ROCKPORT, Texas — August 25 marks the one year anniversary when Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Rockport and Port Aransas.
The storm rapidly intensified in the Gulf of Mexico from a Tropical Storm to a Category 4 Hurricane.
Robert Mitchell, a Rockport resident, will never forget that day.
"We hit the reset button, we lost 100 percent of everything we owned," Mitchell said.
Hurricane Harvey brought wind gusts of at least 145 mph.
"Part of the kitchen window broke out and let out a lot of the pressure out and that's when the house kind of shifted a couple of times and then started lifting straight up like we were in an elevator," Mitchell said.
Mitchell, an Air Force veteran, rode out the storm with his wife and six dogs in the place they called home for five years.
"I told my wife 'just hold on, we don't know what's going to happen here'," Mitchell said.
That decision nearly cost them their lives.
"And then like five or six seconds later, it just dropped us right back down.," Mitchell said. "I said, 'well, I hope that's the worse thing that we're going to have to deal with tonight.' As soon as the words got out of my mouth, that wall of water hit."
Storm surge from Copano Bay dragged the home 50 yards away from where it originally sat, pinning it up against a nearby ditch and their truck. Mitchell, his wife and dogs survived, but they lost donkeys, goats and cats.
Mitchell is halfway into rebuilding their new home, which sits higher up with reinforced concrete on the same plot of land.
Others aren't so lucky.
Rockport Mayor Pat Rios admits it's been tough getting back to where they were before Harvey. In some spots, if you didn't know any better, it looks like the storm blew in last week instead of last year.
"They have their good days and their bad days. So many of these businesses are just determined to fight back and get back into business. Get back to where we were," said Rios.
Rios told KVUE they tend to get lost in the shuffle compared to the disaster in Houston.
"We still want people to realize that we were the first ones hit and we were hit extremely hard for our size," Rios said. "We don't want to repeat this. We don't want to go through this again. So, we're building more resilient. There's a spirit in this community to bring it back better than before and that's what makes my job a lot easier.”
As for Mitchell and his family, if all goes well, they plan to be finished with their home just in time for Christmas.
"You can't even describe what it's going to be like to move back in here. It's just going to be an amazing feeling and I mean we're blessed,” said Mitchell.
One thing is for sure, this community is Rockport strong.