HARVEY LEAVES IMMIGRANTS ON MUDDY GROUND
The undocumented need help but are afraid to ask for it
HOUSTON Magdalena and her family made it through Hurricane Harvey intact, but the storm has devastated her family’s already meager finances.
Before the storm, Magdalena — who asked to be identified only by her first name because she is an undocumented immigrant from El Salvador living in the U.S. illegally — and her household of seven were barely subsisting on the poverty-level wages her sister and brother-in-law bring home from their jobs at a factory and a meatpacking plant.
Then Harvey lashed the Texas coast and flooded one of the rooms in their squat two-bedroom apartment in southeast Houston. Even worse for her family, the storm meant no work for her sister and brotherin-law and a week less of muchneeded wages.
Compounding the pain, Magdalena’s daughter and her daughter’s partner and their three children’s apartment was destroyed. Magdalena’s twobedroom, one bathroom apartment now sleeps 12.
“At least we have our health,” said Magdalena, who cares for her sister and brother-in-law’s children and two of her grandchildren, in an interview in her cramped living room.
“I have to have hope that God will get us through this.”
The Houston region is still reeling from Harvey, which has left at least 44 dead and tens of billions of dollars in property damage in its wake.
Among the most vulnerable in a region on the mend are Houston’s estimated 575,000 undocumented immigrants, the third-largest population of unauthorized immigrants in the United States.
Ahead of Harvey making landfall on the Texas coast on Aug. 25,
THOMPSONS, TEXAS Tom Powell was about two months away from completing his dream home when Hurricane Harvey struck.
Over the holiday weekend, he returned to his Trinity Oak Family Ranch — the legacy project he and his wife, Martha, have been building for the past six years — for the first time since the overflowing chocolate-milk-colored waters of the Brazos River forced him and thousands of others along a rural stretch west of Houston to evacuate more than a week ago.
“I have learned my lesson,” Powell said as he entered the waterlogged 600-square-foot cottage he and Martha have lived in as they slowly went about building their larger and grander dream home. “It is time to move up the hill. But it was real cute. This is Martha’s little nest.”
As the waters recede throughout the slice of southeast Texas ravaged along Harvey’s path, thousands of survivors of the storm are now getting their first look at how their properties fared. In rural Fort Bend County, where the Powells live, Judge Robert Hebert on Sunday began lifting evacuation orders to some parts of the county swamped by the historic flooding. Huge swaths of the county, however, were still considered unsafe to enter, and the evacuation order remained intact Monday.
The Brazos River set a flood record of more than 55 feet in Richmond, just a few miles from the Powells’ ranch. The waterway, which crosses the region and empties into the Gulf of Mexico, rose an eye-popping 45 feet last week and overflowed into the small towns along the river’s edge.
For the Powells, the flood was devastating and a relief at the same time. While the small cottage they were living in before Harvey struck will require extensive repairs, the nearly completed house they were building on higher ground came out of the storm virtually unscathed.
The Powells moved to the ranch six years ago after spending a few years in the Houston suburbs and initially planned to build a new home on the property right away.
But around the same time, Powell’s business — he’s a roofer and contractor — slowed. The couple decided it was best to save money for a few years and enjoy the cozy cottage until they were on firmer financial ground.
As the Powells were set to make their first trip to Trinity Oak — a nod by the Powells to their deep Christian faith — since Harvey struck, Martha decided
“I want to make things as comfortable and ordered as they can be for when Martha comes home. Remember, this is Martha’s nest.”
Tom Powell, on returning to his home before his wife does
she wasn’t quite ready to negotiate the waist-deep waters and see the damaged home.
Tom Powell said his wife is the sort of “country gal that’s not afraid of snakes” or murky water. But the emotional toll was one she was not quite ready to endure.
So, Powell headed to the property with his two adult sons, Joel and Caleb, and two of their friends who volunteered to help get the place in order.
Before driving onto the property, he gathered his boys and their buddies and their children to talk about the objective of his mission: check on the condition of the cottage and get the still-under-construction new house in something resembling livable.
“I want to make things as comfortable and ordered as they can be for when Martha comes home,” he said. “Remember, this is Martha’s nest.”
After taking stock of the damage at the cottage, they quickly went to work getting the new house in order.
While the new structure — a 2,100-square-foot home built at an elevation nearly 8 feet higher than the old cottage — has been built, the interior was still very much a work in progress.
Appliances and a stunning cast-iron kitchen sink Powell found a good deal on will still need to be finished in the weeks ahead. Floors need to finished, massive decorative beams need to be installed, and the bedrooms need doors.
Powell put his son Caleb, 28, who served in the Air Force before becoming a facilities operator for a Houston-based oil company, and family friend Kenneth Williams were placed on outdoors duty. They were tasked with gathering a stack of pine beams that had been strewn about in the flooding. It was dirty work, and the murky water swarmed with ants and debris.
But Caleb and Williams, who is a personal trainer, plowed through their work with efficiency and not a word of complaint.
Inside, Powell assisted his son Joel, 32, a former Marine who is now working in the oil industry, and his buddy Jake Corley with moving heavy furniture and boxes of personal belongings that Tom and Martha had managed to hurriedly move from the cottage to the structure in the days before they had to evacuate.
Tom and Martha Powell, who spend time counseling students through the University of Houston campus ministry, also would use the property to host an annual party for students — an opportunity to show the mostly urban students the beauty of rural life. Now that he has lived through the flood, Powell said he is pondering how he can marry the love for his land with service to his faith.
“I really felt that the spirit of God was telling me that after six years of living in a little cottage, it was time to rise up and get to a higher level both physical and spiritually,” he said.
In the next few days, he hopes to be back at the ranch with Martha for good, to continue building their dream.