Maria Campos wasn’t going to wait till the dam behind her house burst and washed away her home and her family. It was August 26, 2017, a Saturday, and Hurricane Harvey had parked itself over southeast Texas, unleashing biblical amounts of rain. Ivanhoe, where Campos lives, is a tiny town of 1,800 people 100 miles northeast of Houston, and it saw 27 inches in just five days. About 200 feet from Campos’ backyard, Lake Ivanhoe began rapidly filling behind its earthen dam. The front yard had already flooded, washing away her carefully arranged potted plants.
“The water is coming up, up and up,” she recalled. “My husband say, ‘This is serious, because the lake is already full.’ You can see the little fish in my yard. It was like a…