Not “just stuff ”: Residents return to their flooded homes to salvage items they cherished.
Victims of Harvey’s wrath find happiness and hope in unearthing belongings of sentimental value
Across the Houston area, thousands of residents have returned over the past two weeks to waterlogged homes and ruined belongings. Some items were swept away entirely by Harvey’s wrath. Others were irretrievably mildewed or moldy.
Over and over, in houses big and small, people told each other, “It’s just stuff.” That served as a mantra for many as volunteers helped muck out their homes, often tossing most everything they owned.
But from the hulking piles of debris that have lined hundreds of residential roads, or from the few bags Houstonians evacuated with, they salvaged a few things with sentimental value whose price could not be listed on an insurance form: family photos, a favorite pair of sneakers, antiques passed down from grandparents. Here are a few of those people with the cherished items they saved.
Carolyn Bennett stood Saturday in her Kingswood-area front yard, surrounded by piles of furniture, appliances and no-longer-dry drywall. The contents of the 70-year-old quilter’s home covered the lot, piled as high as the floodwaters reached, about 4 feet.
“When this happens to you, you realize that it’s not the antique furniture that counts, it’s not your designer clothes,” she said.
“It’s your relationship with God and other people,” Bennett said, just down the driveway from the camper she and her husband are now sharing. Still. “It’s overwhelming,” she said. “The first or second day you’re entirely
overwhelmed. You go to the store, and you just walk around like a zombie.”
Bennett is a spry septuagenarian, but — even with generous help from her church, family and neighbors — the long cleanup left her saying, “I feel like I’m 125.”
She mourned the loss of several of the hundreds of quilts she’s crafted over the years, for relatives and charities and herself. Her niece said that every November, Bennett drags family members to Houston’s big quilt show. It’s clearly not just a hobby but part of her identity and the way she cares for others.
When the water started covering the neighborhood’s roads, she and her husband, David, prepared to evacuate.
“I got as many quilts as David would let me take,” she said, hoisting a clear plastic bag with three queen-size comforters. Like so much else, the other quilts at her home were lost to Harvey.
A few miles to the southwest, Evelyn Portillo sat with her daughter at a table set up in the front lawn of her northside Houston home, which was uninhabitable after Harvey. They turned the pages of family photo albums, some of the few possessions not sitting at the curb.
Amid the destruction, the 48-year-old played and laughed with her energetic 2-year-old granddaughter, Athena, who had managed to draw on her entire body with a red marker. There were more memories still to make.
A few blocks from Portillo’s house, 12-year-old Yader Duarte watched his three younger siblings play in a neighbor’s yard. His mother said she couldn’t salvage much of anything from their flooded house.
Yader, a student waiting to start seventh grade at Patrick Henry Middle School, grinned sheepishly. He’d saved something: his brand-new Air Jordan sneakers.
When his family was getting ready to seek higher ground at a nearby park, he tucked the shoebox onto the top shelf of his closet. He’d waited months to get the shoes for the new school year, and he wasn’t ready to see them go.
In the Kashmere Gardens neighborhood, near Loop 610’s northwest corner, Maria Sion said she couldn’t salvage her car or any of her appliances. Her eyes watered as she contemplated her losses and the long rebuilding process ahead. But there was a bright spot: her pets.
“I did save my 22-yearold companion, Whiskers,” she said victoriously. The outdoor cat likes to wander. Sion didn’t know where to find him when the water started rising. She waded out to the edge of her driveway and called for him. Somehow, despite the driving rain, Whiskers heard her and came running. They evacuated together, along with Sion’s young dog, Foxy.
On Saturday, Sion called for Whiskers again, this time to take a picture together. Her sister and niece looked under the house for the independent-minded feline. He didn’t emerge this time. But he had come out when it counted.
Next door to Sion, a young man laid decorations on a patio table. Salvageable items were piled into a laundry basket.
Justin Broussard, 27, had returned home after three days sheltering at the George R. Brown Convention Center. It had been a long few weeks cleaning up without much help; his brother, a Houston police officer, was working nearly all the time during the disaster.
Broussard found little left usable at the one-story house where his grandmother raised him. But from tables and walls he gathered some of the antiques his grandmother had collected until her death two years ago: china pieces, metal figures of birds in flight, a yellow glass bowl.
In the Forest Cove neighborhood just north of Humble, Brent Henderson returned to his three-story townhouse Saturday to retrieve what little he could save after Harvey, his third major flood in 16 months.
Last year, 6 feet of water ruined his basement garage during the Tax Day floods. Nine-and-a-half feet did more damage the next month over Memorial Day weekend. He had just finished rebuilding this summer.
Harvey swept away those high-water marks. The swollen nearby San Jacinto River sent 16 feet of water into the neighborhood, washing away garage doors, smashing first-floor walls and partially ripping the porch from at least one house.
“You always wait for the big one, and it happened,” Henderson said.
A back door still hung in a tree, nearly two weeks after the hurricane’s remnants passed through Houston. A refrigerator sat a dozen yards into a marshy area as turtles sunned themselves nearby.
“I loved living here,” he said wistfully. “It was so peaceful. There was waterfowl and beavers.”
Along with a few bags of clothes, the 59-yearold Henderson carried a Texan-themed Santa hat. When he plopped it on his head, it seemed to complete a holiday costume. The straps of his back brace looked like Santa’s suspenders, and his plastic garbage bags could have been filled with Christmas presents.
But Henderson wasn’t heading out to leave gifts after sliding down chimneys. Instead, he was headed back to his family’s FEMAsponsored hotel room. He hopes the government will buy out his property.
“There’s no coming back,” he said, turning to leave.