Matt Lanza

Harvey was an incredibly emotional forecast that challenged many of us in ways we’ve never been challenged before. In writing this personal retrospective I sought a way to process this experience and convey the emotion of the last couple weeks in words. So this is my story, my call to action, my open letter to the city I’ve come to love.

I grew up in New Jersey and became fascinated by weather, most likely at the age of three. The memories are broken up and fuzzy now, but they’re firmly in my mind. In 1985, Hurricane Gloria came barreling up the Eastern Seaboard, forcing my family to evacuate my grandmother from her home in Atlantic City. My dad taped up windows around our house about four miles inland from the shore. I remember going to the coast after dark as the storm pulled away to (perhaps my parents would now admit, unwisely) “assess damage” to the beach. Gloria’s impacts on the Jersey Shore were modest. My grandmother’s house was unscathed, and life got back to normal in short order. Somewhere along the line Gloria ignited a passion for meteorology. It started with a hurricane in New Jersey, and as I sit here 32 years later, I openly wonder if a rain-laden hurricane in Texas is what extinguishes it.

I’ve dealt with a few stressful forecasts in my career. There have been blizzards when I worked in Upstate New York. Hurricane Irene in 2011 had me considering telling my parents to evacuate the same home we shored up for Gloria. In 2012 came Sandy. I had many friends and family members back in Jersey and New York directly impacted by that storm. The lead-up to that storm was one of the most stressful I’ve dealt with, though now a fading second to Harvey. At the time I worked as a meteorologist for the energy trading arm of Deutsche Bank here in Houston. My boss was on a required two week leave, and the onus fell on me to prepare our New York City office for Sandy’s impacts. I remember conference calls, and giving a worst-case scenario forecast I didn’t really even grasp. Sandy was the storm that, as a passionate weather geek, I drew on a map as a kid that wasn’t ever supposed to happen. It was difficult to see the Jersey Shore, my homeland, so ravaged. But my life had brought me to Houston by then, so there was a buffer there to reduce the storm’s emotional impact. But it remained difficult to watch.

Life had indeed brought me and my wife to Houston. We moved here in 2012 after stops in Jacksonville, Southern California, and Upstate New York. Maybe it’s because I somehow grew up deep in Philadelphia Eagles territory as a Warren Moon and Houston Oilers fan (not kidding here at all, I have the 1990s-era Starter jacket to prove it), but I have always had an affinity for Houston. I had no family here, and the first time I visited was on a job interview in 2008. As a broadcast meteorologist in Upstate New York, I had decided that the route I wanted to steer my career toward involved the energy industry. After discussing it over a long period of time with my wife (then fiancée), we decided that Houston would be our goal. It took a few more years, but we arrived in 2012, a year or so after my wife’s brother moved here. My wife’s parents wouldn’t be far behind. Houston didn’t become a home. It became our home.

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