Reality and loss set in as Kingwood residents return to homes

After the rains no longer beat down on rooftops, after water stopped rising and rescues had slowed, a group of storm survivors from the Fosters Mill neighborhood gathered.

Many of the Kingwood residents had waited until the last minute — nearly too long — to flee their houses. Instead, as Harvey raged, they piled sandbags, built trenches, checked on one another by text.

No one expected their curving streets, lined with two-story brick homes with basketball hoops in the driveways, to flood.

But this time, it seemed as if the rain would never stop.

By Wednesday, Kingwood Drive, the main thoroughfare for the community of about 80,000 residents in northeast Harris County, resembled a surging river, with water flowing over street signs and submerged cars.

That’s when stunned homeowners came together to share storm stories, recovery tips and to find strength and solace in each other.

Be dispassionate, they were told. Tear out anything damp. Toss out anything storm-damaged. Numb yourself to the losses. Divorce yourself from emotions tied to possessions. It’s the only way to get through the long process of starting again.

Rachel Smith had almost succeeded in doing just that.

A small army of volunteers from her church had descended on her house, where water had risen five feet deep into the first floor. She and her husband, Aaron, had donned masks and gloves and carted out furniture, ripped out molding, thrown out boxes and boxes of belongings.

But when she thought of what she had lost — the table and chairs handcrafted by her grandfather, the recipes collected by her grandmother, the letter her child wrote — she would again hear the rain thundering and the sound of helicopters whirring overhead.

In those moments, she could not halt the tears.

‘It’s so terrible’

Smith and her husband barely had time to move some furniture and treasured items to the second floor before her home was engulfed early Tuesday morning.

After fleeing upstairs with their two young children and English springer spaniel, the couple hung a white towel outside a window and called the Coast Guard. But they never came.

Instead, after four hours, volunteers from the Cajun Navy pulled the family to safety in a rescue boat.

She returned Thursday morning, once the flood waters had receded and the neighborhood looked almost normal, save for the trash piling high on curbs.

“It’s our whole neighborhood,” Smith lamented as she looked up and down her street, still in disbelief. “It’s so terrible to watch everything around you go.”

The scene replayed itself in neighborhoods across Kingwood, which had seemed other-worldly just a day earlier, with water bobbing against first floor windows, toppling decorative statues and basketball hoops, and sending pool floats, a child’s bike helmet, grills and other detritus floating down the street. Some homes were marked by white towels, signalling a rescue. From others, residents who had chosen to stay behind waved at boats from second-floor windows.

Hundreds of rescue boats, manned by first responders and volunteer crews from Kingwood, Tennessee, Louisiana and California, plucked stragglers trapped by floodwaters and transported them to makeshift shelters at local schools and churches. For days, the normally quiet suburb buzzed with the whirring of helicopters and airboats.

Lost ‘sense of security’

On Thursday morning, the floodwaters had receded, leaving murky outlines along windows and the exteriors of buildings. Most major roadways had reopened by midday. Stores were starting to welcome customers.

But the remnants of the storm were everywhere. Downed trees and thick smudges of mud littered streets.

Gloria Ellzey, 51, and her 17-yearold daughter, Kailee, walked through their saturated first-floor apartment, where the carpet was still thick with water and mold had started creeping on ceilings and walls. Almost everything was a loss. Antique furniture. Gone. Clothes. Gone. Mattresses. Gone.

One of their six cats was missing. Three were outside in a van. The other two hiding in closets, mewling plaintively.

Ellzey and her husband, who uses a wheelchair since having a stroke, were rescued by the Coast Guard on Tuesday. Kailee had left the day before.

On the floor of the teenager’s bedroom, a yellow cone warned: “Caution Wet Floor.” A few days earlier, it had been a funny decoration.

Now, Kailee noted ruefully, “I guess that’s pretty ironic.”

Across the hall, Teresa Zamora waited with her daughter, granddaughter and a few suitcases holding all the clothes they had left. They had evacuated in such a rush that everything, except for important documents, was left behind and swallowed up by the flood.

Now, the Ecuadoran immigrants had to start again, with nothing. Just as Zamora, who works at McDonald’s, had done when she first arrived in this country.

Still, the 63-year-old Zamora shrugged off the damage to possessions and material goods. Only one loss mattered.

“I lost the tranquility I had,” she said. “I lost my sense of security.”