ANGLETON, TX – Another day, another neighborhood underwater. This time it’s the Bailey’s Prairie subdivision in Angleton.
Funny thing, though: on Westwood Street, the homes on one side of the road appear to be floating islands, while across the street, they could win “Yard of the Month.”
“You don’t even feel like you’re in the same neighborhood,” says Janee McClure, whose house appears to be surrounded by a lake. “You look at one side of the street and it’s high and dry. And the other, we have gar swimming by. So it’s insane.”
Bailey’s Prairie was one of three subdivisions in Brazoria County placed on the mandatory evacuation list Sunday, along with Bar X Ranch and Longhorn Estates.
But Don Kubala decided to stay in the home he built 30 years ago and wrap it in a seven-foot sheet of plastic, burying the bottom edge under sandbags and soil. “In case the water did come up, which I figured it wouldn’t,” he explains, “I just wanna be on the safe side. And this way it will hold the water out of your house… if it works like I think it does.”
Thank goodness it looks like he won’t have to test that since the water started receding this afternoon.
Down the street is a whole different story. A devastated Ashley Kearney explains, “My brother and I came down with my parents to look at their house, and they have 8-plus inches in the house… (we) saw lots of snakes. Of course, there are piles and piles of ants floating everywhere. And my parents’ poor cat is stuck on the roof of their tool shed.”
“It first started yesterday morning,” says Michaela Brown, 13, whose family has been displaced to a trailer with their three dogs and pet rabbit. “In 15 minutes, we had about four inches. And in three hours, the house was starting to flood.”
But across the street, Sara Beery’s home is all good. “It makes me feel pretty bad,” she says, “but at the same time, I can’t, you know, not allow myself to feel incredibly grateful that our house is doing well right now.”
Seems these days, rain in the Houston area is kinda like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.
