Houston’s flooding is inevitable, but are the deaths and damage?

Michelle Chaney, a 23-year-old sales associate at Wal-Mart with long black braids and a warm smile, watched in horror as flood- waters rose into her Greenspoint-area apartment. She waited hours for someone to rescue her and her three children.

“We’re trying to get out of there, and nobody’s there to help,” she told me on Wednesday at a mayoral information session at Harvest Time Church.

Finally, she said, as she was searching for shoes and jackets for the kids, a dump truck came, and someone hauled her children off without her. She panicked but soon tracked down the kids at a nearby mall. When we spoke, she said work was calling her to come back, but she was still draining her car with buckets, and she had no idea where they’d spend the night, let alone how they’d pay an unsympathetic apartment manager demanding the rent.

Her biggest loss? Practically everything she owns.

Mark Grimley, meanwhile, is a 48-year-old Meyerland resident, a father of a tween and a teen, who works in sales for AT&T. I found him Wednesday at his two-story home, wearing a “Life is Good” T-shirt and supervising workers as they removed wet sheetrock. As we talked near a plastic-wrapped pool table and furniture on paint cans, he told me how he watched the 7-or-so inches of water flow in through his front door, but how, unlike last Memorial Day, his family was prepared.

His biggest loss? Time, he said. The family will have to live upstairs, again, while first-floor repairs are completed.

While the recent flooding affected Chaney and Grimley in different ways, they had something in common: Neither felt they were all that important to city leaders.

“It’s a matter of priorities. They fixed the Medical Center. They haven’t fixed here,” Grimley told me. “Somebody’s just got to say, ‘Let’s spend money on this,’ as opposed to whatever they think it takes to get elected.”

It’s a sentiment I heard over and over again talking with flood victims last week. And it’s a sentiment to which Mayor Sylvester Turner seems keenly sensitive.

In both Greenspoint and Meyerland, he held information sessions attended by an impressive array of city, county and state officials, and their staffers, on hand to answer questions.

In Greenspoint, an estimated 1,000 displaced people, some who had harrowing tales of escape, crowded into a large church building and were remarkably patient.

“The point that I really want to make,” Turner said, “we’re not here today and gone tomorrow.” ‘Something is wrong’

All the residents could do was believe the mayor when he assured them that eventually, someone would hear their stories. And after a while, officials and staff fanned out with pens and forms, offering guidance for finding housing and assistance.

For Tatisha Jackson, a 36-year-old mother who works at an Amazon sorting center, it wasn’t enough. She didn’t blame Turner, because he’s still new on the job. But she felt like her neighborhood was left to fend for itself, to float to safety on air mattresses and refrigerators while residents elsewhere were rescued in boats. She said she and her family walked half a mile in waist-deep water only to have a “police tanker truck” drive past them.

Her mother took a wider view. For years, she’s heard talk of drainage improvements and projects to widen bayous, and she wonders why that didn’t prevent last week’s disaster.

“Something is wrong. Somebody lyin’ somewhere,” said Lea Porche, who was putting up her daughter in her small senior-living apartment. “If you’re doing the work, there shouldn’t be no floods like this. It shouldn’t be this bad.”

She’s right. Certainly, billions have been spent on efforts that have reduced flooding damage.

As wetlands expert, professor and Texas A&M extension specialist John Jacob says: “We wouldn’t be able to live here if there wasn’t massive drainage infrastructure.”

But it’s not enough. Eight people died last week. More than 2,000 homes flooded in Harris County alone. Time for action

Turner plans to appoint a flood czar, someone to focus on this issue alone and work with neighbor- hoods, civic associations, developers and others to find solutions.

“This issue is a top priority of mine,” Turner told the Meyerland crowd. “It’s a top priority of the city.”

Words are fine. Nowwe have to see action. When the carpets are replaced and the new drywall is installed, we can’t forget to plan for next time. Quite a few essays have been written on the flooding, several published on the Chronicle’s Gray Matters site, all weighing in on causes and solutions: It’s the developers. It’s suburban sprawl. It’s paving over wetlands. It’s the easily gamed permitting process. It’s building in floodways. It’s global warming.

Truth be told, it’s prob- ably a little of all of it. The one idea I don’t accept is that, since flooding is inevitable in a city built on a swamp, so is death and destruction.

“It’s not inevitable that we have to be in harm’s way,” Jacob told me.

Houston’s laissez-faire attitude toward development and storm preparedness can’t continue.

Turner and other officials talked to thousands of people this week, and those people are counting on a sea change in leadership on flooding.

A humble plea: Don’t let their stories, their suffering, be for naught.

Not again.