After living in Pennsylvania for four years, my dad moved to Texas about a year ago. It was a hard adjustment for everyone, even though I was only there ten weeks out of the year. The weather in Texas was the hardest thing to get used to. This past Christmas was my first time there, and I didn’t think there would be cold weather like Ohio, but I wasn’t expecting the 70s and humidity either. Over the summer, I spent two months down there which means I got to experience a weather phenomenon known mainly in the south: a hurricane!
I’ve always heard of hurricanes on the news, and I’ve dreaded being in the middle of one. One thing that always confused me though was why people needed to stock up on supplies for a category one hurricane because I didn’t know exactly what it meant. So when I heard talk of a category one hurricane about a month into my stay, I didn’t think anything of it. That was until I heard how close it was going to be to us.
The eye of the hurricane, now named Hurricane Beryl, was supposed to pass through Corpus Cristi which is about three hours from Angleton, where my dad lives. Most families down south have well water, including mine, and you need power to run the well. If the power goes out, we will not have water which is dangerous because we have a farm and the animals need water in the heat. A few days before the hurricane was set to make landfall, we went to the store and got about twenty gallons of water in big jugs in case we needed them.
The day before Hurricane Beryl hit landfall, my dad and I went to Home Depot and got some bags and a truck bed of sand. We made sandbags to put around the pig pen to keep the water from getting in and making mud. While we were making and laying the sandbags, we could see the dark clouds approaching which looked very frightening. At this point, we were notified that the eye of Hurricane Beryl had shifted and was now headed to a town about twenty miles west of us.
We ate dinner, fed the animals, and hunkered down in the house. I should mention that most houses out in the country are mobile homes or manufactured homes, so they don’t have a foundation in the ground. Our house is a manufactured home and is raised about two feet off the ground. Most of those homes have something called hurricane straps. Hurricane straps are a long metal pole that gets put about ten feet in the ground and two straps are placed through the bottom of the home and wrapped around the pole. This makes it so that the home can’t be moved by the wind or a tornado.
I got a few hours of sleep, but I woke up around three in the morning to the house shaking back and forth. It wasn’t strong enough to knock me off the bed, but it shook me a bit. I also heard the metal slabs on our roof flying up and back down hitting the other slabs. Something hit my window, and it scared me so I screamed. My stepmom ran into my room and told me to come into the living room in the middle of the house. Around five in the morning, the sun started to shine through so I looked out the window at the farm to see the damage, but I could barely see anything through the rain that was still pouring. When the rain let up a bit, I looked again and saw that the little house that was built around the well had been lifted out of the ground and collapsed.
We went out around seven to feed the animals and look at the damage and I was shocked. We have two chicken coops and a tree had fallen on one and it collapsed. However, the chickens that were in the coop were okay. We had gutters from the horse barn and metal slabs from the roof scattered all over. There was some more significant damage to our tack room. It’s about thirty by eighteen feet, and we use it to store our feed, hay, and supplies for the horses. I would guess that it weighs about four tons not counting the hay, feed, etc. I tell you this because it was shifted off of its foundation. This was shocking because we only had eighty-mile-per-hour winds, which couldn’t do that so we assumed a tornado went through our property. This is supported by the fact that the trees on the back half of the property were twisted which only happens when a tornado comes through. Our power also went out. That was our worst fear because, without power, we didn’t have AC, which is awful in Texas heat and humidity. It also meant no water because we needed electricity for the well.
I said before that I was terrified of hurricanes. After being through one, I can safely say that it wasn’t that bad of an experience. In the end, I got to spend more time with my family whilst cleaning up and repairing the damages. It brought us closer together, and now I have a bond with my dad that I don’t have with anyone else all because of a hurricane.
