Houston tackles Texas-size cleanup
HOUSTON — In Kashmere Gardens, a historically black neighborhood and one of Houston’s poorest, the floodwaters have receded, but sorrow is on full display in the piles that line the street.
Heaps of soggy carpet padding. Chunks of drywall. Splintered boards, broken dressers and moldering mattresses.
A television. A teddy bear. Family photographs and a Bible, thick and leather-bound.
It smells musty. Sour, even.
Ten days after Hurricane Harvey blew into these people’s lives — and then lingered for days as a weakening storm, dumping epic rainfall on the nation’s fourth-largest city and its environs — the task of cleaning up is daunting. Much of it falls on people like Sonia Saldana and her family, and the strangers helping them.
Saldana watched from her driveway as a group of young volunteers from the Ahmadiyya Muslim community, clad in neon orange and yellow safety vests, hauled out drywall and insulation and threw it on her family’s growing pile by the curb. Inside, the house was virtually gutted, with walls ripped out and the furniture gone.
“I’m not a very materialistic person,” Saldana said. “We can replace our clothes, our bed, our furniture. But family, you can’t replace.”
The water rose as high as her chest on Aug. 26, said Saldana, who stands 5- foot- 2.
Everyone she’s talked to plans to rebuild, she said, because this neighborhood is home. Her family does too.
Houston has become two cities: a downtown once again bustling, with bars and restaurants full of patrons, businesses reopening and public transportation running again. Then there are the flood-ravaged neighborhoods where homeowners by the thousands are carrying out a vast do- it- yourself recovery, with most lacking flood insurance to help pay for it.
A few streets over from the Saldanas’ house, a man eyed the detritus on both sides of the street and assessed them this way: “Piles of people’s losses.”
Bridget Henderson’s home was evacuated last weekend, riding away on a city dump truck. On Sunday night, family members turned the damaged house inside out, hauling out furniture and other items.
Henderson has asthma, so she’s been trying to keep her distance, at least as much as possible. In a watery landscape rife with public- health threats including mold, filthy debris and sewage- filled flood remnants, authorities have advised people with respiratory issues to be particularly careful during cleanups.