HOUSTON – This week marks five years since Hurricane Harvey caused devastating flooding in the Houston area.
Meyerland, a neighborhood in southwest Houston, was one of the hardest hit areas, but businesses, institutions and the community as a whole continue to show resilience.
Old Hickory Inn BBQ on south Braeswood Boulevard has withstood a lot since 1963. They’ve had a car crash into their building, the Memorial Day flood of 2015 caused damage, along with the Tax Day flood of 2016 and Hurricane Harvey one year later.
“Harvey was the big one though,” said Tammy Haynes, the restaurant’s administrator. “Any kind of preparing that we did was nothing, it didn’t do any good. It wouldn’t have done any good because the bayou just flowed.”
Haynes said they had to replace all their kitchen equipment, sheetrock and wood-lined walls. With the help of the community, Haynes said the BBQ restaurant reopened two weeks later. Most of their neighbors in the Braes Oaks Center, such as H-E-B, also closed their doors.
The shopping center is in close proximity to Brays Bayou, where the Harris County Flood Control District has spent $480 million dollars to reduce flooding, called Project Brays.
“That project is supposed to remove or has already removed over 15,000 structures from the 100-year flood plain maps, which is the effective flood plain map,” said Imelda Diaz, Director of Engineering for the Harris County Flood Control District.
Diaz said the project starts from the mouth of the Houston Ship Channel and extends to Highway 6. Twenty-one miles of Brays Bayou was also widened.
“We expanded the channel, we widened the channel approximately between 50 and 60 feet on average from the mouth all the way to Fondren,” Diaz said. “There were approximately 32 bridge modifications of some sort along Brays, and on top of that, we constructed years ago and we started with the excavation of 4 regional detention basins.”
Construction is also taking place at the Evelyn Rubenstein Jewish Community Center. Joel Dinkin, the Chief Executive Officer, said Harvey flooded the entire campus.
“We said if we’re going to stay here then we need to renovate and build new and elevate and mitigate against future flooding,” Dinkin said.
As part of the $50 million project, the existing facility is being renovated and a new three-story building with several pools and a fitness facility is scheduled to open to the community in late November.
Dinkin said though some families and businesses have left Meyerland, those that stayed are pleased with the post-Harvey progress.
“I think, generally speaking, people feel good about the mitigations happening from the result of the county -- widening the bayou, fixing the bridges and fixing drainage -- that if there is another Harvey, we feel we can conquer that,” he said.
Meyerland homeowner Ed Wolff’s home now sits six feet taller than it did five years ago. Ed and his wife, Katy, had their 1955 home elevated after Hurricane Harvey. Their home also flooded two years prior on Memorial Day in 2015 and Tax Day in 2016.
“The community was part of why we stayed here,” Ed said. “The people are amazing and 75% of this neighborhood stayed here after Harvey. The 25% that moved was probably the group that would have moved within three to five years of the storm anyway.”
The Wolffs live across the street from Kolter Elementary, which is one of four Houston ISD schools that were rebuilt after sustaining significant damage from Harvey.
On other Meyerland streets, like the one Jerry Shannon lives on, the character of the community continues to evolve. There are homes being flattened, raised, abandoned and even up for sale on his block.
Shannon’s original one-story 1985 ranch-style home was damaged during the hurricane. He said his home had never flooded before that historic 2017 storm.
“We woke up and the water kept coming into the house and kept rising,” Shannon said. “It got up to between three and four feet high.”
Shannon said his family packed up and went two doors down to a vacant but already raised home.
“It was a new house and a neighbor and I discussed it and said, ‘let’s break-in, you know,’” Shannon said. “There’s water all around us so we did that, broke in through a window and spent a night there. A day later the water had receded.”
Shannon said following Harvey, he tore down his old home and built a new one higher up.
“The living space is up 10 feet so I don’t think we’ll get a storm that bad,” he said.
While some of his neighbors decided to move, he said many stayed and recovered together. He said the community’s resilience is another reason to love living in Meyerland.