A month after Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Texas, there is still a simple way to tell if a particular street flooded in Houston. Just look at the front lawns.
Debris rose as the water receded and residents returned to gut their ruined homes, disgorging the contents curbside. There is so much to remove, and trips to landfills are taking so long, that the region is months away from clearing it all.
Those unwilling or unable to pay private companies hundreds of dollars to shift the detritus are waiting for the city to remove it. But Houston’s mayor, Sylvester Turner, warned at a council meeting earlier this month that it could take until Christmas to deal with.
In a Friday update after clashes between council members over the handling of the problem, Turner said landfills would operate 24 hours a day as more than 300 trucks collect more than 8 million cubic yards of debris at a cost of more than $250m.
Some of the worst-affected neighborhoods are located around Eldridge Parkway, a busy road in west Houston’s energy corridor where many oil and gas corporate offices are located and a few routes remain closed because of high water. Here, piles of rancid rubbish curl like a wall around a complex of dozens of townhomes opposite a library.
Late last week, a trio of contractors sweated as they plunked large kitchen appliances on to a flat-bed truck. “The whole job’s gonna take probably a good two months,” said one, Anthony Brown.
Built in the 1970s, the houses are framed on three sides by a creek that branches off from the Buffalo Bayou, a major flooding source during Harvey that extends more than 50 miles from Houston’s western suburbs through downtown and out into Galveston Bay. The massive Addicks and Barker flood-control reservoirs and dams, which feed into the Bayou, are less than two miles away.
What four weeks ago were cherished possessions now languished as flotsam, junk chucked indiscriminately a few yards outside front doors. Flies zig-zagged over rotten food next to mattresses, door frames, wall panels, furniture, board games; more or less anything that was on the ground floor in late August. Spanish-language pop music blared from the bowels of one house being cleared out by contractors. Next door, a warning was posted out front: “You loot, we shoot.” But all that remains seems worthless.
A traffic cone protruded horizontally from the second-storey wall of one house, by a window. Olga Weber pointed at it. “That’s where they rescued me, right there,” she said. Weber is a maintenance worker at the complex and was the last to leave – by rescue boat, after she attached the cone to attract attention and wrote a cry for help on a bedsheet draped outside the window.
To read the full story, visit https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/25/hurricane-harvey-houston-recovery-effort.