Sisters' home repair ends flood recovery
Community effort takes 3 years, about 1,000 volunteers, $379,000.
Margaret Morales, 84, and her sister Janie Morales, 76, stood outside their rebuilt home in Taylor on Friday morning, choking up with tears.
Three years ago, floodwaters during the Memorial Day weekend knocked the house where they had lived since 1945 off its beams, and they couldn’t afford to repair it. Their new home was the final one to be fixed by the Williamson County Long Term Recovery Committee.
“You did a beautiful job, and may God bless every one of you,” Janie Morales said to committee members, public officials and members of other nonprofit groups at a celebration outside the three-bedroom, two-bath house on Eighth Street.
“If it weren’t for these people, I don’t know where we would be at,” said Margaret Morales, who added that she and her sister lived in their house after it was damaged because they had no place to go.
It took three years, an estimated 1,000 volunteers and $379,000 for the committee to finish repairing 95 homes in Williamson County, including 77 in Taylor, that were damaged in the 2015 floods. Jeanne McClellan, the chairwoman of the panel, said it was established to help homeowners who had exhausted their money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency or their own personal funds and couldn’t pay for items such as a new roof.
In some cases, she said,
homeowners couldn’t pay for any of the repairs.
Three of the Taylor homes had to be rebuilt, including the home of the Morales sisters, and two others required extensive repairs, including all new wallboard.
“I never dreamed it could take three years to get totally and completely rebuilt,” said Jeff Ripple, a committee member and pastor of the Christ Fellowship Church.
It took time to raise awareness about what had happened, he said.
“So many people didn’t even realize the level of damage that had taken place,” Ripple said.
The city of Taylor was the hardest-hit area in Williamson County during the flooding, when the raging
waters of Mustang and Bull Branch creeks damaged 280 homes, officials said. The estimated damage to city facilities, roads, homes and businesses was $721,000.
The floods also killed 14 people in Central Texas, including 12 along the Blanco River south of Austin.
The Williamson County Long Term Recovery Committee collected $418,000 in grants and donations for the repairs and has $39,000 remaining. It expects to pay final bills and then give any leftover money to the peo- ple who donated it, McClellan said.
Gr a nts inclu d ed a $100,000 donation from the United Methodist Committee on Relief and $50,000 from the Austin Disaster Relief Network.
Ripple said only one of the houses repaired by the committee in Taylor was in a flood plain, so most people were caught off guard by the flooding. According to the National Weather Service, Taylor received 7.63 inches of rain during a three-day period over the 2015 holi- day weekend.
Many of the homes with the heaviest damage were in the southeastern part of the city, which is the poor- est part, said Ripple. He said houses there tend to be older, wooden and built just inches from the ground in low-ly-
ing areas. The flood also damaged 41 of the 70 units at the Avery Apartments, which are oper- ated by the Taylor Housing Authority. Families living there were offered vouchers to move, said Ebby Green, the chief of the housing author- ity. The entire complex will be demolished, Green said.
She said the agency is seeking money to rebuild the apartments. To raise awareness about the flood damage in Taylor, the committee started a “Flood of Hope” campaign that included a fundraiser at the Texas Beer Company in 2016, Ripple said.
“We just kept talking to people one-on-one,” he said.
McClellan said that after she talked to her homeown
ers association, the group’s president made a $1,000 contribution.
So much furniture was collected by the Taylor Area Ministerial Alliance and the
Austin Disaster Relief Network that at one time the entire floor of the Old Taylor High School gym was covered with couches, chairs and refrigerators.
About 700 volunteers from churches, including the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and other groups across the nation helped with repairs, said McClellan. They included volunteers from Ithaca, N.Y.; Madison, Wis.; Slidell, La.; Des Moines, Iowa; and Southern California.
were floored at how many people came from so many places,” McClellan said.
One group of college students from Wisconsin spent the 2016 spring break replac
ing a roof, Ripple said. Habitat for Humanity provided an additional 300 volunteers who rebuilt two houses in Taylor, said Linda Sloan, the director of community involvement for the group. She said it took about 3,600 volunteer hours to build the homes, including the one for the Morales sisters.
The Long Term Recovery Committee paid $80,000 each for materials for the two homes and expects to come in under budget, McClellan said.
Volunteers also helped repair 18 homes outside of Taylor, including in Georgetown, Leander, Hutto, Round Rock and Pflugerville, she said.
Before the celebration of the Morales sisters’ home, Ripple said he was “very relieved” the committee’s repair work was finished.
“This event will quietly pass,” he said. “The majority of people in Taylor won’t even realize this has happened.”