Houston has a hidden tax: It’s called trauma
Disasters are blending into disasters. When is it too much and you leave? For many, never.
It’s a phrase 54-year-old Alice Torres uses like a refrain in a ballad of traumas over the past few years that led her here, to this moment, speaking to me by phone with the borrowed breath of a backup oxygen tank that, by Wednesday afternoon, was running dangerously low.
Harvey didn’t spare her and her mother Dolores Torres in 2017, swamping the 60-yearold, low-slung brick house they shared near Hobby Airport in so much water that home and flood insurance couldn’t cover mold remediation and rebuilding.
“We still haven’t fully recovered,” she tells me.
COVID-19 at least waited a few months until it pounced, sickening both mother and daughter, who was nearly put on a ventilator herself. They both beat the infection, but ultimately, her mother couldn’t survive the destruction of her lungs. In late summer, Alice had no choice but to put her 85-year-old mother in hospice.
“The hardest decision I ever had to make,” Torres said, her voice breaking. Beyond iPAD visits, they weren’t able to see each other in person.
On Aug. 2, Dolores Torres died, and a rosary was held on her birthday, Aug. 12: “We spent all day with her,” her daughter said, some solace given that her mother, like nearly all COVID patients, died in isolation.
Texas’ epic power grid failure amid freezing temperatures last week left Alice Torres gasping, quite literally, for options after the oxygen tank supplier gave her the runaround.
“I have a generator that makes oxygen but without electricity it doesn’t work,”
she told me. “I’m scared I’ll run out.”
At some point, a staff member from state Rep. Christina Morales’ office brought a generator but Torres and her brother couldn’t find gas to run it.
Each disaster Torres experienced has a name and a set of dates, but what is the name for this pileup of catastrophes? What do we call the whole of it?
In a city that boasts of its low cost of living, it’s time we acknowledge the true toll of Houston’s incessant stream of unfortunate and deadly events.
Over the past decade, Houston has been through three years of severe drought. Followed by five years with at least one flood worthy of the increasingly outdated “100-year” or “500-year” distinction. , And then five major chemical explosions in 2019.
Then the COVID pandemic, which at times rendered our region among the worst hot spots in the world.
A psychiatrist I spoke with compared these repeated disasters to the “polytrauma” of soldiers who have survived multiple deployments in war zones. Many here have lost loved ones, livelihoods and homes. Then there are things you can’t see or touch: loss of safety, security and the belief that this too shall pass.
Sometimes it feels as if Texans, and Houstonians in particular, are subjects in some intelligently designed experiment, chosen for our ideal diverse population, extreme weather and weak regulations. Developers profited off lax rules in their paving over floodplains and prairies. Petrochemical companies benefit from loose oversight of their impact on fenceline communities. Electricity generators saved a few bucks because no one required them to weatherize. Yes, companies profit off this laboratory of disaster, but then, so do us lab rats. The jobs, the art, the food, the music, the square-footage, extra bedrooms and sprawling yards.
We owe it all, either directly or within a degree of separation, to industry.
But, to paraphrase a popular counter-slogan of Houston: Is it worth it?
The answer isn’t the same for all. When the going gets cold, some can hop a flight to Cancun. Others pay the ultimate price. Carrol Anderson, a 75-year-old Vietnam veteran, died last week when he went to his truck to use his last backup oxygen tank. More than two dozen have died in the Houston area from exposure, carbon monoxide poisoning, crashes and fire.
When I moved to Houston in the summer of 2001 to attend graduate school at the University of Houston, piles of sopping debris from mucked-out buildings still lined the streets after Tropical Storm Allison’s thenrecord-breaking floods. I was eager to move here, though. The cost of living seemed lower than most any other big city. I found an apartment steps away from the Menil Collection that my meager teaching stipend covered.
Having grown up on the Gulf Coast, in Alabama, I accepted this risk of a hurricanes. In 2008, my new family stuck it out through a couple of weeks without power after Hurricane Ike and bonded with my neighbors over impromptu feasts of thawed-out freezer food. The layering, folding, compounding of disasters over the past decade wasn’t part of my calculation.
I’ve begun to ask myself, in a manner that’s no longer merely rhetorical: Is it time to give up on Houston and leave?
I know I’m not alone. I also know I have the option to cut and run. Many others do not.
As I’ve talked to people during this crisis, it’s been the folks who have lost the most who raise the stakes for me. I listen to them most of all.
BBB
Without his CPAP machine running at night, Billy J. Guevara, 47, woke up after repeatedly gasping for air on Tuesday night. Losing electricity was an inconvenience for 1.5 million Houston households but it posed mortal danger for those with chronic illnesses and disabilities. Guevara’s stress level spiked, bringing on back pain and heart palpitations.
“Being totally blind, it is an extreme burden,” Guevara said of the power outage.
The Northeast Action Collective provided him a battery that gave him some relief. Guevara joined the collective after his house flooded in 2017, along with his mother’s next door, when Halls Bayou broke its banks during Harvey’s biblical rains, but the full costs of the disaster were far worse than material damage.
“I lost my aunt, my uncle and four cousins, the youngest was 6 and the oldest 16,” he told me. They were in a white van swept away in the floodwaters.
Much as they have for Alice Torres, disasters have blended into one another for Guevara. He lost three relatives in Corpus Christi to COVID — his Uncle Francisco, a Vietnam veteran and mechanic, and two cousins.
When I first met Guevara in April 2018, we were deep into this decade of rolling disasters. West Street Recovery was giving a tour of post-Harvey Houston to Henk Ovink, special envoy for international water affairs for the Kingdom of the Netherlands. A camera crew followed Ovink around for a “60 Minutes” profile in the works. As Guevara showed us his partially rebuilt home, those big television cameras focused in so close, so intently — as though they were in a laboratory and the microscopes were peering at their Houstonian test subject — and I felt a strange anger.
Harvey was “like a magnifying glass” showcasing Houston’s vulnerabilities, Ovink wrote for the Chronicle in a still-relevant call for better preparation.
Harvey also revealed some strengths. Neighbors help neighbors in disasters all around the world, but Houston took bottomup, mobile phone-driven mass rescue to a new scale.
We showed the world that people of all races and ethnicities could come together even. Call it a “silver lining.” Call it “resilience.” Call it “Houston Strong.”
But at what point do these words fall apart? How many
Cajun Navy high-water rescues? How many plumes of doom? How many COVID deaths of people who had no insurance and no chance. How many children rushed to the ER with carbon monoxide poisoning because their parents took desperate measures to keep them warm during a statewide power failure?
How many people like Alice Torres, hit by the next crisis before the last one ended? BBB
I called her again Thursday afternoon. The relief in her voice was clear. Her electricity had come back on and her oxygen generator was helping her breathe once again.
As we talked, I asked her when she first needed oxygen. Her answer was another reminder of Houston’s clustering of misfortune, its piling on of unfair burdens.
Before Harvey, Torres received a stage 4 lymphoma diagnosis. She advocated hard for herself until she was placed in a trial for an aggressive chemotherapy. She started needing oxygen.
Torres traces the origins of her illness, and her strength, back to her childhood in a Fifth Ward neighborhood near the Union Pacific yards they called “El Crisol,” named for the nearby creosote plant. The Texas Department of State Health Services found a cancer cluster in that area. Her grandmother, cousin and father all died from cancer.
“I’ve got it all,” Torres told me, a slight rasp beneath her laugh.
I asked her the question I’d been asking myself: had she ever thought about leaving Houston?
“It’s worth fighting for,” she said without hesitation.
Torres joined forces with the Harvey Forgotten Survivors Caucus to do just that.
“I owe it to my parents, and this house is the sum of all their work,” Torres stressed. “I was born here. My dad was a native Houstonian. My dad was in LULAC Council 60 and served during World War II. He fought for rights and equality. My mother was a nurse for 49 years and was also a community person. There’s more to fight for. We have to be persistent. No, I’m not going to give up.”
BBB
After a week like this, I’m not so sure, even without going through anything remotely as difficult as Torres. At what point does Houston become an abusive lover? Do those of us who have options to leave only stay because we develop a siege mentality?
In Houston, we love to think of ourselves as the portrait of America’s future, a multi-hued, multilingual fusion stew of the nation’s demographic destiny. Is that just a modern day Allen brothers ad marketing swampland as paradise? Maybe. But one person’s swampland is another person’s paradise if it’s all they can afford.
I asked Torres about what “cost of living” meant to her.
“Our leaders are only thinking about monetary value, not the actual cost of living,” she said.
The actual cost would not only account for housing and transportation but also for the externalized costs and taxed emotions — the stress, the fatigue, the plumbing repairs, the irrational post-hurricane fear of a light afternoon shower.
In time, many Houstonians start the “and now this” refrain. Many make the “worth it” calculation in their head. Some reach an answer I haven’t yet.
“Leaving Houston broke my heart,” says Amy Hertz, founder of a small communications group called Tangerine Ink who collaborated with Stephen Klineberg on the book “Prophetic City: Houston on the Cusp of a Changing World.” Talking with disaster experts like Jim Blackburn in her research made her realize just how deep the disregard for human life runs through our history. What tipped the balance, though, was the ITC fires in Baytown.
“With all the air filters on in the world — I have a hospital quality air filter — I was still sick and having trouble breathing,” Hertz said from her current home in the Atlanta area.
No, my own bags aren’t packed. My community is here and they make me feel safe. Despite the risks, I’m still with Torres and Guevara for the fight. If Houston is a laboratory, I’ll join the lab rats in the maze.
I do have a breaking point. I think of my children’s future. If we can’t make a real breakthrough in this struggle — the struggle to value human life — it will be time to move on. To a place where life isn’t punctuated by the dreaded refrain,