People in Houston and southeast Texas are turning to an app created in Connecticut to help report flooding and other issues caused by Harvey.
Some 27,000 people in Houston have downloaded the mobile app SeeClickFix built for that city’s emergency call center.
"Houston was one of the first city users of SeeClickFix," Ben Berkowitz, SeeClickFix CEO and Founder, said.
As the water rises from the torrential rain in Texas, SeeClickFix has been flooded with posts by people in the path of this historic natural disaster.
"I’m not surprised Houston experienced the flooding it did," Berkowitz said. "This is a city that has been met with flooding issues previously."
The flooding images are among the worst Berkowitz has seen since he launched the digital communications platform for citizens to report issues to their local governments ten years ago.
"There are photos from Sandy that rival it obviously because of the housing density, but yeah this is up there for sure," he said.
Robin Ladouceur works at SeeClickFix in New Haven. She showed NBC Connecticut’s photos taken by her sister who lives south of Houston.
"This is my sister in her boots on the sidewalk and this is out the front door," she said. "They were very lucky so far."
While Ladouceur’s family is OK, their neighborhood like so many looks like a river.
"They bought cinder blocks so that they could at least put all of their furniture on the first floor up on cinder blocks," Ladouceur said.
Many of the posts on the SeeClickFix map of greater Houston report drainage problems and damaged property.
"It’s obviously going to be very devastating in the short term and long term as well," Berkowitz said. "It’s going to take Houston a long time to recover from this."
With emergency call centers overwhelmed, Berkowitz said citizens in southeast Texas are leveraging the power of social media platforms like SeeClickFix in a positive way.
"We see them volunteering to help each other out," he said. "To ask each other for help. It’s been some really inspiring stories from the social web of folks getting their neighbors out via boat."
