In the quiet pre-dawn hours of Friday morning, the town of Ingram, Texas, was still asleep—oblivious to the terror rushing toward it. But by sunrise, homes were gone, families torn apart, and Libby and Doug Fuller were among the few who lived to tell about it.
Today, they sit side by side, still damp with memory, still shaken—but alive.
“We’re staying at my in-laws,” Libby says quietly. “On an air mattress. But we’re safe. That’s the important part.”
It’s the first time she’s come this close to the place where it all happened.
Doug, her husband, picks up the story from the moment the nightmare began.
“It started around 4 a.m. The rain wasn’t heavy yet. A guy on a motorcycle had pulled into the lot to ride out the storm—I stepped outside to check on him,” he recalls. “You could hear the river, but you couldn’t see it yet. Not until it was too late.”
He returned to the house to wake Libby, concerned they might get some flooding—maybe just the floor. Then, the unimaginable: he turned around and watched their car float away.
“I knew then—this wasn’t just water in the hallway,” he says, voice cracking. “This was going to take everything.”
Within ten minutes, the water was at the ceiling. They scrambled onto their mattress, using it as a raft, unsure whether staying inside was safer than stepping out into the unknown.
Then, the doors blew open.
“The pressure just tore them off. The water sucked us out,” Doug says. “I grabbed Libby. I grabbed our neighbor’s hand. We held onto a support beam for two hours. Two hours in the cold and dark. Just hoping we’d survive.”
They did. But many others did not.
And Libby? After barely surviving the flood, after being rushed to the hospital and losing everything she owned—she went to work.
“I was scheduled for a double on the Fourth of July,” she says. “I sent my father-in-law to tell my job I wouldn’t be there. We had no phones—everything was gone. But the next morning, I bought work clothes from Walmart and showed up anyway.”
Her boss stared in disbelief. She hadn’t known they were listed among the missing.
“But I had to work,” she explains. “I needed the money. We had to rebuild right away. That’s what people don’t realize. Disaster doesn’t wait, and neither can we.”
She spent that first day back preparing food for first responders—giving back to the very people who had helped save her.
And now, for the first time since the flood, Doug stands at the edge of what used to be home.
He stares into the debris, into the ghost of their past life. His voice is low.
“We lost everything—the house, the car… But we have each other,” he says. He reaches for Libby’s hand. “This is my rock. And as long as we’ve got this, we’ll make it. Somehow.”
His father is already on the ground helping with cleanup efforts. Volunteers dig. First responders rest only to return. It’s a fight to reclaim what the water tried to take.
And in this quiet, muddy corner of Texas, survival means more than breathing. It means waking up, showing up—and holding on.
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