Healthy Indoors Magazine - USA Edition

10 | COVER STORY— February/March 2018 one-mile long, 25-foot deep retention pond by my mother's house. Twenty minutes later, the water came back and this time it came back all at once. Literally up the sidewalk into the house. Four feet of water in the house, in 20 min- utes, after they open the flood gates. So I couldn't get any cell phone reception for my mom. It turns out the neighbor across the street rescued her, and then they were rescued by a boat from the National Guard. She had four feet of water in her house and the water was in their house un- changed for 11 days. It didn't come and go, it stayed there. When we finally got into the house 11 days later, it was an absolute mess. The wood floors were bowed up three or four feet. It was just horrible. I had to have a canoe to go down the street to get my mom and get into the house. The water receded. And what do you do? There's no contractors around. There's nobody. I got to my mom's house. Thank God for... and I'm going to shamelessly plug these people... there's three sets of people that I'm going to mention here: Rainbow International, Chris and Maria Slay, put me at the top of the list. There were no restorers anywhere because they had hundreds and hundreds of calls. Then I called my buddy Cole Stanton of Fiberlock, who airshipped me and had his lo- Michael Bowdoin, an attorney in Kingwood, Texas, told the story of how his mother's house in Houston was saved: There is a reservoir system on the west side of Houston called the Addicks and Barker reservoirs. It's been there for 75 years, hundreds of acres, maybe thousands of acres of rice land behind this big dam. So the reservoir starts filling up. The Corps of Engineers says we're early in the hurricane season. We have to let some more water go to prevent it from flood- ing when the next hurricane comes. So even though the dam was not full, they decided they would let water out. When they let the water out, they let it out through Buffalo Bayou, which goes across West Houston, through the middle of Houston, and down into Galveston and out the Gulf of Mexico. So the Corps of Engineer said to the general public, "Don't worry if you haven't flooded yet, you will not flood as a result of our water discharge. About 20 minutes after that announcement, my mother calls and says the water's gone. I said, Mom, what do you mean the water's gone?" The water has now all receded and it's dry in the streams. All the water is gone in 20 minutes. And my keen legal mind says something is not right here because there is a Thermal mapping of an atrium building and the skylight leaked. This building was saturated from the 4th floor (top floor) throughout.

• Cover