After storm’s fury, a grim task: Gathering the dead
HOUSTON — The woman’s body was revealed as floodwaters receded, washed up against the green metal fence surrounding her apartment complex.
Neighbors knew who she was: Kiesha Williams, a 32-year-old certified nursing assistant and single mother of two girls. They had watched her drown as they frantically called 911.
They wondered how many more victims remained entombed in flooded apartments.
Harvey has claimed 32 lives in Texas. But the death toll is expected to rise as flooding subsides and people return home and search for the missing, making grim discoveries as people did in neighboring Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina.
Houston officials started the house-to-house search Thursday in areas where floodwaters rose 3 feet or more.
That includes Woodforest Chase apartment complex in the eastern neighborhood of Northshore.
The boxy tan stucco complex faces Greens Bayou, which overflowed during the worst of the storm last weekend, sweeping families from their homes. Farther north, the same bayou swept away a van containing a family of six. The vehicle was retrieved Wednesday.
At Woodforest Chase, those who could fled to the complex’s rooftops. From there, they shouted for help and watched in horror as neighbors drowned.
Officials have yet to search door to door at the complex,. Neighbors said they couldn’t be sure how many had fled before floodwaters rose nearly to the roofs.
The storm peeled open apartment doors, windows and walls, washing the contents through the surrounding fence where they became mired like flotsam on the beach.
Shaky cellphone video posted on Facebook showed figures clinging to a tree in the parking lot as brown water rushed around them, ripping one girl’s clothes off and threatening to tear her away as the other figure clung to her underwear.
“Pull her up! She underwater!” shouted a woman recording from across the complex.
“Pull her head up!” yelled a girl.
A nearby man can be heard calling 911.
“Tell them she going underwater and she can’t breathe,” the woman said.
“We need someone out here now, we’ve got people drowning,” the man told an operator.
The woman recording screamed. “She’s gone — they let her go,” she said. Noting others had already drowned, she added, “That’s not the first person.”
Also caught in the turbulent waters was Williams. She could not swim, according to a cousin, Daquan Green, 21, who was at Williams’ apartment Wednesday with relatives.
Williams had graduated from Furr High School and worked at a local hospital while studying to become a certified nursing assistant, he said. The single mother rented her own apartment, bought a blue Chevy Malibu sedan and had just received her license before Harvey hit, he said.
When the storm started, Green said, Williams drove away from the complex with her young daughters, then returned by herself. He wasn’t sure why.
“She left them with my mother and said she was coming back,” he said.
A team from the local medical examiner’s office removed Williams’ body from the complex fence Wednesday, and relatives told her daughters that she had died.
On Thursday, members of the Houston Fire Department and search and rescue teams from the Federal Emergency Management Agency had begun going door to door in the Meyerland area of southwest Houston, checking on people's welfare and for any hazardous materials.
Sheldra Brigham, a Fire Department spokeswoman, said crews will use a new GPS tracking system to record and map what they find.
The process could take weeks.