In a photo taken shortly after Hurricane Harvey swamped Houston two years ago, a black luxury SUV sits submerged in murky brown floodwaters. In the background, a yellow construction crane hangs over a half-finished building—evidence of the city’s insatiable appetite for growth juxtaposed with the damage exacerbated by that growth. Another photo shows a battered mesquite tree in Woodsboro, 170 miles southwest of Houston, eerily coated in white tufts of cotton blown across its branches by 130-mph winds. A third image is a collage of cell phone screenshots, each showing the home screen obscured by endless emergency alerts. And then there’s a poem written after the storm by a fourth-grader named Jay. “Floods are thieves that made my favorite cow, Cursey, die,” reads the first line.
These are a few of the roughly 2,300 artifacts in two Hurricane Harvey time capsules: The Houston Flood Museum and the Harvey Memories Project. Both are online-only, open-access archives, and they’re still growing. Together, they provide a compelling snapshot of the destruction wrought by the deadliest storm to hit Texas since 1919. They’re also meant to endure for decades as a resource to future scholars and community members.
