An Olds resident who was stranded in Houston for four days by Hurricane Harvey says Florida residents seem to have learned a lesson from the damage inflicted there and took warnings to prepare or get away from Hurricane Irma seriously.
Irma slammed into Florida Sept. 9 and 10. Hurricane Harvey hit Texas on Aug. 25. Houston is just inland from the Gulf Coast.
"I think people probably learned," Brien McDonald says. "But the tough part is the expectations, because you just don't expect to be inundated with that much water. And it's insidious how water flows to the low spots and just starts to build up."
McDonald works periodically in Houston and happened to be there when the hurricane hit. He was stranded for four days.
Luckily for him, when he's there, McDonald lives in a fourth-floor walk-up apartment. The water rose about three feet, but up where he lives, he was certainly in no danger of being flooded out.
"We got the warning it was coming and we knew that there was going to be some heavy winds and rain," he says. "But I had a bunch of meetings scheduled for right up to the end of the week, so it was tough for me to get away.
"By that time, there were no flights. They had shut all the flights down, so essentially the only way out would have been to drive out -- to just try and get out of the traffic and whatnot, which was just not worth attempting.
"That was my thought at the time. I may have had second thoughts once I realized just what was going to happen," he adds with a laugh.
It wasn't fun being cooped up like that, McDonald says.
"By the end of Day 2, I was ready to jump off the balcony, but the water was so deep around the bottom of the building, I didn't want to chance it," he says.
So McDonald rode out the storm safely and so did his neighbours, as far as he knows.
"My boss had a house in the Sugarland area of Texas that he thought was going to get whacked pretty good because most of the neighbouring houses were under, oh, 10 feet of water," McDonald says.
"But for some reason, his was on a bit of a high spot, a little bit of knoll if you like, and he didn't get whacked."
"But it was bad down here. To be honest, you have no idea how much water was running," McDonald says.
"Once we were finally able to get out, you could see parking garages where all you could see was the roofs of vehicles."
The night the hurricane slammed into Houston, McDonald had planned on watching the Mayweather-McGregor boxing match in a pub about two blocks away from his apartment.
"It would have been about 8 p.m.," he recalls. "The lightning started and the water just came down. It was like a sheet of water, like if you were standing, say under a waterfall.
"So I thought I'd better get the heck out of there or I knew that I was going to get stranded. So I left and then between, say 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. the next morning, we had 28 inches of water fall in that area.
"I know people in that pub, or people who did try to watch the fight, got stranded and they spent three days there ñ in the pub ñ and they never did get to watch the fight because the satellites went off," he adds with a laugh.
Finally, five days later, McDonald was able to get a flight to Calgary, once the airport had reopened.
"On my drive to the airport you'd go by an open pasture. You could see the cattle and the horses standing there with basically their heads out of water and they're just stretching to reach for air. It's just a sad, bloody deal," he says. "Then of course, you watch all the rescue attempts. It's just crazy.
"I didn't have it on my bucket list to go through a hurricane, but I guess I did it anyway. I tell you, I'll take a blizzard any day of the week, for sure."
"I didn't have it on my bucket list to go through a hurricane, but I guess I did it anyway. I tell you, I'll take a blizzard any day of the week, for sure." BRIEN MCDONALD
