Throughout the morning of Sunday, August 27th, Angela Wrigglesworth kept her concerns off social media because she didn't want to worry her parents. But as the waters slowly rose into her Brays Bayou home in Houston, she discovered that emergency services were overwhelmed, dealing with more urgent crises than even the flooding in her neighborhood. Finally, a little after noon, she posted on Facebook: "There is water in our home and we need to get out at some point soon. ... If you know of anyone in the Brays Bayou area that has access to a raft or boat or is helping with rescue in anyway, can you please let them know of our situation? It may be that we need a good Samaritan to step in at this point."
Wrigglesworth has muscular dystrophy and uses a power wheelchair. She teaches third grade in Houston. When we talk, she describes herself as having "high medical needs," emphasizing how severe a threat rising water would be. She can't move through space independently without her wheelchair. She can't swim. She can't climb. Still, she and her boyfriend had decided not to evacuate, in part because her home was likely more accessible than any shelter. Moreover, no one else in her area was evacuating. No one had ever heard of her part of town flooding. And then it flooded.
Six hours and hundreds of phone calls, social media threads, emails, text messages, and other acts of networking later, a friend and two former marines showed up at her door with a red Bass Tracker Pro 170 boat. The three had traveled across the Houston area through horrific conditions to get to them. A few weeks after the incident, Wrigglesworth tells me on the phone: "My boyfriend and a friend transferred me into the boat. They picked up my 400-pound wheelchair and put it at the front of the boat; my big old hound dog and our kitty cat in a crate, and Justin [her boyfriend], we got in this boat." The rescuers waded through the water to pull the boat to their truck, loaded it onto a lift, and towed everyone safely downtown to a hotel.
[For more on this story by DAVID M. PERRY, go to https://psmag.com/environment/...ty-disaster-response]
Photo: Brad Matheney offers help to a man in a wheelchair while Hurricane Harvey passes through Galveston, Texas, on August 26th, 2017.
Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
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