Iconic Photos Of Catastrophes Like Houston Flood Break Your Heart

A terrified boy inside his flooded Texas
house clings to his toy stuffed monkey
as he awaits rescue. 

Every time there is a huge disaster, like the epic ongoing Hurricane Harvey flood in and around Houston, certain photos, images or videos make you stop in your tracks.

That's when your heart really hurts for the people affected.

I'm sure that's the reaction everybody has. A lot of people were horrified by the elderly people at an assisted care facility who were waist or even neck deep in water because nobody was available to come rescue them.

They were eventually rescued.

The photo that did it for me popped up on my Twitter feed Sunday afternoon. It showed a little boy, maybe three or four years old, sitting on a kitchen counter as water rose to halfway up the cupboards below him.

He clung desperately to a toy stuffed monkey as he looked down, seemingly in horror at the water just below him.

I'm told the boy and his family were rescued and are now safe. I hope he still has his stuffed monkey, which I know must be a comfort to him.

The image of the boy in the flooded house crystallized for me how terrifying this catastrophe must be for thousands upon thousands of people.

And it goes on. The firehose of torrential downpours had moved east of Houston, at least temporarily this morning, so places like Beaumont, Texas and southwestern Louisiana are now living through the disaster.

Or at least I hope they're living through the disaster.

Images from past disasters float back into my mind when I see photos like the boy with the stuffed monkey.

I remember a photo of New Orleans after Katrina in 2005. It showed a woman on a bridge, watching as a dead body floated by. I wonder if the woman who witnessed that horror is OK now. Did someone recover the body, so the person's family at least knows what happened and can properly mourn the loss?

As if there is a proper way to mourn.

Sometimes even static images of disaster without people or even any real apparent emotion stir the soul and make you hurt for the victims.

Even static images without people pull at your heartstrings.
Here's a beautiful 19th-century farmhouse destroyed
in Vermont during Tropical Storm Irene floods in 2011.

After the devastating floods from Irene here in Vermont back in 2011, I and a bunch of other photographers captured an image of a flood-ruined house in Pittsfield, Vermont.

Judging from the architecture, the house was probably built in the 1800s. The flood picked up the house and threw it into a rocky ditch, leaving  it tilted at a crazy angle.

Whoever owned the house before the flood clearly took care of it. There it sat, with a smart green standing seam roof, and other evidence it was well-kept before disaster struck.

I wonder what happened to the people who lived there. Are the OK? Is the pain of that flood experience easing?

The images and videos that tear our hearts apart, like what we're seeing coming out of Houston and much of the rest of Texas, is actually good in one respect.

These horrifying pictures spur us to act. Houston and other parts of Texas are going to need a lot of help from all of us.

The boy stranded in his house with his toy monkey is a call to arms. Will you help in whatever way you can? The boy and his monkey, and millions of people in the Hurricane Harvey disaster zone pray that you do.