LA GRANGE, Texas — Cleaning up La Grange was hard after Hurricane Harvey completely inundated the small Texas city. Finding permanent housing is even tougher, but not all hope is lost, as the recovery process continues to persevere.
At Dee and Don Haywood’s home is a decorative piece with the proverb, ‘When one door closes, another opens.’ It is a fitting message for the Hurricane Harvey survivors who are settling into their new place.
“It’s big and open, I like it, because if you’re sitting in here, you’re able to talk to everybody without feeling you got to scream,” Don Haywood said. “When we first walked in it almost said ‘Hey, hey take me home.’”
The Haywoods moved into to their new La Grange house right after the Fourth of July. In addition to having insurance, the couple saved monetary donations from strangers and relief groups in the wake of Hurricane Harvey.
“I can’t even name all the people that would come and give $50, $10, whatever,” Dee Haywood said. “All of that money, along with what we got from our insurance we put it in the bank.”
“People we didn’t even know just walked up to you, ’what can I do for you?’” Don Haywood said.
Their new home is out of the floodplain and it is even closer to some family, but the Haywoods are still adjusting.
“It’s good, it’s taken some getting used to. It doesn’t feel like home. It doesn’t feel like home,” Dee Haywood said. “It’s only been a month, of course we’ll given it time, but I want to go home.”
Home, for 18 years was, behind a truss bridge, beside the Colorado River.
“Then all of a sudden, it’s not your home,” Don Haywood said.
He remembers the moment they walked back through the door.
“This is what we did when we first came, everything was there, the tables collapsed mud everywhere,” Don Haywood said as he opened the door to his own home. He began describing each room and the furniture and appliances inside.
The house is four feet above ground, and Haywood said the flood water reached the roof. It is hard to come back, so the family is looking forward.
“There’s a light there, it may take longer than it did us, but it’s going to be there,” Haywood said.
Like other survivors, the Haywoods got housing assistance and donations from groups like Catholic Charities of Central Texas and the Fayette County Disaster Recovery Team, which Marsha Pyle oversees. She said a year later, they still need volunteers to help with repairs and they want to come up with sustainable solutions. There are still more than 120 families in need.
“We’re right in the middle of Austin and Houston, we tend to get overlooked and we just don’t have that affordable housing here,” Pyle said. “We didn’t have it before the flood we still don’t have it.”
The disaster recovery team used $3 million in donations from non-profits Samaritan's’ Purse and Mennonite Disaster Services to purchase a 23-acre property on North Horton Street in La Grange. They want to create a new subdivision for survivors.
“Something that’s never been done before, a groundbreaking project, that other communities can follow, in case they have a low lying neighborhood that completely gets washed out like ours was,” Pyle said.
This planned subdivision in La Grange is called Hope Hill. Currently, it is in the design phase. Part of the goal in addition to creating long-term solutions, is to keep survivors in the community.
Don Haywood stopped to take a look around the houses on the street he used to live.
“They’ve rebuilt, they’ve rebuilt. They’re trying to redo the neighborhood, to get it back,” he said. “I pray to God that nothing happens to them again.”