For the past week or more, Rev. Stacey Fussell and her family have watched with growing concern as reports of the devastating effects of Hurricane Harvey have affected friends at their former home in the Houston, Texas, area.
Fussell, who moved to the Bradford area in 2010 to serve as rector of the Episcopal Church of Ascension, said she has remained in touch with parishioners from her former church in Sienna Plantation near Katy, Texas, and southwest of Houston. Those she has communicated with have never seen a hurricane or tropical storm of this magnitude or duration. The tropical storm has also made its way to East Texas, and Southwest and West Louisiana with flood damage continuing in a number of communities in those areas.
As former longtime residents of the Gulf Coast region, Fussell, and her mother, Joan Russell, have lived through many hurricanes. So many, in fact, that when they moved to the Bradford area with Fussell’s two young adopted daughters, they brought a large tote they have dubbed their “hurricane kit.” The kit remains stocked with a sterno stove, a lantern, a weather radio and flashlight among other items.
“Run from water, hide from wind — that was the conventional wisdom regarding hurricanes that I learned growing up on the Gulf Coast,” Fussell said this week. “If you were close enough to the shore to be impacted by the storm surge, you should evacuate. If you were far enough inland, you should make sure your hurricane kit was stocked” and stay in place.
She and her family had resided in Sienna Plantation in 2008 when Hurricane Ike struck. They decided to stay put and shelter in place.
“We had fences knocked down and shingles off the roof and spent seven days without electricity, but we made out OK,” she recalled. Many of Fussell’s neighbors, new to the Gulf Coast and not knowing the “rule,” decided to evacuate. As a result, the ensuing traffic snarl left people stranded on interstates. Many ran out of gas and didn’t have access to food and water.
“Over 100 people died in the evacuation fiasco from heat stroke, dehydration and other health crises” that occurred on interstates, Fussell remembered. She said the recent criticism regarding the current Houston mayor’s initial decision not to issue an evacuation order is unfounded.
“The greater Houston area has a population of 6.5 million people … the impossibility of evacuating a population twice the size of Manhattan from an area the size of Delaware on three major highways seems obvious” and would likely have caused fatalities such as those found during the Ike evacuation, she said.
Fussell’s mother, who has lived through 20 hurricanes in her lifetime, weighed in on the current storm.
“They’re something really, really different,” Russell said. “I’ve slept through hurricanes because they’ve only lasted a couple of hours” unlike the current storm’s long, drawn-out presence.
Fussell said she believes the damage in Houston will ultimately result in a smaller urban population in that area, as occurred in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. According to statistics from The Data Center, New Orleans’ population before Katrina was close to 485,000 people. Statistics from 2015 show the population is now approximately 387,000.
“Houston has just grown too large” with its urban and suburban sprawl in areas that once comprised swamps and fields that flooded in the past, she opined.
Fussell believes there is an upside to the disaster and it’s the good it has drawn from volunteers and others across the nation who want to help.
“What you see over and over on the news is people helping other folks … look at the people, they’re black, they’re brown, they’re white,” she said of volunteers. “They’re not standing there with torches busting each other. Everybody is just trying to help each other. That’s who we are as Americans — not what’s happened in Charlottesville” where recent riots erupted from racial issues and tension.
