After Harvey, Houston Gamers Help Save Lives
Lending a hand to a rescue effort that’s anything but play
Edgar Mauricio, Dounn Michael, Rachel Silver, and Kingsley Blancher (above, from left to right) originally came together over their shared love for retro video games, and their willingness to do the work of managing the Houston Retro Gamers group, which holds events around Houston and provides an online community for more than 1,400 gamers who are also enamored of “old school” games like Famicom Grand Prix, for instance, or old Sonic the Hedgehog games from the 1990s.
But in the wake of Hurricane Harvey—which has dropped record amounts of rain and badly flooded Houston and all of southeast Texas—the four gamers found themselves in a position to help, both as individuals and as leaders of their particular community of interest. With gaming events postponed, their Facebook group became a place to trade information, check in as to members’ safety and local conditions, and let others know how they could help. The group’s four administrators, meanwhile, got busy saving lives.
“It was just a hodgepodge of people working together. We threw everything together and just hit it hard.”
Silver worked long hours over many days at the Houston-area hospital where she is a nurse assistant. Mauricio leant a hand in one of Houston’s hardest-hit neighborhoods, where he lives. And Michael and Blancher, while they weren’t able to join forces, both found themselves out on the flooded streets, teaming up with strangers to rescue Houston residents from the city streets that were badly waterlogged—or in many cases just plain underwater.
Blancher, who is 29, is a former Army combat medic and veteran of the Iraq war, and found himself idle after the first day of the storm, in a city that had all but shut down. So he and a few friends who are also veterans decided “to go out and start rescuing people,” he said.
“We threw everything together and just hit it hard,” he told Good Turns recently. The seven friends ventured to Dickinson, Texas, one of the worst-hit parts of the Houston metropolitan area (a mandatory evacuation order was issued there on Monday), and started going house to house, searching for stranded residents and pets. As the group traveled slowly through the neighborhood, they met others on similar missions, and combined their efforts. “It started out with the seven of us and three trucks and one boat,” Blancher said, “and it turned into two boats and five or six trucks and almost 20 guys.”
“It was just a hodgepodge of people working together,” Blancher remembers. But an effective hodgepodge. Over the course of two and a half days (the first half of this week), Blancher estimates that the group rescued more than 60 people, and almost half that number in pets. They found people in houses, in apartment buildings, or simply walking—or in some cases swimming—up the submerged city streets. Once they’d located victims, they transported them to one of the major roadways in the area, where high-water rescue vehicles were able to collect them and take them to safer ground.
Blancher’s fellow gamer, Dounn Michael, was working in a different part of Dickinson with his own team, and had a similar experience to Blancher, meeting up with other like-minded people to add to the rescue effort.
Blancher credits his military service with making him willing and able to lend the kind of assistance he did. “If you’re able-bodied and can help, help,” he said. “But I don’t expect people to. It’s dangerous work.” Blancher suggests interested parties check the Houston Harvey Rescue page on Facebook to find out more about conditions and ways to help. In the meantime, our hat is off to him, to his colleagues at Houston Retro Gamers, and to all those who are willing and able to do these kinds of good turns, or indeed lend any kind of hand to those affected. Their help will be needed for some time to come.
Posted September 1, 2017
