the Houston area to make my way back to North Carolina uh there is much to be done." Yeah no kidding and then my next tweet was Take the Long Way Home by Super you know like yep that's a great song by the way and that was exactly that's where we were headed it was going to be a a difficult journey i had to weave my way around Houston
uh get through Louisiana it took a while

uh going through southwest Louisiana uh
more flood water there wasn't nearly as bad as you could imagine um and finally
just sort of this uh glimpse of the future as the Harvey at least my role in
the Harvey saga was coming to an end more and more people asking how they can support this project uh this woman named
Carla said you know throw it out there so people can know how to donate to your work you're awesome and have been for a long time and people wanted to help and we had our
Patreon which was just starting just
getting there had a few members and remember Patreon is a monthly thing yo
know that's set up as a sustaining foundation and we were just starting to crack that egg so to speak you know like all right and we did have our PayPal uh that people could donate

to on PayPal and uh you know directly 10
bucks 50 bucks whatever every little bit helped and I had the hashtag crowdfunding works but people were
actively asking me how they could help
they really appreciated what I was doing and saw the potential of it as we went forward so um I got out of there this is

funny here's a picture of me i'll save this it's so random i just took a selfie
and uh put it out there it's like all right here I am this is what it look like after several days of starting to grow a beard i I must not have brought a razor with me I guess i don't know um and uh I was ready to go so I had to
work my way around the belt line like I said it was crazy getting out of there get into Southwest Louisiana and uh get through uh Texas

and I just started going back through Twitter and figuring everything out finally get into Louisiana at the border area there uh and I'm going to stay
trying to remember where did I stay that night it i don't think it was Lake Charles it might have been No it was Alexandria i remember I stayed in Alexandria Louisiana that night uh but
this picture here this is August 30th 2017 and this is from 7:30 in the evening picture number 38 it's a radar scope shot and it's still raining like I
had caught up with Harvey again it had
made landfall it was in southwest Louisiana and uh I was trying to weave
my way through all that shenanigans and get to Alexandria i got there got a good
night's sleep kind of trying to unwind
everything and that's that's a lot to process it is there's I saw so much been
through so much there was a lot of uh
positives a lot of um negatives in terms
of people's lives you know and how that affected me and at the same time there's

more and more chatter and discussion and anxiety that

there's another one coming way out in the deep tropics it's going to be 93 L is the invest number for what will become Irma so the 31st of August we wrap up the month of August i go start to make my way home you know in earnest like I'm gonna get on the interstate and start really hitting it and I stopped in
Baton Rouge and I had lunch with uh a
family that had been longtime fans and supporters of the site and my work and
um I'll keep their names private because I haven't cleared it with them to mention that one of the uh the husband in the family he's a prominent doctor so we'll just leave it uh anonymous if if you don't mind but I met with them just
and we went to Red Lobster i was I I was on a Red Lobster thing uh for a number
of years but anyway it's neither here nor there but I do remember yes I know it's so weird sorry but I went to Red Lobster met them hey I needed some seafood what can I say and I know you're like "Dude seafood red Lobster Louisiana what are you doing it's just me all right take it or leave it uh but we had a good lunch at Red Lobster just yo know got to kind of debrief a little bit
which was very helpful actually it was therapeutic um just a tremendous awesome
family uh this husband and wife and they had some grown children and they lived in Baton Rouge and were very much keen in on hurricanes believe me and that was it uh we parted ways and it was nice to
see them and I drove uh several more
hours and um made it home on September 1st rolling

in in the evening hours and I remember
some of the energy and just leftovers of
Harvey had finally made its way that far east to the Carolinas just some scattered thunderstorms like a loose feeder band you know nothing significant but I remember coming on home in uh off
the interstate Interstate 95 to where Highway 74 is that goes east into Wilmington and there was a big uh
display of lightning you know this little narrow band had set up and I had
my drone of course and I put the drone up for like 20 minutes just watching this lightning and did a time lapse of it and so forth and I thought wow like
this hurricane season we are already yo

know Harvey's come and gone i mean it's obviously the disasters was going to linger for a while in Houston but now we got this new one coming and the next name is Irma and boy oh boy did it look
like it was going to be one of those ones where we just knew somebody's going
to take this on the chin you know we're not just had the look and so we wrap up
everything i get home i had a few days
and then I'd have to start getting ready for what would be another legendary topshelf you know like one of
those ones it was just one after the other there in 2017 and we'll start dealing with Irma in the next episode all right so that is it that is it for the Harvey saga again I want to refer you to our YouTube channel and on our hurricane track insider site we do have the documentaries tab that you can click
on and they're all listed there so it's easy it's like a playlist it's got like like our own little Netflix going on right if only uh but we do have a pretty good gallery now a pretty good library of documentaries and tracking the hurricanes 2017 is in there and the uh
the Harvey chapter is uh just something
else and really good music I did for it so I invite you to take a look at that if you haven't seen it and if you have seen it watch it again you know why not and you can you know put everything together that I just told you here in this monumentally long uh podcast episode of Stories from the Hurricane Highway and with that being said again as always I appreciate you tuning in to Stories from the Hurricane Highway and thanks for your support as well and your feedback i am Mark Sith your host i'll
be back with you real soon

heat heat