One Family’s Story of Rebuilding After Hurricane Harvey

A year ago, floodwater stood three feet deep in Shelia Harris’s home in Houston, forcing her family to leave home like thousands of others.

“We started calling for help,” Harris says. “You had to be registered, and we didn’t get registered until sometime Sunday.”

That Sunday was two days after Hurricane Harvey slammed Texas on August 25th. Harris, 57, says they watched the rain fall and collect in their yard and then inch slowly into their home. Days into the storm, one-third of Houston was underwater.

“I had to make a sign that said, ‘We need help!’” she remembers. She was worried about her family which included her husband and their 27-year-old daughter. And, there was also her elderly next-door who had a pacemaker and needed to be rescued.

“My husband was able to get a boat to come in and rescue us,” Harris says. “Because there were so many people, we were not able to take anything…but, I already had my insurance papers, and the paperwork I knew we would need in a Ziploc bag. Once the boat rescued us, we had to cross over the freeway, and we rode on the back of a furniture delivery truck.”

Harvey was a Category 4 storm that parked over Texas and the Gulf Coast, dropping more than 50 inches of rain and causing an estimated 120-million dollars in damage which made it the second most expensive natural disaster in the country after Hurricane Katrina. Harvey impacted 13 million people in Louisiana and Mississippi as well, and 68 people died.

Harris and her family stayed in a multipurpose center for days. A week passed before they could even get into their neighborhood to assess the damage. Americans from all over the country stepped in with donations and other assistance, but the devastation left Harris and many others emotionally adrift.

“During that week, I was totally lost,” she says. “This was the first time this had ever happened to me. Where do you start? Because Houston is so big and with the surrounding areas, there were too many people for FEMA and the insurance companies.”

For six months, Harris and her family stayed in an apartment, incurring an extra expense while the work began to repair their home. But, there was more trouble ahead for a family still reeling from the hurricane.

Houston Has A Flood Problem

In February, Houston’s Mayor delivered a State of the City address where he described the storm as a “wake-up call” for Houston.

Mayor Sylvester Turner leads the fourth-largest city in America, and additional expansion is expected over the next decade. Experts suggest the urban sprawl also plays into Houston’s vulnerability to severe flooding. The Bayou City sits on a low-lying coastal plain, and rapid expansion has eliminated the wetlands and prairie that could provide some topographic relief.  

Efforts to improve Houston’s building and zoning regulations, long considered lenient, are underway. The Washington Post reports that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is revising the rainfall totals for Houston which will change the definition of a 100-year storm from one that has a 1 percent chance of occurring within a given year. And, the Bayou City Initiative calls for city leaders to address infrastructure changes in flood-prone areas that will make Houston more flood-resilient and based on insights developed after Harvey.

Repair Costs Keep Rising

Harris says she doesn’t live in a flood-prone area, but she had purchased flood insurance. It is the flood insurance she says that came through with $20,000 when her homeowner’s insurance failed to pay little more than $2,000. But, her house needed more than $50,000 in repairs which resulted in the family taking out a loan.

To complicate matters, Harris says the contractor she and her husband hired is “not trustworthy.”

“My garage is not fixed,” she says. “He broke a vanity he said he would repair, and my sheetrock looks horrible. At that time, contractors were greedy.”

The couple exhausted their funds making repairs to a home they have lived in for 30 years and paid off just two months after the hurricane hit.

“We had to purchase everything: clothes, furniture. I appealed to FEMA twice, and they still turned me down,” she explains.

A few neighbors sold their homes, choosing to move rather than rebuild. Harris says she occasionally wishes she had made the same decision.

She comforts herself by acknowledging her blessings.

“I’m blessed through it all…in the midst of the storm, God is still good,” Harris says. “I have my life and my family. I’m back in my home, even though things are incomplete. It’s patience…I’ll have to wait until that next step.”

According to Harris, since Harvey, they have learned how to communicate with the emergency teams at disaster sites, how to select a contractor, and persist with insurance companies. These are lessons they would rather not have experienced. And, until their house feels like a home again, there could be more bumps along the way.

Harris admits, “Sometimes, you want to cry and get emotional. But, I said, ‘Lord, I just don’t have any more fight in me for this. I’ll just have to trust you to fix this.’”