‘I don’t want to give up’: Rockport determined to rise

Almost 2 months after the beating it took, Texas town strives toward recovery

Each day, Deborah James methodically removes rows of seashells and merchandise from her stormravaged Sea Shell Shoppe, wipes everything down with a vinegar-peroxide mixture and stores it all in plastic bins in a nearby shipping container.

It’s been seven weeks since Hurricane Harvey roared through this seaside town, crushing buildings, splintering roofs and displacing thousands of people. The long road to normalcy sometimes seems far off. For James, 65, it’s done one shell at a time.

“This really hurts,” she says as she rummages through her moldinfested store, which lost part of the roof during the storm. “But I don’t want to leave. I don’t want to give up this corner.”

Ground zero for Hurricane Harvey, Rockport and neighboring Fulton received some of the worst wind and storm-surge damage from the Category 4 storm that made landfall here Aug. 25. But news media atten-

tion quickly shifted to the Harvey-induced floods in Houston and later, hurricanes in Florida and Puerto Rico and the California wildfires.

“That attention was never here,” James says. “It went straight to Houston.”

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has struggled to keep up with the litany of disasters. FEMA officials pulled workers from other federal agencies, such as Homeland Security and the Army Corps of Engineers, to staff the recovery effort in Aransas County, which includes Rockport, says Rita Egan, a FEMA spokeswoman.

Nearly 13,000 people have registered for FEMA assistance in Aransas County, and the agency has approved $22.4 million in aid, she says. “We are stretched thin, there’s no question about that,” Egan says.

Harvey affected about onefourth of the county’s 9,228 structures, causing about $420 million in property losses, according to county statistics.

About 6,000 of the county’s 24,000 residents lost their homes, says Rick McLester, Fulton Police Chief and Emergency Management Coordinator for the county.

McLester says he was somewhat dismayed when, at the height of recovery, he was alerted by FEMA that the agency was diverting assets from Rockport to Florida in preparation for Hurricane Irma’s landfall there. McLester says he noticed the number of FEMA workers shrink from the 20s and 30s to the 10s today.

Residents and officials feared being eclipsed by other disasters. “There is a sense of that,” he says.

There’s also been progress: Power was restored within two weeks of Harvey’s landfall, thanks in large part to 6,500 workers who swarmed the area immediately after the storm, McLester says. The county has picked up nearly 800,000 cubic yards of debris.

That’s just a fraction of the total debris left clogging curbs, and many residents remain in need adequate housing, McLester says.

“There’s still people hurting, there’s still people without lots of things,” McLester says. “But things are moving forward.”

“There’s still people hurting, there’s still people without lots of things. But things are moving forward.” Rick McLester, Fulton police chief

COURTNEY SACCO, USA TODAY NETWORK Michele Green’s company was destroyed by Hurricane Harvey in Rockport, Texas, which received some of the worst damage from the Category 4 storm that roared ashore in August.

RICK JERVIS, USA TODAY Only a few concrete steps remain from a store on Austin Street in Rockport, Texas, which was destroyed by Hurricane Harvey in August. Many structures in Rockport were destroyed in the storm and removed.