Imagine standing in water shallow enough to just barely hit the soles of your feet, and then it rises, so fast that in just about 10 minutes, it's up to your neck.

That's how fast the Guadalupe River in Texas rose last week, according to state officials, 26 feet in less than an hour.

NPR Sergio Martinez Beltran has been out around Curval,

where some of the worst flooding hit, talking to folks who survived.

Hi, my name is Sergio. I'm a reporter.

And you can hear how sudden this all was in the stories they tell.

It was terrifying, dude. It looked straight out of a horror movie.

Ryan Dale was in his apartment

near the Guadalupe River with his three kids overnight, Thursday into Friday, watching the

rain come down, feeling nervous. He went outside around 6 a.m. and the water was about 100 yards

from his house. And then I came out 15 minutes later, and it was smacking the side of the apartment, getting up over the fence.

Dale and his kids literally ran to safety.

Another person, Sergio, talked to, is Melvin Harris.

He and his wife woke up to a neighbor pounding on the door of their RV.

Get out, get out there's, it's flooding.

And I thought, well, hell, I've seen it flood before I never even thought

of getting that damn high but he says by the time they got out the water was waste deep

of course it washed the motor home away washed both of our cars away and we got out with our dogs and the clothes on our back, and that's it.

Harris and his wife are now homeless.

They moved here two years ago after Harris retired.

This is all they had, and now all of it is gone.

We had friends that were camped up the road here, and they didn't make it.

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