KENS 5 reporter Sue Calberg take you on a journey through an area hit hard by the rising flood waters.
KERRVILLE, Texas — KENS 5’s Sue Calberg has been on the scene in Kerr County looking at the damage caused by Friday’s catastrophic flood. Here’s a transcription of her tour of one neighborhood. Click the video above to watch:
“We want to take you on a journey though some of the hardest hit areas in the Texas Hill Country for “a little walk and talk.”
First we met with Pearl and helped her haul some of her treasures out of her house, which is now wrecked.
She has a red sign posted on the door by the emergency management folks saying her home is unsafe. Most of the homes have similar signs.
Her home has been knocked off its foundation. It had a lot of water in it, so now we’re just going to do a little walk and talk because by far Pearl’s house is not the only place that is damaged here. We’re at the corner of Box Elder and Water Front Drive in Kerrville, Texas. The Guadalupe River is way down there past those trees that are absolutely trashed, so I’m going to say that’s probably 100 yards or more and probably.
30 feet down, so that’s where the water was they say Friday morning at 4:30 a.m., most of the folks that lived here started getting notifications from their neighbors and you see that car with the X on it there? That means it’s been checked, and it’s been declared free of people.
There are cars all over this neighborhood that obviously were not there when this incident started.
And they’ve washed downstream. There are X’s on houses too where first responders have gone in, but this house that you’re looking at right now, it’s got a big orange X on it as well and that means that they’ve cleared the house. But look what’s right next to it… you see the yellow house? That yellow house used to be on a foundation next door, but the yellow house slammed into the white house and look at this door right here.
I mean maybe it fell over, but you know this is the door the witness marks of where the water was? It’s way up here and then this house slammed into the first house and the carport collapsed so there’s that that’s going to have to be taken care of. There’s personal property, tools, we were talking to Pearl earlier and she said, you know, I could fix some of this, but my tools all washed away. Now look over here across the street. All the houses across the street took on water, too.
One of the women told me that her neighbor called her around 4:30 a.m. and said, get your kids and get out. She had three kids and her mother, and she said when they came out the door. They were scared because she had never seen anything like this. The water was already up here and rising like crazy now this yellow house that ran into the White House, look at this, the house next door. It pushed the yellow house. It also is off its foundation.
Obviously there was an eave on that house. The eave has been ripped away and it ran into the yellow house, making the yellow house run into the White House and, debris… personal property, all of it. And then across the street you can see the watermarks on the fence and the people here have said. Everything says unsafe. There’s debris, there’s nails, there’s all kinds of just seriously dangerous things here.
The people who have come to help, they’re all wearing serious boots and they’re coming to do some significant work here because there’s a lot of this stuff here that is not gonna be salvageable. I don’t know where that house went but it’s not there anymore, that’s an empty foundation. The only thing that’s left is the metal.
Whatever you call that thing that you would use to haul it away that you would use to haul a mobile home away, it’s just that’s there, but the home is gone and then this is the empty foundation where this gray house used to be and then everything in the yard is trashed. That’s the high bridge that comes into Kerrville. We came in here by the high school.
I don’t remember what that road is called, but I mean just look, miles and miles of devastation. Heritage trees are gone, all of the people that were swept downstream from where we’re standing right now. We’re in Kerrville, so what you’re looking at upstream, Hunt and Ingram are in that direction. Several miles, more miles, five to 10 miles probably, as the crow flies.
We will be here in Kerrville for the foreseeable future.”