Editor’s Note: This photo essay is published in partnership with The Texas Tribune.
I walked into an apartment slipping and stumbling on mud so thick I couldn’t see the floor underneath. The table in the dining room was set, decorated with charger plates, flowers, and napkins nicely folded. The mud and debris covered everything. On the wall, I saw a red, white, and blue garland with American flags, a reminder that the day prior had been the Fourth of July. I tried to imagine the life, or lives, that had been lived in this place. A pair of sunglasses, left behind, caught my eye.
I studied water. I studied rivers and tributaries and floodplains and watersheds. Hydrology was a main focus of my research as a student of environmental science at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. I even attended a summer program at the National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in 2016 that focused on flood mapping and emergency response. But theory is one thing, and seeing 100-year-old cypress trees laying flat on the ground, completely uprooted, is another.
I accepted the surreality after seeing a kayak stuck 20 feet high up, on a tree branch, among other things that were absurdly out of place. Hills of mud, vegetation, and personal artifacts deposited by the flood had changed the landscape. It all told the story of what had happened that early morning. Everywhere I went along a 30-mile or so stretch of the Guadalupe River, there were excavators and people digging, looking, hopeful to find the missing. The scale of the devastation, the search and recovery efforts, and the grief—all things unfathomable to me, even after I witnessed them.
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This post was originally authored and published by Brenda Bazán from the , a nonprofit investigative news outlet and magazine. Sign up for their , or follow them on and .
