Houston pivots toward cleanup as hopes for normalcy return
Trump plans visit as mayor says city is ‘ open for business’
As floodwaters receded in the nation’s fourth- largest city, residents and officials turned to picking up the pieces and finding a semblance of normalcy as the last remnants of catastrophic Hurricane Harvey moved on.
Parts of the east and west sides of the city remain underwater, but the rest of Houston has mostly dried out. Traffic is returning to the streets. Businesses are reopening. Even baseball games will go on.
“The city of Houston is open for business,” Mayor Sylvester Turner said. “And quite frankly, we’re open for business right now.”
On Saturday, President Trump is expected to make his first visit to Houston in the aftermath of the storm. It will be the second trip to Texas in a matter of days by the president, who visited storm- battered Corpus Christi and huddled with Gov. Greg Abbott and state officials in Austin, the state capital, to discuss the recovery.
TheHouston Astros, who rode out the storm in Tampa, will return to Minute Maid Park for a doubleheader on Saturday, playing their first home games since Harvey walloped the region.
Firefighters on Friday continued a block- by- block search of tens of thousands of Houston homes to search for survivors or bodies in some of the areas hardest hit by the storm. At least 39 people were killed along Harvey’s path, with 25 of the dead in theHouston area.
Officials say floodwaters should be gone from most of Houston and Harris County by early Saturday. Jeff Lindner, meteorologist for the Harris County Flood Control District, said Harvey flooded an estimated 136,000 structures in Harris County, or 10% of all structures in the county database.
Abbott cautioned Friday that it will take years for Texas to dig out from this catastrophe
“This is going to be amassive, massive cleanup process,” Abbott told ABC’s
Good Morning America. “People need to understand this is not going to be a short- term project. This is going to be a multiyear project for Texas to be able to dig out of this catastrophe.”
Those residents in the hardest- hit areas in the city and neighboring communities — a whopping 70% of Harris County’s landmass was submerged by at least 18 inches of water — say it will be some time before they are able to return to their homes.
In the waterlogged Nottingham Fort neighborhood, near the Buffalo Bayou, homes and vehicles were awash in several feet of water. Residents expect it will take weeks before the murky rain water completely recedes and they will be able to return to their homes.
Nottingham residents with homes on higher ground who were spared the brunt of the storm have been working alongside impacted neighbors, wading into the brown waters to help salvage valuables and personal items.
In East Houston’s Lakewood neighborhood, Jackie Cirilo recruited an army of family members to start gutting her mother’s home.
The group of young cousins took hammers to the walls, ripping out drywall from knee- height down. The men used shovels to scoop bits into a garden wagon for the trip to the curb.
“My mom lives here,” she said. “This is the house I grew up in. We’re going to save it.”