Friday, November 8, 2013 (around 7:30 am):

After our situation suddenly took a turn for the worse, I stopped looking at my watch all the time, so for the rest of the day, I’m not entirely sure about what time it was when certain things happened.

Once we saw that the water was rising, and that the water level was higher outside than it was inside and continuing to increase, the first thing we realized that we needed to do was to get out of our fort that we had built. As the water continued to rise, we had to scramble to find some shoes that we could wear so that we wouldn’t have to go barefoot should the situation continue to worsen.

Our first concern was that we didn’t want to be trapped if the water were to rise higher than the tops of the doors in the room. Our second concern was that the wind was returning, and we wanted to be protected in the case the roof were torn off or if the ceiling collapsed.

0.5ft deep

The first thing we did was climb up onto the top bunk of the bed. Our bags that we had placed on top of the bunk bed were positioned so that there was a space between them that we were able to lay in. I pulled the mattress that had been the door to the fort out of its cords, and we tried to hide beneath it for a while.

1.5ft deep

As we watched the water continue to rise Elder Oakes became very uneasy, and suggested that we leave the apartment so that we wouldn’t risk drowning.  I told him that for the time being, the water was not too high for us to escape, and that if anything, I wouldn’t want to limit our options.  I suggested that we remain on the upper bunk until or unless it became clear that the water was going to reach the height of the top bunk, and possibly approach the level of the top of the door or ceiling and put us in danger of being trapped inside without air.

2ft deep

As the water continued to pour in through both doors into the room, many of my books and other materials disappeared beneath the highly agitated surface of the water.  Because Elder Oakes doesn’t exactly have a very conservative profile, even in the most compact position he could manage at the time, we were left only with partial protection from the wind and rain coming through the ceiling and the decorative cement blocks next to the bed.

3ft deep

Elder Oakes became more and more uneasy concerning our situation atop the bunk bed as the water continued to rise.  We decided that we needed to leave the bunk bed and consider our other options.  It turned out to be important that we had left the bunk bed, as we had later calculated that between the two of us and our baggage, we had more than 500lbs total on the top bunk, and we had actually slightly bent the thin metal frame.

3.5ft deep

We jumped off of the bed, leaving the mattress that we had on top of us over our bags so that they would be protected from the water coming through the ceiling if the water wasn’t going to get as high as that bunk. Elder Oakes at this point had resolved that we would head for higher ground and leave the apartment. I advised against it, but emergency situations aren’t times to argue.

We left the bedroom and went into what would have been the living room if there had been more furniture than just a plastic table and an ironing board.  As we waded through the room, Elder Oakes leading the way towards the door, I grabbed the small plastic table that I figured would be able to provide protection from both flying and falling objects. When we reached the door, however, the wind coming in the door was so strong that we wouldn’t have been able to leave the door without mostly submerging ourselves in the water. I saw a lot of debris, particularly corrugated steel, which I was very worried about potentially being hit with going 150mph.  After Elder Oakes and I negotiated with the wind coming through the door for a few moments, I suggested to him that it would probably be much safer to stay inside the building, and I suggested that we go back into the most central room in the building, where the walls were very close together and there were no windows or walls on the exterior of the building.  In retrospect, I am not exactly sure what the plan would have been had we made it out the door, exposed to the brunt of the storm and surrounded by rubble and debris. It turns out that one of the main causes of death in our area was when people panicked because of the flood waters and left their shelter. While the flood waters are dangerous and there is a very real potential for drowning, leaving shelter in the middle of a storm brings near certainty of injury from flying debris, falling rubble, or other causes.

4ft deep (about the deepest it got)

We moved back into the room and placed the table against the doorway, protecting us slightly from the winds. I happened to have my waterproof camera at this very point and decided to take a very brief video of the situation that we were in. After I took the video, I took the table into the room sideways. We crouched/sat beneath the table in the back corner of the room for the next hour or so.

The following video taken when the water was at 4ft deep and was taken only 30 minutes after the flooding started.