If you had been wondering whether the sandbag and tarp barrier (pictured at top) mustered around Kristin Massey’s Meyerland home was able to hold back the floodwaters once nearby Brays Bayou overflowed its banks a block to the north Monday night, here’s your answer: “We did all that we could, but it would never have been enough,” Massey wrote on Facebook the following morning.
To prepare for the storm, Massey had spent close to $5,000 to arrange a perimeter defense using 18,000 pounds of sandbags. But the water reached the 9 ft. level on Braesheather Dr. a block south of Brays Bayou and just west of the 610 Loop (above) — and up to 4-and-a-half-ft. high inside her 1961 home:
Harvey Defenses
Chronicle features editor Lisa Gray says her Meadowcreek Village home escaped water damage during the flood, but it was close — and many others weren’t so lucky: “Berry Bayou — the middle of which forms my back property line,” she writes, “received more than 45 in. I’ve seen it in national weather-nerd articles where people are marveling how fast a bayou can rise. My husband says we were half an inch away from the bayou coming out of its bank in our back yard. He sent a graph, showing that on Saturday night, at the monitor I can see from my back yard, it was literally at bank level. But the water broke first on the other bank, into the yard of one of my favorite people in the neighborhood, and up and down the yards on that side. Lots of houses flooded. ‘Dry privilege’: That’s the headline of the essay I ought to write.” [
Lived in Houston for years but still coming up to speed on how the Addicks and Barker dams are supposed to work — just as the reservoirs reach to their highest-ever levels? 
The A.D. Players‘ new 450-seat Jeannette and L.M. George Theater at 5420 Westheimer just west of the Galleria, which opened earlier this year, “has stood the storm well,” its operators report today on Facebook. But not so much the very first set of shows in the resident theater company’s new season: Because of Hurricane Harvey’s devastation, 
