Debra Wray Furrh, the advocacy director of Lone Star Legal Aid, evacuated to Texarkana last week when Hurricane Harvey struck. The Houston headquarters were closed. One colleague fled to Nacogdoches, and another was stuck at home, in Pearland. Lone Star, which offers free legal services to the poor from Waco to Galveston, has a special disaster-recovery unit that’s weathered Katrina, Rita, Ike, and the yearly floods and fires since then. “We just stay real calm,” Furrh said.
At nine-thirty on Monday morning, she was working the phones from a room at a Best Western when a colleague texted her with a question: “Is our building on fire?”
Furrh: “What’s your source?”
The source was a legal intern who lived in an apartment building across the street, in downtown Houston, and had called the Fire Department. The flooding seemed to have caused an electrical explosion. Windows had shattered, and flames and plumes of black smoke were lashing out.
Furrh made three quick calls. The first was to Lone Star’s C.E.O., who happens to be her husband. He was in a satellite office, where a unit of lawyers were manning a crisis hotline. (“Hi, honey, are you sitting down?”) Next up was Darren Gold, the building manager, in Houston. “Go see what you can see,” she told him. He’d been waiting for the roads to clear so that he could recover clients’ files, rescue the servers, and haul out boxes of materials for distribution at shelters across town. The last call went to Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, to see about fielding phone calls. “Once Houston went down, we went black, and there was no way for people to contact us,” Furrh said.
When crises hit, the lawyers from Lone Star have answers to the overwhelming questions that follow the devastation: What if you lost your job because of the storm? (You have thirty days to file for unemployment.) How can you be sure that you’re not getting scammed by a contractor? (Ask to see his registration certificate with the Texas Residential Construction Commission.) How do you file claims with FEMA? (Very carefully.)
Roslyn Jackson, Lone Star’s supervising lawyer in Houston, was at home in Missouri City, twenty miles south, watching her yard fill up with water and texting her four managers. They were busy signing up staffers and volunteers for shifts at the shelters. “I’ve been through a lot of the high water, but nothing’s happened like this,” she said. “Employees kept calling to ask, ‘What can I do?’ We were getting texts until well after 2 A.M. I had to say, ‘All right, everybody, we got to go to bed. We start again at seven.’ ”
On Tuesday morning, the highway was finally passable, and Darren Gold drove to the office. “It wasn’t like how we left it,” he said. Water from the fire hoses covered the floor, and there was soot everywhere. “We’re trying to stay on pace with the disaster. We need to get back to the people who were affected by the storm.” It didn’t occur to him that he and his colleagues were victims, too. He loaded three boxes of informational flyers onto a dolly and went outside, where a volunteer packed them into his car and drove to the George R. Brown Convention Center. Ten thousand Houston residents were seeking refuge there. Lone Star employees set up a stall by stacking a piece of discarded plywood onto two cardboard boxes, and they were up and running, ready to receive clients.
Lone Star’s resident expert on disaster recovery is Saundra Brown, who’s also the proud co-author of a PowerPoint presentation called “Mo’ Disasters, Mo’ Problems: Providing Legal Assistance in the Aftermath of a Disaster.” In the days since Harvey, Brown and her colleagues have been training volunteer lawyers throughout the city, visiting shelters, and taking calls. “If only I could stand on a mountaintop, I’d say, ‘Register for FEMA! You have sixty days!’ ” she said. “I was never prouder of Houston than after Katrina,” when evacuees came to Houston and the city took them in. “But I might have to revise that soon. The response to Harvey is the story of everybody. Everyone’s pulling their weight.”
Brown is preparing for the long haul. “The next phase will be appealing FEMA denials,” she said. “They say it takes about ten years to do a recovery from a major disaster.” A few months ago, she finished up a project related to Hurricane Ike, which hit in 2008. ♦
