Meet Chase
By Chase Hayes.
Wading through murky, chest high floodwaters with a crate above my head I tried desperately to rescue an elderly woman’s four cats who had become trapped inside her home.
It was 2017 and the fury of Hurricane Harvey, a 500-year flood event, was wreaking havoc on the Texas coast, triggering catastrophic rainfall and flooding in my hometown of Houston.
The natural disaster decimated all in its path and for the third consecutive year in a row, record-breaking flooding had left our quiet neighbourhood in complete ruins.
I was 14 at the time and I remember my mom and I huddled around the TV for updates, with the eerie sound of the wind howling outside.
Live reports told of a series of tornados in our neighbourhood, and I spent hours sheltering in our hallway with my dog, prepared at any moment to lay over her and take the protective position I had learned from school drills.
While the terror of that day was overwhelming, sadly it was all too familiar.
My first encounter with a hurricane was when I was five years old.
The evening that Hurricane Ike hit, I had fallen asleep in the safety of my mom’s room, only to be woken in the middle of the night by a raging storm and an empty bed.
Panicked and scared I searched the house for my mom, to no avail.
Through the back window I could see the wind whipping debris across the yard and pelting rain coming from the black sky.
Armed with a flashlight in my little hand, I stepped into the storm to find my mom.
Within a few minutes the faint sound of a drill at the side of the house caught my attention and I found her desperately trying to secure our gate which was threatening to tear away from its hinges.
That night under the blackened sky and torrential rain we fixed the gate together.
Years later during Hurricane Harvey, my mom and I jumped into action once again, this time digging a trench at 3am in the morning to protect our home from the rising flood waters.
With our raincoats covered in mud and our faces pelted by the unforgiving rain, we then turned to our neighbour’s property where we helped stop the water from entering their house.
The next day we joined our community for a walk around our neighbourhood to survey the damage.
With roads blocked by debris, it was three days before we could drive out for supplies or help.
Trapped in our homes, we remained glued to whatever device we had to hear the news.
We watched as the story gained traction in the national media and then went global, sparking debate over the storm’s relationship with climate change.
The world as I knew it was spinning out of control.
While I thought about how these natural disasters could be prevented, I grew strength from the kindness, compassion and collective action of my fellow neighbours.
I truly believe these values are what kept us above water during those difficult times.
With every passing year I not only saw the effects of climate change, I felt it.
I remember feeling my skin bake in the Texas heat and my hands burn on the steering wheel of the rusted old tractor on my grandfather’s farm.
I loved spending summer days working out there, being paid with juicy blueberries.
As each summer tightened its grip on the farm, there was less and less rain to quell the growing heat waves which threatened the crops.
The droughts went on so long that the tyre swing I loved swaying from became buried beneath piles of leaves and cuttings waiting for the burn ban to be lifted.
It also became far too hot to enjoy sleeping in the hammock under the stars like I always had.
My childhood holidays were spent with my great aunt and uncle at Lake Livingston in the East Texas Piney Woods, where I’d learn to drive the boat and unsuccessfully, water-ski.
After a full day on the water, I’d crash on an air mattress exhausted.
In the middle of the night, my uncle would wake me quietly and we’d go onto the roof and lay under a blanket, while he taught me about the constellations.
Sadly, those holidays stopped.
With the end of the drought nowhere in sight, the water dropped so low we had to take the boat out.
We prayed for rain and when it finally came, we rejoiced.
But when the bayous overflowed, we wept.
Well-known for its flooding, Houston relies on networks of slow-moving rivers and streams (bayous) to keep the wetlands beneath the ‘Bayou City’ drained.
After years of rapid expansion, the city has been built in spite of the environment, and now it is facing the consequences.
The reality is low-income, low-priority neighbourhoods are generally hit the hardest by natural disasters, struggle the most to recover, and are the least able to invest in prevention measures for the next event.
Seeing my home, my family and friends suffer year after year in the wake of preventable disasters has filled me with passion.
After moving to Australia when I was 15, my fear of flooding was replaced with a fear of bush fires, having experienced them in the local parks around my suburb.
Seeing reports of the Black Summer bushfires only magnified this issue for me and I devoted countless school assignments to investigating the links between climate change and the growing suffering of people around the world.
Too often, climate change is debated as some future possibility when for so many of us, it is already reality.
I mourn the people we could protect if only we could set our priorities straight.
As a university student, so much of the rhetoric is about preparing for careers, learning practical skills to apply for a future job, and using my time in university to make myself the most appealing job candidate when I enter the workforce.
What is missing is a fundamental consideration of how higher education can prepare students for the challenges we will continue to face as part of the climate crisis.
Being involved in Planet Positive is an opportunity for me to apply my passion towards enacting real world change, and with each person investing their time and efforts to such a critical cause, I become more and more hopeful that the people I care about will not have suffered in vain.
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