A Houston man got more than he expected when he returned to his flooded home. Hurricane Harvey was only half of Brian Foster’s worries, as he soon found out while walking the rooms of his former abode.
The house was badly damaged, so much so that Foster was already planning to demolish it. He and the work crew were walking through the rooms, looking the job over, when he happened to enter the dining room.
The next half-hour was a blur.
“I walked through the house and was looking at demo-ing the house, when I turned around and walked back through my dining room. I looked down, and there was a 10-foot alligator in my dining room,” Foster said.
Foster and the rest tried to lasso the gator, then contacted Wildernex Wildlife Control and the local authorities. Together they managed to duct tape the reptile’s mouth shut and load it into a truck for safe transport elsewhere.
Foster, who is originally from Louisiana, isn’t used to seeing such a sight in Texas. Neither are most of the other Lone Star residents, for that matter. The high water is providing a baptism by fire for these folks, with numerous gators, including a 12-footer, being displaced throughout the hurricane-ravaged area. (It took five law enforcement officers sitting on top of the latter to subdue it.)
“This isn’t like Florida, where you find gators in your pool,” Constable Mark Herman of Harris County, Texas, told CNN. “It’s a rare event to happen upon an alligator here.”