DEWEYVILLE, Texas >> Jimmy LaVergne and Tommy Williams were chatting on the banks of their underwater town.

“Last time, it took everything I had,” LaVergne, 36 and a county constable, was saying, looking over his steering wheel at the river where Highway 12 used to be.

His family had just moved into a new house when the Sabine River swelled up a year and a half ago and swallowed the whole town. LaVergne, his wife and their three children moved into another house for a year, but that house was sold; they were now in the process of moving into a travel trailer in Deweyville, where he would build a house for them again.

That trailer was now out there somewhere in the water. Asked about what is next, LaVergne could come up with nothing other than: “I ain’t going to go through this again.”

Again — this is the word in Deweyville right now. The post office flooded, again. All of the churches flooded, again. The health clinic, the county offices, again. The Williams’ house, the Bickhams’, the Fortenberrys’, again, again, again.

Houses that people worked on for months, gutting and renovating and refurbishing, and had finally moved back into less than a week ago — they are flooded. Houses that people planned to move back into later this month are flooded. Trailers brought here by the Federal Emergency Management Agency as temporary refuges after last years’ flood are now themselves flooded.

The waters were not as high now as they were in 2016. But the advance notice was shorter this time and people barely had a chance to gather their things — furniture, appliances, photographs, pets — if they had any chance at all. On the other hand, there were not as many things to gather.

“I have less to lose,” said Shirlene Hryhorchuk, 75, now sleeping in a cot in the home economics classroom where she teaches at the high school. “All the stuff that truly meant something to me is already gone.”

Alongside the heartache here is anger. Not anger at nature. Nature they could deal with, as they had dealt with Hurricane Rita, which tore off the roof of the high school on homecoming weekend in 2005. Gustav, too, did damage. There have been destructive floods and storms going back to the towns’ founding in the 1890s, and houses have been lost. But the town as a whole was never lost, not until the last couple of years.

“We survived Harvey,” Hryhorchuk said. This, she said, was not Harvey.

Deweyville, a town of about 1,000, sits down the Sabine River from the Toledo Bend reservoir. One of the largest man-made bodies of water in the country, the site of lake houses and great bass fishing, the reservoir is held back by a power-generating dam. The floodgates at the reservoir are controlled by the Sabine River Authority. Under a protocol set by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the authority opens gates to a certain extent when the reservoir level reaches a predetermined level, sending the excess water down the Sabine.

That is what happened after torrential rains in 2016, and towns and communities along the river in Louisiana and Texas were inundated. More than 450 people joined a lawsuit against the authority, charging that the opening of the floodgates had been catastrophically mishandled — that the reservoir levels had been allowed to stay too high until it was too late.

“Homes and businesses and churches were flooded, property was destroyed, burial vaults were disinterred and scattered, and animals and livestock were killed, in the name of” the Sabine River Authority, read the suit, which is ongoing.

The town rebuilt. Then this year, the heavy rains came again with Harvey. The level in the reservoir rose, again, and the floodgates were opened. Deweyville had been soaked by Harvey’s rains like so many other of these little East Texas towns walloped by the hurricane, but the storm had already moved to the northeast before the worst of the flooding came to Deweyville. The water had taken a few days to make it downriver.

“I know we survived Harvey,” said Teddie Berry, 27, smoking Marlboros in a folding chair outside the camper where he is now living with his father. “Our damage is not from Harvey.”

But this was all Harvey, insisted Ann Galassi, the assistant general manager of the river authority. The repeated destruction may seem unnatural but Harvey, and the rains last year, she said, had brought the sort of challenge that the authority had never seen before.

The rainfall last year set records for the reservoir’s 48-year existence. Then this year, after Harvey had passed through, there was so much water in the river, in the bayous and in Sabine Lake — into which both the Sabine and Neches Rivers flow — that “there was just nowhere for the water to go.” Galassi said that the presence of the floodgates, with the controlled release of water, actually held back what could have been a far more destructive torrent.

“Deweyville would have been in worse trouble without the dam than with it,” she said.

Still, she acknowledged the anger.

“It is very emotional and we understand that,” she said, pointing out that some people who work for the authority were dealing with flooded houses themselves.

Paul Price, the county judge here in Newton County, said the calamities of Deweyville are the result of a combination of factors, including the operation of the floodgates and some raised railroad tracks that run through town and keep floodwater from draining. But he agreed with Galassi that one of the factors is just abnormally bad weather.

“We’re getting more rain here in recent years as weather patterns change,” he said. It is a curse for a poor and rural county that has enough problems keeping people as it is. There are some already saying that rebuilding in Deweyville is out of the question. It’s just too tiring to endure over and over again.

But for a county that sits a little inland from the shore, Price said, changes in the climate could cut both ways.

“The prediction is that sea levels are going to rise around the world and people are going to be moving north,” he said, “So our county can be a productive county if people want to come a little further north.”

This is little comfort to the people now in Deweyville — or the people now just outside of Deweyville, waiting for the moment when they can come back in.

As his town sat submerged, Berry was among a rotating cast of Deweyville residents who had lost everything — again — and were living in vehicles at an intersection up the road. He and a neighbor, Greg Powell, were going through the familiar government forms that needed filling out once again.

“Which of the following cities have you currently or previously used as an address?” Berry was reading out from his phone.

Powell’s current address was his pickup truck. It had everything he owned, and it was where he was sleeping.

Last year when his house flooded he slept in a little red welding truck where he kept his tools, used in his work as a welder. That truck is now somewhere down in the flood. So is the RV he lived in, while he gutted and restored his flooded home. And so is that home.

“It ain’t done this since the 1800s,” Powell, 54, remembered saying to himself of last year’s flooding. “Let’s rebuild the house. What are the odds?”

New carpet, new walls, new insulation; the kitchen cabinets, the last step, were sitting on the living room floor. He grew hot just thinking about it.

“Is people’s recreation more important than people’s lives and livelihoods?” he said, cursing the nice lake houses around the reservoir. If he were in charge of things, he would make one law. “If you control them gates and get that big paycheck,” he said, “you and your family must live downstream.”

His phone buzzed. He checked the screen and laughed The government website had apparently recognized him like an old friend.

“Really!” he said. “It said ‘Hi, welcome back’!’”

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