ROCKPORT, Texas (AP) – Emergency officials in the coastal town of Rockport, Texas, say they consider it almost miraculous the death toll from Harvey’s landfall hasn’t been higher.
Thirty-seven-year-old Sam Speights easily could have been a victim. He says he survived by dodging, weaving and running from his trailer home to a pickup truck to a concrete block structure after the hurricane hit Friday night.
When nearly everyone else on his street had fled, he hunkered down. Harvey flattened nearly everything on his street, a line of trailer homes on a 10-foot rise three miles from the Gulf of Mexico. Speights says he has lost everything.
Rockport emergency management spokesman Bill Terry estimates that it will be three to four weeks before essential services can be restored and people can return to their homes.