The picture of southern hospitality, 65-year-old Roger Molaison stood outside his childhood home in Houma, Louisiana and assured people with a warm smile that they had, in fact, found the garage sale. He invited them into the house with a firm handshake and a friendly pat on the back where his 70-year-old brother, Richard Molaison, talked with potential buyers looking through a random assortment of colorful tableware.
Richard found himself again in the process of clearing everything out of a beloved home, albeit under much more pleasant circumstances. Before he was selling household items at a bargain in preparation to sell the house he grew up in, Richard was ripping soaked electrical work out of his Texas home in the aftermath of 3.5 feet of flooding from Hurricane Harvey in 2017.
Growing up in Louisiana, the Molaison brothers lived through more than their fair share of hurricanes. Fortunately, Houma is located farther above sea level than New Orleans or the bayous of Louisiana, which means that the house their grandfather built never experienced severe flooding.
“We’ve been through at least a half a dozen hurricanes, direct hits, and probably 10 or 12 being on the outskirts, and they just knock a few shingles off,” Roger said.
But it was a completely different story when it came to Richard’s house in the community of Kingwood in Houston, Texas during Hurricane Harvey, and he learned firsthand what happens when a city is ill-prepared for a storm of Harvey’s magnitude.
Richard said that north of his house was a disaster waiting to happen. The water levels of Lake Conroe were already high before Harvey, but nothing was done to slowly drain the lake in a controlled manner. So when the Conroe Dam was nearing its breaking point, the decision was made to open the spillway and release the water.
“When they unleashed Lake Conroe, that was it,” Richard said. “We were toast.”
Richard said that, despite him never seeing or hearing a warning, water from Lake Conroe was released at 2 a.m. Then at 6 a.m., his heart sank as he watched out his window as water began to swallow his back yard.
“We started scrambling,” Richard said. “We just grabbed stuff that we felt we needed.”
At the peak of the flooding, 3.5 feet of water filled the inside of Richard’s home. One of his neighborhood’s residents took a video of the devastation while he paddled down the neighborhood’s street in a canoe. At one point in the video, the red roof of Richard’s car can be seen barely peeking out from the water even though he deliberately parked it on the highest point of his driveway. The rest of Kingwood fared no better.
“The middle of Kingwood, called Town Center, in 30 years, never flooded,” Roger said. “For Harvey, it had 6 feet of water.”
When the flooding finally subsided, it left its mark on everything it touched. Molaison had to rip out of his house everything that wasn’t 4 feet high, including drywall, electrical work and furniture. His neighbors were in the same position, but Richard said because of the landscape, some had flooding that reached 6 to 8 feet high.
“You go down the road, and there were mountains 6-foot-high covering their yards of debris,” Roger said.
Richard said that when he called the salvage yard to come pick up his car, they told him that they couldn’t pay him for it because of possible contamination from the water. Much of the water that flooded Kingwood passed through drainage systems after Lake Conroe was opened.
“What’s flowing through that is real nasty,” Roger said.
That same water flooded the community’s brand-new grocery store, which had opened only a few months prior to Harvey. One of the largest groceries Roger had ever seen, the store was forced to throw out all the food from its shelves.
Now every part of Richard’s house below the 4-foot line is brand new. He said that while he did have flood insurance, 90 percent of the people living in Houston did not. Flooding of Harvey’s magnitude just wasn’t on the minds of people living in the city, but it’s something that the people who lived through it will never forget.
“Two weeks before the storm came above Houston, I’m talking with my neighbor,” Richard said. “He said, ‘Rick, we’ve been here 19 years, I’ve never seen more than 2 inches of rain on the street.’ He had almost four feet of water in his house. When you’ve never flooded before, you don’t think that you’re going to be flooded.”