Last week, as Nathaniel Smith and his daughter boarded a school bus to drive out of the path of Hurricane Laura, he thought of the last time a storm forced them to flee. Three years ago, Smith nervously called for a rescue crew as the unending rain of Hurricane Harvey drenched his home in Port Arthur, a refinery town on the Southeast Texas coast. As water rose inside the house, first one foot and then two, Smith and his daughter climbed onto his bed with two suitcases and tried to sleep. Early the next morning, they ventured out into the yard, which by then had become a lake, and stood on lawn chairs, hollering and waving until they flagged down a boat to carry them away from the flood.
Late last Wednesday night, as Hurricane Laura drew closer, Smith, now 66, remembered what Harvey had done to his home. Smith’s daughter, who is autistic and sometimes has seizures, lived with his ex-wife for much of the two years following Harvey as he worked to gut his house and then rebuild with some help from FEMA—treating the structure for mold, replacing the floors and walls, and purchasing new appliances.
As the potentially deadly hurricane sped toward the Texas-Louisiana coast last week, Smith sheltered inside Huntsville High School, about 140 miles northwest of his home. In cots spaced six feet apart, he and others braced for how their lives could again be changed by a storm. “A lot of us were afraid that after all we’d done to save our houses, it would all be gone,” he says.
