A Texas mother described being pulled off the roof of her house Sunday to escape the devastating flooding caused by Tropical Storm Harvey.
Soaking wet and clutching her daughter, Christy Huffman told CNN’s Ed Lavandera about her harrowing escape from her home outside Galveston, Texas, as they stood in the middle of a flooded section of the Interstate 45 south of Houston.
“We were on our rooftop,” she said. “We’d been waiting for the Coast Guard helicopter. It picked up some of our neighbors. Some of our neighbors are still back there on the rooftops.”
“We saw the boat come by first and so we took the first chance we could to get out of there,” she said.
A day after Texas experienced the most powerful hurricane to hit the United States in a decade, Tropical Storm Harvey has left devastating floods in its wake, with warnings that tornadoes, rain and more flooding are to come in southeast Texas.
Huffman told Lavandera that she estimated there was about 10 feet of water in her house.
“It was up to our eaves. In some houses it was over,” she said.
Asked by Lavandera how she was “holding up,” Huffman said that she was terrified.
“You hear loud noises and you don’t know what it is,” she said. “It’s your refrigerator falling down on the dining room table — it’s bobbing in the water right now. My nerves are fried, absolutely fried.”
“I still have animals back there. This little one I had to get out,” she said, looking at her daughter.
“I’m very nervous for all my neighbors and myself,” she added.
The “worst part” of her ordeal, she said, was a few minutes before she was rescued, when a tornado warning was issued. Her neighbors had no second story on their house, and were taking refuge by lying on the roof, exposed to the elements.
“They were all as flat as pancakes on their roof. Probably afraid of the tornado. Scary. Sad. It broke me into tears,” she said.