USA: Houston tackles Texas-size cleanup

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“I’m not a very materialistic person. We can replace our clothes, our bed, our furniture. But family, you can’t replace.”

Ahmadiyya relief workers take a break to pray during Hurricane Harvey clean-up
(Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times/TNS

Times of Ahmad | News Watch | US Desk
Source/Credit: The Courier-Tribune (TNS)
By Hailey Branson-Potts | September 4, 2017

In Kashmere Gardens, a historically black neighborhood and one of Houston’s poorest, the floodwaters have receded, but sorrow is on full display in the piles that line the street.

Heaps of soggy carpet padding. Chunks of drywall. Splintered boards, broken dressers and moldering mattresses.

A television. A teddy bear. Family photographs and a Bible, thick and leather-bound.

It smells musty. Sour, even.

Ten days after Hurricane Harvey blew into these people’s lives — and then lingered for days as a weakening storm, dumping epic rainfall on the nation’s fourth-largest city and its environs — the task of cleaning up is daunting. Much of it falls on people like Sonia Saldana and her family, and the strangers helping them.

Saldana watched from her driveway as a group of young volunteers from the Ahmadiyya Muslim community, clad in neon orange and yellow safety vests, hauled out drywall and insulation and threw it on her family’s growing pile by the curb. Inside, the house was virtually gutted, with walls ripped out and the furniture gone.

“I’m not a very materialistic person,” Saldana said. “We can replace our clothes, our bed, our furniture. But family, you can’t replace.”

The storm killed nearly 50 people, with bodies still being found. Recovery is expected to take years, at a cost of $120 billion to $180 billion, by official estimates.

The personal toll is harder to calculate.

The water rose as high as her chest on Aug. 26, said Saldana, who stands 5-foot-2.

Everyone she’s talked to plans to rebuild, she said, because this neighborhood is home. Her family does, too.


Read original post here: USA: Houston tackles Texas-size cleanup


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