Joe Morales stood in the shocking cold rain outside of the Delco Center in flip-flops and socks, worried about the horses and cows he'd left behind on the ranch where he works in Victoria, Texas. Before Harvey made landfall as a category 4 hurricane, Morales tucked each animal in a stall with a round bale of hay and a trough of water that he thought would keep them happy for several days. He reinforced the stalls with two-by-four braces. 

Now he was sleeping on the floor of a high school sports complex turned emergency shelter in Austin, Texas, 130 miles away from home.

The recorded message on the phone hotline for Victoria was saying it could be more than a week before evacuees could return. There was no electricity. The water tower pumps were broken, so no water was moving through city pipes. It was impossible to get gas or buy food. The rivers upstream from Victoria were overflowing, which meant there would be even more flooding in the future.

A friend texted Joe a grainy picture: The building that Joe and his girlfriend, Chrissy, had been fixing up as a home had tilted off its concrete block piers. Trailers in his neighborhood were flattened. But Joe was most worried about the animals and whether they would be all right.

Joe and Chrissy put their dogs and cats in the truck and drove out of Victoria, with just a few dollars in cash between them. It wasn’t clear exactly where they were supposed to go, so they drove north until they saw a flashing sign on the highway directing evacuees to an emergency shelter. Austin residents volunteering at the shelter gave Joe some cash to fill up the tank of their truck and get dry clothes. Joe is using that gas now to ferry people between the shelter, the hospital, and the grocery.

When Joe first pulled into the parking lot at Delco Center and passed the police checkpoint, he realized that all of this was looking very familiar. He’d been here before, for Hurricane Rita.

“I’m really getting to know this place,” he jokes.

Much of Houston is underwater. Waves of people just like Joe and Chrissy are pouring north, and there are tens of thousands more who need housing. 

FEMA has only $3.3 billion to spend, but it’s estimated that $40 billion of damage may have been done to homes alone. Congress has yet to pass major emergency federal funding for the disaster. What’s true of prior hurricanes is true again during Harvey: In the vacuum of government response, individual people have taken the lead in helping evacuees through the disaster by offering cash, rooms in their homes, and rescue with boats or trucks.

The first wave of evacuees came almost entirely from coastal Texas towns where many people rely on subsistence fishing and hunting to survive. Franco, a stocky man with a black mustache, drove here from Port Aransas, which was also under a mandatory evacuation order. Back home, he has a habit of leaving fishing poles secured to the pier overnight, lines swaying in the water, so if a catfish takes the bait there will be food in the morning for his home-bound neighbors. He’s worried about them—people who can’t leave their homes are the ones most profoundly abandoned in climate disasters. “I like helping people,” he says. “The bad thing about being here is everybody has to help me; I can't help nobody.”

James Troyano, a forklift operator, and Yolanda Ordonez, an artist whose black hair almost reaches her waist, left their rental home in La Porte, Texas, with their two young children and just quarter of a tank of gas. La Porte is near where the hurricane made landfall; James would have stayed behind to help, but he worried about his older son, who is autistic. “We can’t just ride it out,” he says. 

They loaded their sons James, 9, and Matthew, 6, into their car and began driving, using a weather map to navigate their way away from the storm. “We just kept trying to drive higher than where the rain was moving on the screen.” They bought the gas to evacuate with money they had saved to make their car payment. “I hope the car loan company is going to understand,” Yolanda says.

The family spent their first night at a shelter in Dallas, but it was so overcrowded they didn’t feel safe there. They wound up driving another four hours the next morning to a donated Airbnb in Austin. They stopped by the Austin Red Cross shelter to ask for food and aid and were turned away because they are not currently staying there, and no financial aid is available right now. A volunteer at the facility quietly gave them $150.

Yolanda and James’s relief was short-lived. A pipeline ruptured on the northeast side of La Porte and was leaking anhydrous hydrogen chloride, a corrosive gas used to refine gasoline. “The city put out a recorded message saying close your windows and doors, turn off your air conditioner, don’t go outside,” says Yolanda. “And if you are outside, go inside a building right now. They’re running loud sirens like the old air-raid sirens, the emergency signal that they test every Saturday in case there is a leak.” Much of their family was still in La Porte—James’s parents, brother, sister-in-law, and their two children.

At the grocery store, the checker asked if they were hurricane evacuees. When they said yes, she gave James and Yolanda a discount. “We both broke down in the grocery store,” James says. “It’s so hard to keep up the façade of being strong for my kids. I have overwhelming feelings.”

“I just said, ‘Hold me, baby,’ and we cried together because all the people helping have humble hearts,” says Yolanda.

“I’m so worried, I can’t sleep when I lie down. It’s days of lost work,” James says. “My boss’s house was completely destroyed. The warehouse is closed and that means more time with no paycheck. I talked to my landlord already and said I evacuated and I don’t have no more money, but he said he is expecting the rent.”

Some people stayed behind because they were worried about losing their jobs—in areas where evacuation is voluntary, rather than mandatory, they could be fired for not showing up to work. But many people who left early now have a negative bank balance and no homes to return to, alongside everyone else they know. 

“I’ll tell you one thing,” James says, “The weather is changing. The water is so hot in the Gulf of Mexico. That’s the fuel for the storm. Usually there’s cold pockets, but now it is hot all the way down. I do believe that the earth is warming and we need to do something about it.” 

“We’ve been through this so many times before,” adds Yolanda. “We had Hurricane Ike. We had Hurricane Ivan when we were in Florida. We can’t stay and go through it again.”

“You know why this is happening?” Joe Morales asks. He and Chrissy were standing outside of the Delco Center in a downpour. They were talking about how great rain feels and smells even when you know the trouble it’s causing. Joe said that he could make $34 an hour working in the oilfields but chose to make $10 an hour and take care of horses instead, because he wants to be outside helping nature instead of harming it.

“Why this is happening is that I think we done so much bad to Mother Earth that she's giving it back to us,” Joe says. “Not to be mean or hurt anybody but just to get herself clean. We done too much to her. Too much pollution. Too much taking and not enough giving back. Now she is telling us about that."