Houston Flood Hits Many Poor Peoples

She roused her three young sons and began frantically moving rugs, photo albums and electronics to dry surfaces. At 7:30 a.m., she called 911. But hours later, no one came.

Ramit Plushnick-Masti woke just after 4:30 a.m. Sunday to find water seeping into the bathroom. She ran to the sunroom that faces her backyard and discovered water already 5 inches deep. Out front, a brown river sloshed from the street to her doorstep.

“They were backed up pretty badly,” Plushnick-Masti, 42, a communications director at the Houston Forensic Science Center, told HuffPost by phone later that evening. “But by about 10, it was clear that it was going to be catastrophic.”

She began posting on Facebook and texting friends, and found out her local rabbi was sending a boat around to pick up stranded people in need of rescue. The family of five threw laptops, cellphones, chargers, a few pairs of pants and some T-shirts into garbage bags and waited, perched on the kitchen counter, water lapping just inches below.

When the motorboat arrived to pick them up, the water was so high it overturned the family’s washing machine and stand-up freezer. Plushnick-Masti, who is about 5 feet tall, had to swim to reach rescuers.

“It was cold, it was nasty, it was brown,” Plushnick-Masti said from a makeshift shelter a church, where the electricity was out. “The water was so powerful.”