US News

Gators take up residence in woman’s backyard during Harvey

Tropical Storm Harvey displaced some coldblooded characters.

A Texas woman was shocked to see a creepy trespasser “eyeballing” her from her flooded back yard — and then realized it was an alligator.

A sign warning against alligators on a flooded street during Hurricane Harvey in Seadrift, Texas.Reuters

“I see many tiny turtles, cuties swimming about. Sweet, right? Then I realize the piece of wood isn’t water, it’s a gator! I kept an eye out on him for an hour or so,’’ Arlene ­Kelsch, of Missouri City, told Metro US.

Kelsch said she later went to check on the reptilian interloper again, only this time, it appeared to have moved closer to her house.

“But it turns out it wasn’t him, it was a second gator! I swear to God, it was eyeballing me through the window!” she told the news outlet.

“’As long as I don’t open my door, I’m fine, but it’s still a little creepy,” she told the Houston Chronicle.

IT’S not the kind of place where you’d normally hang out, but for Texas flood victims, a local funeral home was a welcome refuge.

More than 100 people found temporary safety at the Crowder Funeral Home in Dickinson, according to the Galveston Daily News.

First responders had transported all the refugees there late Sunday night and Monday morning, Dickinson Police Officer Guadalupe Vazquez said.

The displaced victims were later bused to Houston, where they could take shelter at the George R. Brown Convention Center, according to Vazquez.

A few Houston residents made proverbial lemonade out of lemons — by water skiing on their flooded streets.

The friends hooked up a cable to a truck Sunday and set off on a tubing and water-skiing adventure as the storm turned roadways into canals, the Houston Chronicle reported.

Reddit user Just_the_faq shared video of the surreal spectacle, which appeared on the image-sharing site Imgur.

So much water has been dumped on Texas that the National Weather Service has had to add new color warnings to its rainfall maps.

The new maps now have purple for “15 to 20 inches’’ and a light-pink hue for areas that have received “greater than 30 inches” of rainfall.

“So much rain has fallen, we’ve had to update the color charts on our graphics in order to effectively map it,” the NWS wrote in a tweet Monday morning.