ARTHUR, Texas _ The front doors to the Lake Arthur Place nursing home were locked when Ben Husser and his team of volunteer rescuers arrived on boats. He knocked, and when somebody cracked open the entrance, he pushed his way in.
The hallways smelled like feces. An old woman in a wheelchair was trembling, her feet dangling in nearly 12 inches of floodwater from Tropical Storm Harvey.
"What's going on here?" Husser asked a nurse. "Why is she shaking? Is she cold?"
Husser, a 45-year-old audio engineer who had hurricane relief experience with the Louisiana Air National Guard, had borrowed a friend's boat and come to help. He made his way inside and tracked down the nursing home's administrator, Jeff Rosetta. Husser was with the "Cajun Navy," he told Rosetta, and ready to evacuate the patients. Empty boats were waiting.
What unfolded next was one of the most surreal scenes in Harvey's already extraordinary assault on Texas.
In the coastal refinery city of Port Arthur, the storm _ which originally hit Texas as a Category 4 hurricane _ overwhelmed emergency responders with 26 inches of rain in a single day, more than double the previous record. Two nursing homes filled with 184 residents were flooded with nearly a foot of water. Even deeper waters surrounded the facilities.
And at the moment, the only rescuers in sight were a ragtag band of volunteers on fishing boats.
"You don't understand, I can't give these people to you," Rosetta said, according to Husser. "I can only give them to the National Guard." He ordered Husser to leave.
"Well, that's not the way it's going to work, man," Husser replied. "These people are leaving."
Words turned to physical blows. At one point, Husser drew a gun.
"I had to do what I had to do," Husser later explained. "We had to beat the crap out of Jeff _ at least, I did."
Some degree of chaos may have been inevitable amid the record-shattering rains of Harvey. The storm made landfall on Aug. 25 as the strongest hurricane to hit Texas in 56 years, and four days later brought its full drenching force to Port Arthur.
But the crisis at Lake Arthur Place was also the result of decisions made before the floods by the company that owns the nursing homes _ Dallas-based Senior Care Centers _ and by local officials caught off guard by the storm's strength.
Police raided Lake Arthur Place for evidence two weeks after the floods to better understand why it had not been evacuated before the storm hit, according to a criminal search warrant filed as part of an investigation of possible elder abuse.
"There were several days of warning, and several days to prepare," a detective wrote in an affidavit.
