San Antonio group finishes 2002 flood recovery work

Relief efforts continue
in Rio Grande Valley,
El Campo, Wharton

By Claudia M. Williams
Staff Writer
After nearly three years of work, a San Antonio interfaith group completed recovery efforts last month from 2002 flooding.
A $5,000 donation from the San Antonio District in February allowed the Greater San Antonio Interfaith Disaster Recovery Alliance to finish repairs on the last three of 73 homes damaged in 2002, said Donny R. Jones, Southwest Texas Conference disaster recovery coordinator. Thirty inches of rain in July of that year inundated the area.
As work in San Antonio wraps up, Jones said, disaster recovery efforts are getting under way “in earnest” in the Rio Grande Valley.
“We’re going to be in the Rio Grande Valley for three to five more years,” he said.
Recovery work is also under way in El Campo and Wharton (in the Texas Conference). Two days of heavy rain in late November 2004 caused the Colorado River to flood.
“About 30 families in El Campo were flooded out, 10 of them in the area around Wesley Chapel [UMC],” Jones said.
Seven-hundred Rio Grande Valley families—most of them living in low-income neighborhoods known as colonias—lost their homes when Hurricane Marty dumped rain on Hidalgo and Cameron counties in 2003.
“These people have no insurance,” Jones said. “They have no savings. They don’t qualify for government assistance. They have no one to turn to except the church.”
Much of the recovery work involves pulling out water-damaged sheetrock and insulation—“instead of waiting for the sheetrock to dry and then painting over it.” That, according to Jones, was the only recourse the homeowners believed they had.
“They do whatever they can, and then the mold develops, and they have more problems,” he said.
In El Campo, United Methodist congregations are working together to help the families. In Wharton, an assistance program formed in 1998 is still in place.
Among other repairs, Jones said, disaster recovery team volunteers are needed in El Campo to level homes on pier-and-beam foundations, replace water-damaged sheetrock and install insulation where often there was none.
“We bring homes up to livable standards,” he said. “‘Livable’ is different from ‘where they were before,’ which is the government standard.”
It’s not always just houses that need repair, Jones said.
“We’ve worked on some families, too,” he said. “We don’t go looking for them because that’s not our mission, but we do find them. We’ve recognized living conditions and relationship issues that need help we’re not qualified to give. We contact family services agencies to alert them of a particular need.”
Jones said recovery work is completed in “chunks” as donations of money and materials come in and as volunteers step forward.
“We greatly need plywood, sheetrock and insulation,” he said. “Primarily, though, we need money and volunteers to do the work. And the families we’re helping need our prayers.”