Hundreds are displaced in Bastrop County after flooding that began in Travis and Hays counties on Friday. The emergency is a reminder that floods don’t stop just because the rain does.
Onlookers gathered at the Colorado River Bridge in Bastrop all afternoon on Saturday.
Donna Allon was there with her husband Robert.
"I don’t think you can really imagine just how high this water is or how devastating this could really be until you're right there standing on it," Donna Allon said. "It's hard to imagine, but boy, you can really feel the force of it when you're just even trying to get into town, and I feel so bad for the people when they were saying 'Evacuate now!'"
The waters that caused so much havoc upstream Friday took some time getting to the bridge. Officials say the river crested in Bastrop around noon Saturday. By the time it was over they’d rescued about a hundred people from the floods. Around 250 homes were evacuated. Some of those people ended up at the First United Methodist Church in Bastrop, where David Childress and his 2-year-old son Colt were talking about the cow that wound up in their house after they'd evacuated on Friday
“We went in the house, and I had a pig in my house, I had a cow in my house. And it was water was all the way up to the top of my stove," Childress said. “They just swimmed in I guess, trying to get to higher ground. It was like four or five feet, and I guess when the flood took the doors out and stuff they just went in."
He lives near the county line by Highway 71. He thinks that as the river rose, that backed up already swollen creeks, and flooded the area around his home.
Heather Shipp, Childress’ neighbor and niece, says everyone's wondering where the water's coming from. She was also flooded out and, like a lot of people, she brought up the fact that this flood came just weeks after a major wildfire hit the area — not to mention the flood that happened earlier this year.
"I made a joke about it earlier, but I know it’s not God. But it’s like, what did we do wrong?" Shipp said. "What did we do wrong? It’s like everything’s happening from one end to the other, and it sucks because I'm like seven months pregnant, and all my baby stuff got taken away."
She says in the days to come she and people like her will need help cleaning debris and rebuilding lives that were turned upside down in a matter of hours.
