Cold and scared, I gripped the side of a National Guard truck as we made the alarming exodus from our flooded home to shelter at the Houston Convention Center.
With water everywhere, and not a single point of illumination, I stared out at the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Harvey.
At 13, I was already a veteran of flooding. At age 11, my Houston neighborhood experienced a 100-year flood — an extreme that was supposed to happen once in 100 years. (Leinfelder, (2018)
That day school was canceled so my sisters and I put on our rain boots and went outside to play in the water. I wasn’t too concerned. I was glad to have gotten this 100-year flood out of the way so young.
But a year later another 100-year flood happened. (ClicktoHouston, 2019) This time our red Ford Focus was submerged in the street and water got into the engine. I was upset and confused.
“Why is it called a 100-year event if it happens every year?” I asked my parents.
A year later, Hurricane Harvey hit, my dad woke me up at 5 a.m and as I stumbled out of bed, I felt water under my feet. The water had finally made it past our front door.
We moved to our living room and placed anything we could up high where we thought the water could never reach it. But the water kept rising. I was scared for my grandparents, who lived next door. How could we transport two diminutive elders down a street filled with over 4 feet of murky water?
Around 11 a.m., we moved to the second story of our neighbor’s house. I watched out the window as my elementary school across the street was submerged. The water kept climbing. Around 5 p.m., we were evacuated by open-air National Guard trucks.
My phone battery was running out, but I needed to understand what was happening to me.
I googled Hurricane Harvey, finding a news report that said something called climate change would continue to worsen floods (Gibbens, 2018).
But surely nothing could be worse than this?
After a restless night sleeping on cots with hundreds of people at the convention center downtown, the water subsided enough for us to leave, but we couldn’t go home. The water damage to our house was too severe. We moved into temporary housing while it was torn down and rebuilt.
After two years I finally got to go home.
It feels like I can’t outrun climate extremes. Three years ago, in February 2021, a historic freeze hit Texas, knocking out power for a week. I found myself sleeping next to my grandparents’ fireplace just to stay warm.
Now, at 20, one of the few places I thought might be safe from climate disasters — where I had hoped to settle down for the long term — has just been devastated by a hurricane, the likes of which the area has never experienced. (Schaper, 2024) No matter where I go, it seems like there’s no escape.
I can’t sit back and be passive when it comes to climate change. Not when it’s getting worse.
Things are bad now but they’ll be worse for the next generation. When we burn fossil fuels it traps pollution in the atmosphere causing our world to overheat, which in turn exacerbates extreme weather. (IPCC 2021) We have to do something about it. Later is too late.
Children born today are already facing disproportionate increases in floods, heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, and crop failures due to climate change. Analysis published in Science warns that today’s newborns will face on average seven times more severe heatwaves during their lives than their grandparents (Thiery, 2021).
Last year, I became an intern for the nonpartisan, volunteer-powered nonprofit Citizens’ Climate Lobby and learned how to speak up for the future I want. One where all elected officials, regardless of party, enact laws that hold big corporate polluters accountable and work to prevent climate extremes from worsening.
It lit a fire under me to become a climate voter in 2024 and talk about what this means for me through the Environmental Action Group and by being a Greenbelt student at Furman. Every candidate vying for my vote should outline real and effective solutions to reduce climate pollution.
When young people like me think we have no voice and give up, when we don’t tell leaders what we want or sit elections out, we fail to hold our members of Congress accountable. That’s something we have the power to change.
References:
Click2Houston Digital Staff. (2019, April 16). Look back at Houston’s 2016 Tax Day Flood. Click2Houston. https://www.click2houston.com/weather/2019/04/16/look-back-at-houstons-2016-tax-day-flood/
Gibbens, S. (2018, January 4). Climate change made Hurricane Harvey more deadly. National Geographic. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/climate-change-study-hurricane-harvey-flood
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (2021). Climate change 2021: The physical science basis. Contribution of working group I to the sixth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (V. Masson-Delmotte, P. Zhai, A. Pirani, S. L. Connors, C. Péan, S. Berger, N. Caud, et al., Eds.). Cambridge University Press. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/
Leinfelder, A. (2018, May 24). Remembering 2015’s Memorial Day flooding in Houston. Houston Chronicle. https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Remembering-2015-s-Memorial-Day-flooding-in-12943900.php
Schaper, D. (2024, October 1). Hurricane Helene brings heavy rain and flooding, raising more questions about climate change. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2024/10/01/nx-s1-5133530/hurricane-helene-rain-flooding-climate-change
Thiery, W., Lange, S., Rogelj, J., Schleussner, C. F., Gudmundsson, L., Seneviratne, S. I., et al. (2021). Intergenerational inequities in exposure to climate extremes. Science, 374(6564), 158-160. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abi7339