“I have had enough rain. I don’t need any more for a while.”

That was an understatement coming from Cheri Benander, formerly of Powell, who now lives in Texas, in the area hit hard by rain and flooding from Hurricane Harvey.

“I have dumped somewhere between 32 and 35 inches from our rain gauge,” Benander said Wednesday. It’s possible that she missed a few additional inches, since the gauge was full when she returned from an out-of-town trip over the weekend.

“I don’t think it’s stopped raining since Friday,” she said Wednesday.

Benander and her husband, Greg, moved to Livingston, Texas, in February 2016, to be near family after Greg underwent a heart transplant in 2014. They live about 45 miles north of the George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston.

The Benanders are safe and well. Their house sits on ground that’s a little higher than other areas around them that flooded and had to be evacuated, she said.

“We’re not evacuated,” she said. “We have roads closed, and we have experienced some of the problems with supplies. But we’re still in our house, we still have electricity, and we have what we need. We’re doing much better than thousands of people, so we can’t really complain.”

“We’ve just been kind of hunkered down, watching movies and making sure that we have plenty of supplies,” she said. 

In some places around their house, there is no standing water; in others, it’s ankle deep, Benander said.

“The ground is extremely soft, though,” she added. “I left [Monday] to get some supplies, and when I got back, I pulled over to park the pickup a little off the driveway, on grass that looked perfectly fine, and the passenger side sank up to the wheel wells.”

Benander said local television channels have covered Hurricane Harvey and the accompanying rain and flooding 24/7 since Friday.

“We have kind of stopped watching it for the most part,” she said. “You can only take so much.”

“It’s massive,” she said of the flooding. “It’s much bigger than just the city of Houston.”

“So far, we’re fortunate because there hasn’t been an extreme loss of life,” she said, adding that she knows it could get worse. “So far, it seems to be very minimal. ... Of course, any loss of life is horrible.”

Meanwhile, Ben and Jessi Borcher, also formerly of Powell, are feeling relieved after Hurricane Harvey mostly missed their town of La Vernia near San Antonio.

That wasn’t what was forecasted. Hurricane Harvey initially was predicted to make landfall in the San Antonio area.

“San Antonio was bracing, we were bracing; my employer sent us home. We were bracing for the worst,” Ben Borcher said.

But, when the hurricane hit a high pressure system to the west, it turned east toward Houston instead.

“We got lucky,” Borcher said Wednesday. “We only got 8 inches of rain. We’ve had thunderstorms blow through before when we got 4-6 inches of rain.”

The worst damage Borcher said he’d seen was at a gas station, where the awning over the gasoline pumps blew over. The Borchers had some trees with branches that broke, and a few people had trees blow over.

“We had pretty crazy wind gusts,” he said. “It was pretty wild.”

Borcher said he’s been impressed with the Texas spirit since the hurricane hit.

“It’s been pretty profound down here,” he said. “The stories of support and aid — the big media runs some, of course. But the smaller stories that you hear of the Texas people helping each other” are amazing, he said.

Borcher said he passed a huge motorcade of highway patrol vehicles headed south toward Corpus Christi to provide help there, where Harvey made landfall and hit hard.

“If I had to live in any other state than Wyoming, I would pick here,” he said.