Population of shelters dwindles as water recedes.

Flood victims beginning the task of finding more permanent housing

Shelter populations dwindled across the Houston area on Thursday as floodwaters receded in many neighborhoods, allowing displaced residents to survey damage to their homes and begin considering next steps.

Facilities that had been overwhelmed with too many people, too few cots and too little food in the early days of Tropical Storm Harvey settled into a more organized chaos.

Downtown, at Houston’s largest shelter at the George R. Brown Convention Center, city officials and volunteers — laden with more donations than they knew what to do with — turned their attention to connecting flood victims to counseling, free transportation

and temporary housing.

“Almost as urgently as we set up this, we have to be moving with the same level of urgency to get people into short-term housing, or if they have a longterm solution, getting them into a long-term housing solution,” said Houston Housing Director Tom McCasland, who opened the shelter in 30 minutes Sunday morning.

Red Cross criticism

Houston’s shelters — and particularly the Red Cross — have come under fire throughout Harvey for not having enough supplies to serve the evacuees streaming through their doors.

By sunrise Sunday, when much of the Houston area awoke under water, one of the city’s two Red Cross shelters was not accepting evacuees — too much flooding — and the other had only 200 cots for what turned out to be more than 2,000 people.

After Mayor Sylvester Turner decided early Sunday to open the convention center, it took several hours for Red Cross volunteers to arrive, soaking wet in the back of a dump truck. Cots did not come until after dark, and shortages persisted for days.

Such problems are not new to the organization, which has been criticized for understaffing and mismanaging shelters during several recent disasters, from Louisiana to New York.

The Red Cross has said the widespread flooding caused by Harvey made it difficult to deliver additional supplies.

“Often, weather events come, hit hard, and leave quickly,” Red Cross spokeswoman MaryJane Mudd said in an email. “Hurricane Harvey came and hovered over the city very hard for an extended time, making it difficult for our pre-arranged, available shelter items to get to some locations.”

Spurred by Harris County Judge Ed Emmett, the organization closed some outlying shelters Thursday and bused evacuees to a new facility in south Houston’s NRG Center, which is owned by the county.

“The ideal would be if people find a friend, a neighbor, a relative to stay with, and if they can’t, then we’re going to move everybody down to NRG where they have services, because these small shelters don’t have these things,” Emmett said. “Of course, this is a case where most people do not want to be in a shelter very long.”

More than 1,200 people were sheltered at NRG as of Thursday afternoon, while the George R. Brown’s population dropped to about 3,800 as evacuees sought alternate housing.

‘We’re blessed’

Vicki Morse watched for her ride Thursday outside the shelter at NRG Center, eager to take her family to a friend’s place on Hillcroft to stay for a while.

“We’re blessed enough to have somewhere to go. Where we live, you can’t even see the roof of the house,” said Morse, whose neighborhood in Coldspring, north of Houston, is known as “The Bottoms” because it lies below the Lake Livingston dam.

At George R. Brown, empty cots dotted the convention center’s halls, as parents carrying babies and diapers, elderly in wheelchairs and couples on their phones waited in lines to sign up for assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

At one end of the building, volunteers and city staff worked with those who had received their FEMA approval numbers to arrange transportation and, perhaps, a hotel stay.

“How do I check the status?” Valery Bailey asked her sister, trying to figure out if FEMA had signed off on the application she submitted the day before.

Bailey’s home filled with some three feet of water through the weekend, leaving behind closets now growing mold.

Bailey, 33, sighed and sat down next to her husband, Henry Woods.

“It’s asking for a PIN they sent to me by email, and I can’t even find the email,” she said to Woods. “I could’ve sworn they sent me an email.”

Woods could not find the message either.

FEMA as of Thursday afternoon had received more than 364,000 applications for aid from Harvey’s victims and had approved $66.4 million in aid for more than 103,000, a process that typically takes a day or two. Thousands have been moved into hotel rooms.

“You’ve got to kind of go through step by step,” Woods said. “It takes a toll on a person.”

In the meantime, the couple had cots at the downtown shelter, but they planned to venture back to the northeast for the night, to stay at Bailey’s grandmother’s place.

“It’s more comfortable there probably,” she said.

For those without temporary housing options, the city is focused on identifying alternatives, such as Airbnb.