Essay: So little changed after Harvey. Can we call what happens next a disaster?
People cross a median to 45 South near Edgebrook to board Metro buses to be taken to a shelter at the GRB Convention Center Sunday, August 27, 2017. Much of the area was flooded from rains after Hurricane Harvey.Almost exactly five years ago I was on the campus of Rice University, teaching my first classes of the semester. I tend to teach in the afternoons, and I took my class outside to watch the eclipse. A few students had brought special cardboard glasses.
By Tuesday, when Harvey turned toward Beaumont and Port Arthur, I saw the sun for the first time in four days, and through the pinhole in the clouds it made, saw a city that had been changed: over 150,000 homes flooded; a third of the city underwater. Some places had recorded 61 inches of rain — nineteen trillion gallons for the entire metro region, enough to compress the earth two centimeters.
What shocked me most when I left my flooded neighborhood — more than the sight of entire streets where every home was underwater, more than the smell of wet rot and contagion — was finding so much of the city still. Buses ran; food could be delivered. People gathered at coffee shops and bars to talk about the latest episode of their favorite television show. For these people, maybe nothing had changed — as if the storm had come and gone with no more consequence than the eclipse.
. Funded by the Houston Endowment, we collected dozens of poems, essays, documentaries, paintings and photographs from the community through an open call; and with the help of community partners, we collected audio recordings, poems written by school children, poems written by men incarcerated at the Harris County Jail, podcasts, articles, archival footage of community tribunals, memorials, and remembrances.
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