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Notes from the Field: Rural Resilience in Southeast Texas

Anna R. Hurt

Hurricane Harvey made landfall on southeast Texas on August 25, 2017. Following the devastating hurricane, Rural LISC responded to requests from its allies and partners in the impacted region by increasing its presence in rural Texas to address recovery needs in the areas of housing and economic development. This blog was written by Rural LISC’s Disaster Recovery and Resiliency Coordinator Anna R. Hurt, chronicling the organization’s Harvey recovery work. Rural LISC has 86 partner organizations, and works in more than 2,000 counties across 44 states. Three such partners serve the southeast Texas region.

On August 24, 2017, I was cycling through what has become a well-developed routine during my almost five years of working on disasters. With an eye on the latest projections for incoming Hurricane Harvey, I made a post-it-note list of work responsibilities that I could set aside and stuck it on the side of my printer. I scrolled through updates from the National Business Emergency Operations Center to get a sense for who was positioning where. I reached out to every contact I had in Texas and those who I knew would hit the ground the second Hurricane Harvey passed.

“I know you’ll be responding to Harvey. I’ll take your situational updates as you have them. Nothing fancy needed, just the short and simple facts,” I wrote.

And then I turned to my phone and a closer circle of friends and colleagues in Texas. Those texts and phone calls were decidedly different.

“Be careful.”

“Take care of yourself.”

“Let me know if you need anything.”

 “Are you on alert?” I asked my friend, Jack Payne, at the time a reserve FEMA Voluntary Agency Liaison.

“Yes,” he said. Then: “I’ll see you whenever you get here.”

We all knew this was the big one that we had escaped for years. We knew even if we didn’t see each other soon, we would see each other at some point in the decade-plus of recovery that would be needed after the storm passed. What we didn’t know is that after Harvey would come Hurricane Irma in the Caribbean and Florida, Hurricane Maria to level Puerto Rico and strike a second blow to many of the same Caribbean areas that Irma had just devastated, the massive wildfires in California, and floods and a volcano would rampage through Hawaii. Many of us would cross paths in those locations long before we ever met in Texas.

Hurricane Harvey is the second most costly storm to hit the U.S. mainland, according to the National Hurricane Center, rivaled only by Hurricane Katrina.

Fast-forward one year. I have just transitioned to a new job, working on disaster initiatives for Rural LISC, and I am driving through a Texas rainstorm to the tiny town of Shepherd with the disaster program coordinator from Covenant Community Capital, a local community development organization with a large rural service area. We are scheduled for a community meet and greet, with time to allow residents to work with us individually on applications for the Health and Safety Home Stabilization Program that LISC, through its Resilience and Recovery Network, is coordinating in six rural counties in Texas. The program, funded by the American Red Cross, is designed to fund repairs on homes damaged during Hurricane Harvey, returning them to basic health and safety standards.

We are 30 minutes early. I run through a packed parking lot in the pouring rain, to where Debra, the city clerk, is holding the door open for me. She and I share a laugh over the unexpected downpour, and then, soaking wet, I turn around. The laughter leaves me in an instant.

The room is already full of solemn faces, looking at me as though I am crazy for laughing at the rain. After four hours of sitting across from each of them, listening to story after story of how entire families and homes and thus a community, have fallen through the cracks of insurance coverage and FEMA assistance and other resources that one might assume are automatic, I think that I really might have been crazy for laughing at the rain.

These are the stories of a year lived with their backs against a wall.

“What’s your annual income?” I ask the woman across from me, pen poised over a paper application.

“I get about $730 in Social Security every month,” she tells me, unfolding a tattered award letter for me to copy. “So, whatever that is in a year. My daughter and grandson live with us. I’ll have to send her income to you later, but she just works at the school.”

She tells me there is mold in their only bathroom, that every time it rains, water leaks into the room her daughter and grandson share. I think about that as I jot notes on the page, trying to keep my face neutral. For a year, they’ve been living in a home that has leaked water into one of two bedrooms every time it rains. If I were to guess, there is significant mold there, too.

I understand clearly in those four hours that there isn’t room for more time or empty words.

Rural LISC’s work in Hurricane Harvey recovery is implemented by two local partners, Covenant Community Capital Corporation, led by Stephen Fairfield, and Legacy Community Development Corporation, where Vivian Ballou is the executive director.

Most of what I know about Stephen didn’t come to me because he told me. It has come to me in the words and praise of others in his Texas community and perhaps that says more about who he is than I ever could. Everywhere I go, people say, “Oh, Stephen.” And then they follow it with a compliment on something he has designed or built or led. It’s a true testament to a man who in an unassuming way has been about bettering his community for a long time.

Legacy started as an organization that served underprivileged children in the city of Port Arthur. In time, they realized they needed to serve the children’s families as well and made the transition to housing work. Vivian renamed the group “Legacy” as a tribute to her mother’s lifelong work in homelessness and transitional housing in the area. Vivian deposited $100 of her own money to open Legacy’s bank account 10 years ago, and had to personally guarantee the mortgage for the first home and family that the organization served.

Vivian and Stephen both have reputations for rising to the challenge when it comes to their work and I know they will be no different as they face the long road of hurricane recovery in front of us.

As I drove around Texas recently, I thought repeatedly of a word I first heard in Puerto Rico: creciente. It’s a Spanish word that when used one way might mean flooding, and another way would mean growing, or yet another way (my favorite) means rising. Rising is the thing that you always find in the despair of a disaster, although often you have to look long and hard. It’s in the families who stick it out together over a year in a home that leaks every time it rains, because they believe it will get better. It’s in the neighbors whose talk and frustration eventually catalyze action that creates something bigger and bolder than was ever present in their community before. It happens in the dirty, gritty places where local contractors stay an extra hour with donated materials to fix one more thing because they are already there and have the ability to help a little more. It happens in the broader sense in state capitol rooms as policy shifts and preparedness measures get cleaner and more robust. And somehow, it happens in us all as a nation. From crushed business systems, from ashes in California, from the places completely wiped clean of all power in Puerto Rico, from wind-damaged roofs in Florida, and from mold-infested, water-logged homes in Texas – we rise.

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Anna R. Hurt is the Disaster Recovery and Resiliency Coordinator for Rural LISC. She began work for Rural LISC in June 2018 and currently leads disaster recovery initiatives, with predominate focus on Hurricane Harvey recovery. She was previously the Assistant Director of Disasters and Grants at the Center for Disaster Philanthropy and she resides in rural Kansas.  

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