Continuing flood recovery

Regarding “Flood project holds promise” (Page A21, Oct. 28), the author, Mark Cover, is right that the work of rebuilding is far from over. Every Saturday since Harvey, a group of friends and I have been mucking homes in Kashmere Gardens. Sometimes we saw other teams of volunteers helping families, but most weekends it seemed like just us — clearing one house at a time.

Most weekends we felt, as some neighbors had told us, they had been abandoned by the rest of Houston — they were left to fend for themselves.

Recently we couldn’t find a house to muck in Kashmere. We thought naively that the worst of Harvey had turned a corner toward recovery. Then we showed up in the Lakewood subdivision in Northeast Houston.

Flood waters crested their rooftops. They heard their neighbor’s children crying in nearby attics. When they made their way to the shelters, they watched as armies of support flooded into Kingwood, their more affluent neighbor to the north. Then they returned to devastated homes, no armies of support in sight, with that same sentiment I felt in Kashmere — they were left to fend for themselves.

We helped Joshua Anderson rip everything out of his mother’s home. He told us FEMA’s offerings were worse than paltry — not even enough to fix the floors he tore out himself, let alone replace a small percentage of everything lost. He also told us matter-of-factly about the dearth of donations and supplies his neighborhood has received opposed to the great need. He and some buddies started their own hyper-local donation and distribution center out of a gutted home. It is also where the friends have been sleeping. They named their organization, very aptly, S.O.S. — Save Our Selves.

Houston’s response to Harvey can’t be called a success until all our neighbors, even the less-affluent, aren’t left to save themselves.