Accustomed to disasters, Houston didn’t see this one coming

HOUSTON — The storm that hit Houston Thursday evening surprised a city long accustomed to bouts of severe weather. The Astros continued to play baseball, even though rain and wind blew through the team’s closed-dome stadium. Many people, following their evening routines, have been surprised while cycling or at the gym.

Across the city Friday — but particularly in the dense, leafy Inner Loop neighborhoods that radiate from the city’s skyscrapers — Houstonians faced a cityscape of debris left behind by winds of up to 100 mph, as strong as some of the hurricanes that hit the city. city ​​in recent years.

Decades-old oak and pecan trees were torn in half or toppled at the roots, flattening fences or blocking roads. Stop signs leaned at sharp angles. Highway billboards became distorted, including one for Car Wreck Cowboy, a local lawyer whose sign, usually dominating Interstate 45 near downtown, had been flattened in an empty lot.

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At least seven people died because of the storm and about a million people on the Gulf Coast lost power. The gravity of the moment was underscored when Houston Mayor John Whitmire, a moderate Democrat, and the county’s top official, Lina Hidalgo, a progressive, put aside their differences and held a joint news conference Friday — the first since Whitmire’s election last year.

Residents spoke of horizontal rain and trash swirling in the air and wondered if a tornado had passed through.

“It was like we were in the middle of a blender,” said Martha Rosas, sitting outside her home with her sister Friday, surrounded by citronella candles. They lit up the helpless house the night before and have now repelled the swarms of attacking mosquitoes.

“We were here, but it was so bad we locked ourselves in the pantry,” Rosas said. When they came back out, she and her sister saw that a thin three-story building under construction across the street was no longer standing.

“It just got picked up and landed on this building,” Rosas said, pointing to a building whose roof now had a hole in it. All that remained of the construction site was a metal fire escape.

“Even during hurricanes, we’ve never seen the trees go this crazy,” Rosas said.

Throughout Friday, the city came back to life in its post-disaster posture, due to past calamities: Hurricane Ike, Hurricane Harvey, the freeze of winter 2021. With municipal services overwhelmed, Neighbors equipped with chainsaws showed up to help neighbors. Those who had electricity offered their refrigerators to those who did not.

Red lights remained out until late in the afternoon at many intersections. The city’s drivers, often aggressive on its fast-moving highways, have also been transformed, now courteously exchanging turns at unregulated intersections.

Lines formed at gas stations with working pumps, as well as at local donut shops that had opened.

“Comfort food! We need comfort food,” said Lizzette Cantu, 45, as she waited in line to buy a frozen dozen at a Shipley’s on North Main Street. She planned to bring them to her son , hospitalized nearby, she explained.

Cantu was not home when strong winds passed through her home, near the University of Houston’s downtown campus, and toppled one of her old pecan trees. “My porch is gone,” she said.

The storm surprised her and many Houstonians. “We were here for Ike, but we had days to prepare for it,” Cantu said of the 2008 hurricane that hit the city. “We had time to prepare. For this, I don’t think anyone has done it.

As power outages continued into the afternoon, some residents began to worry. The weather was cool Friday, but a heatwave was forecast for the weekend, with temperatures reaching 90 and a heat index near 100. And then there was the problem of all those races quickly deteriorating.

“I’m about to lose all my food,” said Anthony Heysquierdo, 67, a retired electrician, standing outside his home in the city’s east. “And I get food stamps. I am on a fixed income. I do not have a car.

Behind him, four men, one armed with a chainsaw and another armed with an axe, cut down a tree that had fallen across the road. A fifth man had helped earlier – someone who wasn’t from the neighborhood and had just stopped to lend a hand.

“It felt like a tornado was there,” Heysquierdo said, remembering the moment when the worst of the storm passed. “I prayed all the time.”

Not far from his home, a large tree crashed into an SUV, killing a woman inside his driveway on Avenue O. On Friday, the tree remained, the side door frame conductor being bent in a semi-circle under the force of the fall. The back door was wide open, a child’s car seat leaning out.

Family members told news channel Telemundo that the woman was a mother of several children and had gone out to move the car, fearing it would be damaged by the storm.

Neighbors brought in a bouquet of flowers, the start of a makeshift memorial in a rusty chain-link fence.

The storm also destroyed millions of dollars’ worth of homes, many nestled between twisted live oaks planted more than a half-century ago. In the Woodland Heights neighborhood, a large tree fell on an old bungalow, narrowly missing a house that had just been built and sold. The bungalow was also being renovated.

“I received a message: tomorrow is chainsaw day,” said José Pizana, a foreman, referring to his boss’s message Thursday. He said it would take about two hours to cut down the fallen tree. “It stayed inside,” he added, pointing to a member of his team who cut down the tree with a machete.

“It’s an old house, so it’s pretty sturdy,” said worker Toribio Vasquez, speaking in Spanish. He said he hadn’t been worried even when the tree fell. “No hay nada” – it’s nothing, he said, smiling for a second before going back to cutting branches with the machete.

“It comes from Guatemala,” Pizana said, “where there are volcanoes.”

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