It’s been days since the waters began rising in Houston, and people are still being rescued from flooded homes. Evacuees are arriving at the George R. Brown Convention Center in downtown Houston.
From Monday to Tuesday, the population grew from 5,000 to 10,000 — far exceeding the capacity officials intended. People have showed up with few possessions – just what they could carry as they evacuated neighborhoods for safety.
Securing basic necessities
All day long Tuesday people streamed past loading docks and empty trucks at the back of the convention center, hauling bulging bags of donations into the cavernous exhibition rooms turned into dormitories. Each item is added to massive piles to be sorted and handed out to the thousands of people displaced by the storm.
A volunteer helps triage the goods to the appropriate area. There are towering piles of clothes, stacks of diapers, cartons of ready-to-eat food piled high.
Jennifer Miller and her friends came with plastic bags filled with diapers, dog food, tampons, bedding —anything they could think of. Miller says she’s lucky because she was spared this time.
"My family house flooded in Tropical Storm Allison, so I know what it’s like to lose pretty much everything. So I just wanted to come and try to help if I could," she says.
Evacuees wait in untidy lines for donated items. In one, a volunteer calls out shoe sizes, holding up a pair: "10.5 in men’s" as people rush to grab them.
These are the basic necessities the floodwaters stole.
Reconnecting with family
Demetrius Washington is waiting for cartons of packaged food. He came with his mother on Sunday after his home in the Lakewood neighborhood flooded. He’d lost contact with his grandmother during the storm, and he was worried.
"I seen on the news that her neighborhood got flooded and everything and I stopped watching cause I got depressed," he says.
But Tuesday morning, his mother Ramona got a text message. It was his grandma. She was at the convention center. Now, he’s searching for her among seemingly endless rows of green, army-style cots
"Getting that text message and her saying that she here? I feel relieved now. I know she all right," he says.
"To lose everything else again and start all over, it's just very hard."
Reliving painful memories
Washington’s friends Lee Benford and Crystal White say what a lot of people have been saying: They didn’t think it would get like this — that the flooding would be so bad. They hunkered down to wait it out, like officials had advised. But the rain was unrelenting; the bayou nearby spilling over its banks.
The sound of the rain on Benford and White's tin carpark roof was deafening. From inside, they watched their belongings floating in the floodwaters, panic rising with the water. Finally, a neighbor with a boat saved them.
"He came and got us out," White says. "That was our only means because the water was passing my mailbox." Benford adds: "It was all the way to the bottom of our window."
Benford says he’s never seen anything like this. But for Crystal White, it was all too familiar. It was a dozen years ago Tuesday – she was in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana.
"To lose everything else again and start all over, it’s just very hard. I’m trying to stay focused and positive, but it’s just too much," she says.
White says she does feel lucky her children were at her mom’s house this weekend – four kids all aged between 5 and 10. But this brings back painful memories of just how hard her family had to struggle to rebuild lives in a city full of strangers after Katrina.
"Honestly, to me, it just feels like...giving up," she says. "I don’t know what else to do."
Her husband also feels lost.
"I never been through this before," Benford says. "I’m supposed to be the man. I’m supposed to be the one she can look up to. And I just thank her for being strong, and I was able to lean on her. I just hope everyone be OK because this is hard."
By Tuesday’s end, with the convention center past its capacity and need continuing to grow, Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner announced a second massive shelter a few blocks away.
