2 months ago
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AUSTIN, Texas (KXAN) — A Texas pistillate says she and her family, aft being swept distant by floodwaters aboriginal Saturday morning, managed to past by climbing a tree.
Melissa Higginbotham lives successful Leander, conscionable down the thoroughfare from the Travis County Emergency Services District 1 presumption and the Round Mountain Baptist Church. She explained that, astir midnight, she noticed determination was h2o successful her beforehand yard.
"About 2, my dada came banging connected the door, 'We got to go,'" she recounted to Nexstar's KXAN connected Sunday.
Higginbotham and her daughter, positive their household pug, loaded into a car and tried to get to higher ground; but it was excessively late, the h2o had risen excessively quickly. They past piled into her dad's motortruck successful an effort to escape.
"My car floated off, we inactive haven't recovered it. And past we watched our neighbors successful their double-wide interval past america with their full household successful the house. They fortunately deed immoderate trees backmost present and stopped and made it," Higginbotham said.
The motortruck that Higginbotham and her household were successful began floating arsenic well.
They deed a tree, crawled retired the model of the truck, and climbed up the tree. Higginbotham, her dada and her girl stayed determination for astir 2 hours until the h2o receded immoderate and exigency crews came.
Melissa Higginbotham of Leander, Texas, shows the histrion she climbed to past floods during the aboriginal greeting hours of July 5, 2025. (KXAN photo/Grace Reader)"God was with america and God made definite we were okay," said Higginbotham.
Those surviving astir her, galore of whom are family, were helping to prime up the pieces connected Sunday.
"It's Leander astatine it's best, nary 2 ways astir it. Community supporting community," she said.
Baptist religion opens its doors
Just a fewer roads down, the Round Mountain Baptist Church has opened its doors to assistance walk retired water, food, and astir importantly, assistance radical get information. At the beforehand doorway is simply a database of radical who whitethorn beryllium missing.
"While it's been devastating, it's besides been awe-inspiring to spot the assemblage conscionable set unneurotic and enactment unneurotic to supply abstraction for radical to come," said Katherine Waggoner, who works astatine the church.
Waggoner said the top request she's seeing close present is for information, assistance uncovering people's loved ones who person not yet been seen since the floods washed done this weekend.
"People conscionable privation to cognize what's going on, they privation to cognize wherever their loved ones are," she said.
