PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP returned to Houston with the first lady Saturday to meet with evacuees and volunteers in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey.
Region still reeling as president, first lady meet evacuees
HOUSTON — A week after Hurricane Harvey lashed Texas with record rainfall, Houston storm survivors began to return to their neighborhoods, where the divisions between those who lost everything to the floodwaters and those who escaped relatively unscathed were on display.
Parts of west Houston were still reeling Saturday.
In residential neighborhoods near the Addicks Reservoir, which overflowed during the storm, residents relied on boats, canoes and kayaks to run errands and commute to work. Some had power, some didn’t. Some homes were swamped; others were dry.
“It’s a tale of two cities right now,” said Pete Carragher, 64, a geologist who returned home by canoe with his son-in-law, who lives nearby, to check on their houses and fetch supplies.
“You go a mile north and you would never know anything had happened, apart from the extra lines at the gas stations and the few shops being shut,” Carragher said.
He stood in knee-deep water, dressed in waders and boots. “It’s just if you’re in this flood plain areas here, it’s devastating.”
Meanwhile, in his second visit to the region in a week, an optimistic President Donald Trump toured NRG Center, an emergency refuge housing 1,800 evacuees in Houston. Joined by first lady Melania Trump, he sought to reassure residents that his administration was engaged in the recovery efforts.
“As tough as this was, it’s been a wonderful thing,” Trump said Saturday, praising the state’s response. “It’s been very well-received.
“We’re signing a lot of documents now to get money,” he said, a reference to the White House’s request Friday to Congress for $7.9 billion in immediate aid. Officials said this was only a down payment, a portion of a much larger funding request that could top $100 billion.
The Trumps brought coloring books and crayons and sat with families that had been displaced. Trump lifted one little girl into his arms and gave her a kiss. He signed his name on the cement wall by the children’s artwork.
With a wide smile and quick banter, Trump served food in the lunch line — at one point joking about his hands being too big for the sanitary gloves — and then moved on to First Church in the Houston suburb of Pearland.
Standing alongside the first lady, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Sen. Ted Cruz, at the church, Trump offered words of hope to storm survivors.
“We knew we have a long way to go, but the water’s disappearing,” Trump said. “And you look at the neighborhoods and you see it’s — we just saw it through there. Two days ago, even yesterday, they had water. Today it’s all swept up and cleaned up. We’ve got a lot of hard-working people, I’ll tell you that.”
Trump closed by discussing the effort to rebuild. “We’re talking about, they say two years, three years, but I think that because this is Texas you’ll probably do it in six months.”
His optimism seemed to belie the complicated reality of rebuilding lives. After talking with families who had lost their homes, Trump said he was struck by how “happy” they were.
The president’s second post-hurricane trip, which included a stop Saturday in Lake Charles, La., occurred after criticism that he didn’t meet with storm victims during his initial visit Tuesday in Corpus Christi, Texas. Trump said he did not want to interfere with rescue and recovery operations.
In much of Houston, the floodwaters have receded, allowing traffic to flow on freeways where there had been dramatic scenes of white-capped waves only days before. But cities and towns to the east remained underwater.
Saturday marked the third day residents in Beaumont, a city of almost 120,000 east of Houston, went without clean water after flooding overwhelmed the city’s pump system. Thousands in Texas are still without power.
Throughout the state, relief workers and volunteers continued to survey the wreckage of homes and neighborhoods, searching for survivors or those who died. The storm is blamed for at least 44 deaths.
Amid the signs of gradual progress came warnings of the difficulties ahead. Houston city officials alerted residents that scammers claiming to work for insurance companies were calling flood victims and saying they had to pay overdue premiums or they would lose their insurance.
And in a statement issued jointly with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the city warned of people impersonating emergency response officials in order to enter victims’ homes.
Officials with the Houston Independent School District, the fourth largest in the country, reported that after surveying most of the district’s nearly 300 schools, only 115 had been deemed safe to open by Sept. 11.
About 75 schools sustained damage and the district expects to have to relocate 10,000 to 12,000 students.
Meanwhile, some attention has shifted to Hurricane Irma, a Category 2 storm in the Atlantic Ocean — more than 2,000 miles from the East Coast. Its path remains uncertain.