Just how disastrous the flooding in Houston is economically won’t be determined for some time. Now, as rain continues to fall in many areas, the primary concern is still getting people to safety and avoiding any more loss of life.
Allison Hay, executive director of Houston Habitat for Humanity, is a native Houstonian. She’s experienced major flooding events in years past, but never anything close to Hurricane Harvey’s scale.
“We’re having some major flooding in places people thought they were safe and now they’re having to evacuate pretty quickly,” she told BUILDER Tuesday. The difference this time around from past storms like Hurricane Ike (2008), she adds, is “the whole region is experiencing massive amounts of water and there’s no place for it to go in a controlled manner.”
How to Help
Houston Habitat for Humanity will be focusing on the area’s rebuilding efforts for the foreseeable future. When asked how builders could help, here’s what Executive Director Allison Hay said:
“It costs money for materials, as every builder knows, and we don’t get donated sheetrock and we don’t get donated cabinets. You have to help the homeowner by going and finding it and replacing it at the best price you can but it still costs.
“We use volunteers, but we need the materials to be purchased for I don’t know how many tens of thousands of homes that are going to need something.”
If you’re able to help in any way, click here.
You can also make a donation by calling 713-661-9993.
For more information about Houston Habitat, click here.
Hay is one of the lucky Houston residents whose home was not flooded, but the roadways around her home are impassable, effectively trapping her in place.
The homes of two of her staff members flooded Monday after rain continued to pound the area. The status of Habitat’s offices and ReStore building, where it sells home goods at a discounted price, is unknown at this time.
Hay is hoping she and her team will be able to assess the area on Thursday or Friday. “If it would just stop raining it will drain,” she says.
Houston Habitat has heard from many of its homeowners since Hurricane Harvey belted the area on Friday with reports of flooded homes and destroyed property. Hay and her team are communicating with homeowners in shelters via email to help them navigate the mounds of paperwork coming their way. “Right now we’re trying to get them to…start filing for FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) and talking to their insurance companies because we want them to recover as quickly as possible,” she says.
Houston Habitat has built more than 1,000 homes in the area, but Hay says it avoids doing so in designated flood zones because it would cost its homeowners more money in flood insurance.
Flood zone or not, Hays says, “With this type of flooding, no one is immune.”
The organization, currently has three homes under construction and Hay isn’t sure the status on any of them.
When the roads become passable, Houston Habitat will send out its crews to assess homes and help homeowners board them up, if necessary. Then, for the foreseeable future, it will deploy volunteers to gut homes, removing anything that could grow mold.
It's still to early to assess how much damage the floodwaters have caused.
Since Houston is no stranger to flooding, albeit not on this scale, it has good process for “mucking” homes, Hay says. “Lots of volunteers come in from everywhere,” she notes. “Every church I know of has a team that will put on gloves and ventilator masks and start mucking out these homes.”
When other major storms have hit, she adds, Houston’s population was smaller. In 1960, its population was roughly 940,000, according to U.S. Census Bureau, rose to about 1.95 million in 2000, and currently stands at about 2.3 million. It’s the fourth-most populous city in the U.S.
“With Ike and with [Hurricane] Carla (1961), we’ve had bad storms but we didn’t have the population that we do now and we didn’t have the concrete, the land with so many homes in development in the past,” Hay says. “That really has changed the complexion of our Greater Houston area…all the development. The growth has been tremendous.”
Again, If you’re able to help in any way, click here.
You can also make a donation by calling 713-661-9993.
For more information about Houston Habitat, click here.
