MORE WORK TO DO
Five years after the devastating hurricane slammed the Texas coast, small towns face the ongoing challenges of rebuilding their communities
ROCKPORT — Each day, Gary Billy drives past the empty corner lot where his restaurant once stood. Sometimes, he looks over at the scrubby grass, the crumbling foundation and the fading blue sign for JJ’s Little Bay Café.
“We put our hearts and souls into that business, into that property — expanding and doing things,” he said. “Sometimes it hits you and you’re just like, ‘Man, you miss it.’ But life just keeps going.”
The restaurant was among hundreds of buildings that were destroyed five years ago when Hurricane Harvey made landfall in this small Gulf Coast city.
Now, residents and elected officials here say they are recovering from the devastation, mirroring other small towns affected by Harvey. That said, they still have more work to do to bring displaced residents back home and get their infrastructure ready for future storms. The city also is facing an affordable housing shortage, a wave of ongoing construction projects and the lingering emotional toll from the disaster.
The Southeast Texas community of Dickinson has its challenges, too. Homeowners there remain skeptical that the city’s mitigation efforts are enough to prevent other disasters.
In Port Arthur, near Louisiana, the largest
“The challenge is preparing for the next storm. There’s going to be one — we just don’t know when.” Aransas County Judge
C.H. “Burt” Mills Jr.
mitigation projects await federal funding approvals before they can get off the ground.
“The challenge is preparing for the next storm,” said Aransas County Judge C.H. “Burt” Mills Jr. “There’s going to be one — we just don’t know when. (We’re) trying to prepare to where we don’t have near the disaster that we had with Harvey.”
ROCKPORT
Harvey made landfall near Rockport at 10 p.m. on Aug. 25, 2017. Winds topped 130 mph and rain blew sideways, stripping leaves from trees and twisting telephone poles. The storm ripped through homes, businesses and churches while water from Copano Bay surged onto the back side of the peninsula. The damage was violent.
After the hurricane, Billy and his wife returned to Rockport to find that they had lost their restaurant, RV park and home. Powerful winds ripped the new roof from the café and tossed it onto a nearby church. Inside, everything was gone, including original artwork and a large tank full of tropical fish.
The owners have since reopened JJ’s Café in a building next to Walmart. They feel like they’re back on their feet, Billy said, although high prices are hurting the business and a workforce shortage has forced him to close on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
The café lost nearly its entire kitchen staff when workers moved to bigger Texas cities following Harvey. Many never returned because the hurricane wiped out apartment complexes, exacerbating the city’s affordable housing shortage.
“They can’t afford to move back down here,” Billy said. “The majority of workers that left this area are still gone — and they’re never going to come back.”
Some affordable housing options have been rebuilt following the storm, including the Saltgrass Landing, a lowincome apartment complex where Elizabeth Brown lives.
Harvey obliterated the complex. Many tenants were displaced and never returned, but Brown stayed with a friend in Rockport and moved back into a two-bedroom apartment — bigger and nicer than her old one — when it was rebuilt.
At first, she had no furniture and slept on the floor, but Brown was thrilled to have a home again after feeling lost.
“Not having a place to live really sucked,” she said. “It just makes you feel like your whole world is turned upside down, like everything you know is taken from you.”
Elsewhere on the peninsula, construction is underway at other apartment complexes, some for low-income tenants and others at market rate prices. Crews also are working to rebuild Rockport City Hall and the Aransas County Courthouse, which are projected to be complete next fall.
Meanwhile, many of the pastel-colored million-dollar vacation homes on Key Allegro Island have been repaired, though some lots remain vacant where residences were destroyed and demolished.
Despite the ongoing housing challenges, local customers and tourists still flock to JJ’s Cafe for breakfast and lunch fare like omelets, shrimp and grits, and chili with cornbread. Sometimes the line extends out the door.
Sporting a yellow T-shirt and flipflops, the owner sipped sweet tea and chatted with regulars on a recent afternoon while friendly waitresses greeted newcomers.
Billy still gets emotional when he thinks about the Harvey recovery and the ways people helped one another during the darkest days. He decided to rebuild his life in Rockport because he loves his friends and customers.
“I could have just put everything for sale and walked away,” he said. “(But) we didn’t want to do that.”
Rockport lost roughly a fifth of its population in the years after Harvey, and school enrollment dropped by 500 students, according to the city. But officials say the numbers are bouncing back.
Scott Jones, a pastor at First Baptist Church, said many people who helped lead the recovery efforts have since moved away. His church suffered great damage, including a shattered stained glass wall, but has since been rebuilt.
“I think for those who tried to bear the weight of helping the community to recover, it took a toll on their lives,” Jones said. “I’m still trying to recover as well.”
Still, Jones said he feels called by God to stay with the people in Rockport despite the threat of future disasters.
Others also remain committed to rebuilding on the peninsula.
St. Peter Catholic Church in Fulton, a town next to Rockport, was destroyed by Harvey and has since been demolished. Construction begins soon on a new church for the largely Vietnamese faith community and is expected to take more than two years.
The church has faced many challenges throughout the recovery and rebuild process, including limited resources and materials, navigating eligibility concerns for funding and the COVID-19 pandemic.
But the rebuild is crucial for the small, pious community whose lives revolve around the church.
People attended daily evening Mass in a beautiful sanctuary before the hurricane. They held Bible study, language classes and large Vietnamese New Year celebrations in the parish hall.
They now gather for Mass inside a former gymnasium where metal fold-up chairs, crosses and a small altar decorate the warehouse-like facility.
There’s little left at the old church grounds: an empty foundation, a damaged hall where debris litters the ground and sunlight pours through holes ripped in the ceiling, and a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary that was somehow unscathed in the storm.
Still, a small cohort returns to the battered property for daily prayer, including Thao Nguyen, a longtime parishioner and volunteer for the church.
On a recent afternoon, he and several other people sat under a tarp tent beneath the Mary statue.
They sang in Vietnamese while the sun scorched the nearby parking lot, praying for their community, praying for those in need, and, most of all, praying for the completion of their new sanctuary.
“Oh my God, I want to see that day happen,” Nguyen said. “Everybody (is) waiting, waiting, waiting.”
DICKINSON
When Harvey left Rockport, it moved inland — before pivoting hard and re-entering the Gulf of Mexico. The system lingered there, dumping up to 34 inches of water on Harris County in four days.
While Houston received much of the federal funding and media attention, surrounding towns suffered, too. Lesser known than some of its Galveston County neighbors but still home to more than 20,000 people, Dickinson is Pastor William H. King III stood under ceiling fans that drooped like lilies, warped from the moisture of water that filled Greater New Hope Missionary Baptist Church during Hurricane Harvey.
On the ground, he pointed to faded lines marking where he had installed makeshift walls for rooms, each big enough for only a bed, lamp and nightstand. From 2018 to summer 2022, couples from a Christian charity group stayed on-andoff at the desolate campus on 22nd Street as they helped repair other storm-damaged structures in Dickinson.
Their departure meant that the team succeeded in moving 400 families back into their homes. It also meant that King was getting his secondary church space back — and he’s having it refloored, installed with new fans and ready for parishioners to attend services in September.
“They’ll be praising God, clapping hands, singing ‘Glory to God after a storm, Amen,’ ” he said one morning this August.
The past half-decade has been trying for the city of Dickinson, which saw about 85 percent of its landmass go underwater during the hurricane. Some people packed up and left, but most rebuilt, banding together in love of their community. Since then, however, they’ve taken on a particular, more despondent brand of resiliency: They eye the city’s ongoing mitigation efforts and fear that they are sitting ducks.
King meets those residents often. Leaving the church that day, he drove his truck through town and descended into the Bayou Chantilly neighborhood, cornered in by I-45 on one side and Dickinson Bayou on another.
It used to be a lovely place — lush and well-kept, homeown
er Gayann Corbin said. Now, it's dotted with “for sale” signs, displaying people's slow exodus from the neighborhood.
She and her husband, Bob, met King on their corner along with a half-dozen neighbors. Most people in Dickinson know of King, since his church serves about 60 percent of the community and became a distribution center during Harvey. (He was also a city councilman for 21 years, and he's running for county judge.)
The conversation turned to the city's disaster response, and the gaggle erupted into overlapping speech. The most visible project to date is the widening of West Gum Bayou and the construction of several detention ponds to expand the capacity for floodwater. They weren't buying it.
“I don't have a degree in engineering … but I believe if we had a pump station pumping water out of the bayou into the contributory of the Galveston Bay, that would be better than widening the area,” Arthur Francis said. “It doesn't matter how deep you have it and how wide it is. The water has nowhere to go.”
The city also is turning to voluntary buyouts and acquisitions, programs that allow it to buy people's homes in floodprone zones and either demolish them entirely or rebuild them higher. Corbin and Francis said they don't expect many people to bite.
Francis said he hasn't seen Dickinson keep a “pulse” on its people, and Noel Larsen added that she feels the city sat on its hands for years after the storm. In 2019, she saw some of her neighbors remove some obstructions from the bayou in order to aid water flow, frustrated that the city hadn't done so itself.
Jon Junemann, who has lived in his home since 1975, jabbed his fingers in a fury.
“It takes a quarter of an inch of rain to absorb in this gumbo clay in one hour,” he said. “Where is the water going to go? It's going to be right here in Lake Chantilly again.”
City Manager Theo Melancon took the helm in 2021 after a period of tumult among Dickinson's leadership. He said residents in any city tend to feel hopeless when it takes years for the biggest projects to get underway, and King added that he feels Dickinson residents feel a particular apathy toward their local government.
Even then, Melancon said Dickinson officials haven't been sitting around — they earmarked $70 million in state and federal funds for mitigation, with more in the application process. Already, the West Gum Bayou widening is underway, and about 110,000 square yards of dirt have been moved in ditch cleanups.
Dickinson also plans to construct a diversionary canal that reroutes floodwater and deposits it further east on Dickinson Bayou, and city leaders are exploring a pumping project at Benson Bayou.
“As dirt starts moving and turning, I believe people will see,” Melancon said. “I don't think a lot of people understand the size and scope of the projects.”
Melancon agreed that the buyout programs might not have enough takers, especially since people worry whether they can find other, similarly priced homes in Dickinson.
In Bayou Chantilly, the Corbins said they put $200,000 into their home, and they received just $28,000 back from FEMA on account of not having flood insurance. Their onestory took on 4 feet of water during Harvey — the same as a next-door neighbor who drowned in his bed.
The home is worth more than the buyouts stipulate, and Gayann said she won't be spending any more money to raise it. It will stay on the floodplain.
Across from King's church on 22nd, however, one home sits on stilts. He's optimistic those residents will be safe.
“If that house ever floods in the future, God help us all,” he said.
PORT ARTHUR
On Harvey’s last leg, the storm moved northeast in the Gulf and hit the coast of Louisiana on Aug. 30, 2017.
Port Arthur, just inside Texas’ border, recorded more than 60 inches of rain — worse than anywhere in the state. Miraculously, no one died.
The home wrap is a giveaway. Graciela Alvarez is still finishing Hurricane Harvey repairs.
She leaned against her porch, remembering how the federal government at first offered her $10,000 to repair a home that took on 4 feet of water. She fought for months to raise the amount to a number that was still too low — and in the end, her family decided against contractors and did the job themselves.
“We couldn't pay workers, so my dad and my family helped so we could stretch out the money,” daughter Brianna Maciel said. “After work, they would come fix the house.”
After five emotional and financially difficult years, they're almost done.
“Thank God we have life, but it's a long process,” the mother said.
Reminders of Harvey lie everywhere in Port Arthur, which was 85 percent covered in water at the end of August 2017. They're at Alvarez's house in the Lakeside neighborhood, in the residences abandoned after decades of floods and in the lifted homes in El Vista. They're in every rainstorm, when the city's lowest-income residents now fear the worst, Mayor Thurman Bill Bartie said.
“They're not able to get back on their feet,” he said. “That's where the paranoia is. They all have such a great fear of losing (more), because most of them lost a whole lot.”
More than 1 in 4 Port Arthur residents live below the poverty line, and people who were uninsured during Harvey are the most likely to face continued financial fallout, the mayor said. In spite of it all, economic development and proximity to chemical and petroleum companies have kept the population from experiencing major losses, officials say.
People accept some level of risk when they move to Port Arthur, however. Most of it is just above sea level, and it's the last place water will go before it lands in the ocean.
“What they want is every drop of rain sucked away,” Bartie said. “It's impossible.”
Even with mitigation efforts, city officials know they can't prevent damage for another storm as bad as Harvey. The current infrastructure is designed for 25-year floods at most, and 800-year flood designs are needed, said Hani Tohme, an engineering consultant for the city manager.
“There isn't a city in the state of Texas with the flat land that we have here that can survive a storm the level of Harvey,” he said. “While all these mitigation projects we're doing are great, they're going to help with the 6- to 12-inch rains. But when you overstep that, there is no way literally to design for it and have the money to build it.”
Money has been a perennial problem for Port Arthur — inland areas like Houston received the bulk of federal aid. But now, with a list of major drainage improvement projects ready to go, the city also faces more than $30 million in funding shortfalls because of cost increases from COVID and inflation, said project consultant Mounika Parakala. Until officials get re-approval or new funding sources entirely, they're in a holding pattern.
Some smaller but still significant projects have occurred, such as improvements to the lift stations that handle sewage, repairs on seven pump stations, ditch draining and road resurfacing. And with FEMA help, some people have raised their homes — like Alma Medina, whose son biked down a ramp that connects to their newly renovated house.
Blocks away, Alvarez and her daughter, Brianna Maciel, hope for the best. They have flood insurance now.
“My mom says it's fine,” Maciel said. “But it rains hard, and she thinks we're going to flood again.”