Two years after Hurricane Harvey hit, Beatrice Sanders sat on the raised deck of her new home in Port Arthur, telling me that God had answered her prayers. Last fall, government contractors finally tore down the three-bedroom house Sanders bought with her late husband more than 40 years ago in the city’s Montrose neighborhood, replacing it with a new home—this one perched on stilts six feet above the ground.
I saw Sanders’ old house when I visited the city last year. Multiple storms had pummeled Port Arthur before Harvey—Rita in 2005; Ike in 2008—but Sanders and her family always fixed whatever they could on the house and moved on. Government assistance hadn’t yet come to help repair all the damage left by previous storms by the time Harvey hit in August 2017, turning Sanders’ neighborhood into a lake. Floodwaters touched the ceiling and took a week to recede, transforming the house into a rotting, uninhabitable shell Sanders couldn’t afford to rebuild.
