Floodwaters raise ire in west Wharton
WHARTON — Heavy with heat and moisture, the air in Rosa Lee Dove’s first-floor apartment stunk of mold. The 74-year-old breathed in the gritty smell and wondered how much longer she could live that way.
Five days had passed since a mandatory evacuation forced Dove and others from their homes in a lowlying neighborhood in this small, rural city southwest of Houston. The Colorado River that weaves along the edge of town had risen dramatically due to recent thunderstorms. Its brimming banks would send water into roughly 100 homes, all located on what’s considered to be Wharton’s west side.
The flood marked yet another blow to the lives of those who had the least. West Wharton, as it’s called, is home largely to poor, black residents who
are separated from the white community to the east by railroad tracks. Theirs are the homes that get damaged when the floodwaters come. It is they who face the longest recoveries. As in any number of small towns across the state, they share in the story of racial disparity, fueled by such long-standing wounds that the solution, at times, feels doubtful, obscured.
After a major flood in 1998, Wharton city officials began tackling their drainage problems, but none of the projects significantly benefitted west Wharton.
The city focused on mitigating the effects of flooding in areas where officials felt they would get the “biggest bang for the buck,” acknowledged Mayor Domingo Montalvo Jr.
“You have to talk about the cost-benefit ratio,” Montalvo said. “That is what gets you funded.”
The city’s calculus of where to start making fixes led them to the east side, where neighborhoods of higher value stood to suffer the most damage, the mayor explained. By contrast, solving the issues in west Wharton would be expensive — about $6 million — while the value of the homes and land remained low. Help there was pushed down the line.
“They never cared about the west side of Wharton because it’s an all-black community,” said Bill Coleman, 77, a part-time resident and local activist. “They’ve got everything on the east side. We’ve got nothing on the west side.”
Coleman has vowed to keep pushing for improvements in a struggling community that members of his family have called home for a century.
Meanwhile, a proposal to protect west Wharton, which City Manager Andres Garza, Jr. calls “the big fix,” is scheduled to come before the city council in mid-May. Then city officials would have to find the money to pay for it.
Vulnerable residents
From the time of Jim Crow laws, discrimination based on race and class influenced where poor communities were located, often restricting people to areas that put them at risk for environmental hazards, said Robert Bullard, dean of Texas Southern University’s public affairs school.
Such inequities weren’t necessarily erased after the laws changed, Bullard said. In some cases, development pushed invisible communities even further behind, leaving residents vulnerable to threats like pollution or, in Wharton’s case, flooding.
“Living on the other side of the tracks is more than just a slogan,” Bullard said. “Living on the other side of the tracks can be unhealthy and unsafe.”
With a population of near 9,000, Wharton is about 32 percent white, 27 percent black and 39 percent Latino, according to 2010 Census data.
‘Have to grow together’
Local officials would never neglect an area based on race, color or creed, said Montalvo, who became the city’s first Hispanic mayor in 2010 and faces a contender for re-election on May 7.
“We knew if our community was going to grow, it was going to have to grow together,” he said.
Montalvo said the city has focused attention on improving west Wharton, providing it with what he called the city’s best water system and removing its dilapidated buildings.
However, residents such as Coleman aren’t satisfied with the pace of changes. Coleman has pleaded for better street lighting for the community, which he says lacked adequate water service for years and only recently received a streetsweeper.
Worst of all has been the dismal susceptibility to floods — four in the last 30 years — that disrupt the lives of west Wharton residents while sparing the rest of the city.
As piles of soggy insulation, broken TVs and ruined furniture piled up along their streets last week, resigned citizens described coping with the unceasing problem as best they could.
Mary Washington, 66, worked weekends to save $3,200 for her sinking house to be raised, work that got underway the week before the storm. “It saved me,” she said.
At the behest of his wife, 75-year-old Robert Phillips moved from the home in which they’d raised their family, renting it out instead. “I couldn’t blame her,” he said, standing among bleach fumes from cleaners he’d used trying to fight off the mold for his tenants.
And Paula Earls Price, 72, predicted a $30,000 bill for repairs. She had waited like many others for the waters to drain and then ar- ranged to rip out the lower portion of her walls. “I just wish it wouldn’t happen again,” she said. “It happened too many times already.”
The three figured something could probably be done to help them, but hadn’t.
Stopping by his neighbors’ houses Tuesday, Coleman, dressed in a suit and tie and with a notebook in hand, told them he planned to pick up west Wharton’s fight.
“I’ve got to make a difference,” he said. “I’ve got to make a difference.”
Part of 2007 flood plan
Like many residents, Coleman’s family has lived in west Wharton for decades.
His grandmother, Mattie Jackson Davis, born in 1887, bought up property in the city. She gave birth to Coleman’s mother, Thelma, in 1911, two years before the city’s worst-ever flood. Later she built her the house where Coleman continues to live part-time. The street is named for her.
Memories of floods sprinkle Coleman’s childhood. At age 8 or 9, he recalled, he had to stay in train boxcars until the waters went down. Around 10 or 12, they took shelter in a hide house, where animals were skinned.
The self-described “come-to-guy” for the community, Coleman today splits his time between Sacramento and his small red house on Mattie Street, where he puts out a U.S. flag to let neighbors know when he’s home.
He sees himself following in the footsteps of his mother and grandmother, whom he said made a point to care for others in the neighborhood.
City officials said they are doing all they can to fix the flooding problems.
With the help of federal funds, officials finished projects on the east side to add flood gates ($125,000), dig a drainage channel ($2.2 million) and complete a system to protect the bank around a wastewater treatment plant ($60,000).
In 2007, the federal government approved a plan, the Wharton Flood Reduction Project, to get the entire city out of the 100-year floodplain. The plan includes the segment to protect west Wharton.
‘It takes a while’
Local officials stress that they have continually and proactively helped west Wharton residents get out of the way when the “wall of water,” as the mayor called it, comes. Rescuers worked tirelessly to get people out. A local church group helped move and raise furniture, and is now seeking donations to help rebuild three homes. The mayor hosted a town hall Wednesday, too, hearing out frustrated residents. (Some residents offered to spearhead a letter-writing and petition campaign to help get the west Wharton flood-control proposal funded.)
“Once everybody got to get it out, they understood that this isn’t something that happens overnight,” the mayor said. “It takes a while.”
Still, when the river began rising the week of April 17, bringing on warnings of a flood just a year after residents there had last been evacuated, Rosa Lee Dove thought that she couldn’t afford to move or store her belongings once again. Dove simply left and returned home to ruin.
“We are suffering over here because we are poor people,” said Dove, who receives $756 a month through Social Security. “But we are human beings, too.”
Dove hoped to get a voucher to stay in a motel. Instead, in pain from recent back surgeries and subsequent falls, she trudged step by step with her cane up a flight of stairs to a relative’s second-floor apartment, where she could rest in someplace dry.
“I can’t do that too much longer,” Dove said midmorning Tuesday.
Standing in the doorway, Coleman urged her to keep pushing forward.
“You ain’t tired yet,” he said to her. “Been on the road a long time, but you ain’t tired yet.”