BEAUMONT, Texas — Five years ago from Thursday night, Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Rockport.
In the next few days, the storm slowed down and turned into a catastrophic rain producer.
As much as 60 inches of rain fell in parts of Jefferson County even after Harvey was downgraded to a tropical storm.
Since the storm, millions of dollars have been spent on rebuilding homes and infrastructure while other money has gone toward flood mitigation and drainage.
Jefferson County Judge Jeff Branick is a lifelong Southeast Texan and says he's never been through a storm quite like Harvey.
Branick says, initially, he wasn't too concerned. He and his emergency management team had been meeting twice daily with the National Weather Service for about two weeks.
"I thought that like most storms it would continue inland and then lose power as it moved across the state," he said.
Following landfall, came a forecast predicting 10 inches, but Branick thought Southeast Texas would be fine.
When the storm stalled, Judge Branick found himself hunkered down at the courthouse.
He says the City of Port Arthur's emergency operations center's lines were overwhelmed, so they started rolling over into their emergency operations center.
“I spent probably from that time until three o'clock in the morning answering phone calls and taking down information about people that were stranded at their homes," he said.
When the skies finally cleared, Judge Branick surveyed the destruction from the ground and the air and that's when he realized rebuilding would take years.
“Only about 18 percent of homeowners in Jefferson county based on information that I was getting at that time from the National Flood Insurance program had flood insurance."
Judge Branick says out of roughly 81,000 single-family homes in Jefferson County, about 31,000 of them took on water ranging anywhere from two inches to seven feet.
Five years later, he says the lessons learned are easy to spot.
"I've noticed as I go around the community and look at the new homes that are being built that I see that most people are building their homes much higher than they did prior to Hurricane Harvey and I'm glad to see that," he said.
The county's focus since Harvey has been on drainage and flood mitigation.
Branick says they've been studying the flow of water from inland Southeast Texas down to the coast to get a better idea of how to withstand future flood events.