Through The Eyes of a Survivor: Harvey Remembered Nine Years Later

9/3/26 – This guest post about “Hurricane Harvey Remembered” is by Kathleen Todd Jordan. Ms. Jordan grew up in Kingwood and has lived here for almost 50 years. She met the man who would later become her husband while they were both enrolled at Kingwood Middle School. So, Jordan has deep ties to the community and its residents. During Hurricane Harvey, two of her neighbors died. Many others had their homes destroyed. On the ninth anniversary of the flood, she wrote a deeply moving memoir of the event and recovery from it. Jordan is also a newly appointed board member of the Lake Houston Dredging and Maintenance District. She gave me permission to reprint her story below.

Neighbors Helping Neighbors

Pics below show our dear family-friend’s home. The living room looked as though a whirlpool picked up all of the furniture and swirled it around. Rushing water and debris had pulverized the thick, picture windows. 

Seeing people’s lives through their material objects piled high to the sky … it was just heartbreaking.

Harvey Remembered: Antibiotics, Amputation, Death and Anger

Now, this is where I have ZERO tolerance for the back talk from government entities – speech emanating mainly from Montgomery County (MoCo). When people from Kingwood hear some MoCo folks saying that we are just belly aching and no one died and “we flooded, too”…I say “Don’t go there.”

After the storm, we opened our home to a friend, who otherwise would have been packed off to the George R. Brown. We helped her muck out her home and her neighbor’s. Two doors down from where she lived, we mucked out a young man’s home with the help of his mother. She slipped and fell in the mud in his kitchen.  

She cut her arm when she fell. The son asked if anyone had a first aid kit.  I ran home to grab what I could. A couple of days later, we heard the mother was in the hospital with an infection.  

That infection turned into MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), a type of staph bacteria that is resistant to many common antibiotics.  In a last ditch effort to save her life, the medical team decided to start AMPUTATING BODY PARTS. Think about this MoCo, City of Houston, GLO, Harris County. She still died.

Just two blocks away, a husband attempted to start his portable generator. He dropped dead from a heart attack.  Two deaths within two blocks. Two lives extinguished. Arguably, the loss of life could have been avoided. More such avoidable tragedies happened beyond the immediate area where I was working.  

What Montgomery County Needs to Understand

Everyone reading this outside of Kingwood needs to understand these memories and heartaches go far beyond the material losses that have changed each of us. 

When we hear the uninformed – especially those from MoCo – say things like, “No one died,” “lowering the lake does not work,” “we want to use our boats,” almost 80,000 people here beg to differ in no uncertain terms. 

Did you know that almost 50% of all deaths from Harvey in Harris County happened in the Kingwood/ Lake Houston area? 

So again, when someone from The Woodlands says, “Well, we flooded, too,” I respectfully say, “Go to hell!” No one died there.  

Be a good neighbor, MoCo. Every single time we drive through that fair county and see all the unbridled development, it terrifies us. Boatloads of cement dumped on cleared land are replacing dense forests. 

It infuriates ALL of us when our elected officials ask MoCo elected officials for a little consideration and they are told to “go pound sand.” We all know it and will never forget and never forgive. 

The Ultimate Day of Reckoning

Those people will answer someday for their disregard for their neighbors. Perhaps not in this lifetime. But I firmly believe they will when they meet their Maker.  

Don’t be fooled by my smile in flood-mitigation meetings. I know who you are and what you have done and failed to do.

All of this is to say, there is a group of people in Kingwood fighting to protect lives, homes and businesses. This is the main reason I eagerly agreed to serve on Lake Houston’s Dredging and Maintenance District Board. From Congressman Crenshaw all the way down to the incomparable reporting from Bob Rehak to Mark Micheletti being the lone Harris County voice on the SJRA board, it will take all of us to protect our community. 

Get involved Kingwood. Do not let this happen again.

Posted by Kathleen Todd Jordan on 9/3/26

3292 Days since Hurricane Harvey