How one neighborhood coped with the aftermath of Hurricane Beryl

Hours after Hurricane Beryl tore through her Houston neighborhood, Jennifer Cormier sat in her driveway wondering how she was going to get to her next dialysis appointment.

Brown water, thick with motor oil and debris, reached her knees and clogged the street in front of her. During Monday’s heaviest downpours, the water seeped several feet into her driveway, nearly reaching the foundation of her house.

Cormier was scheduled to receive dialysis — a treatment people with kidney failure need to survive — earlier in the day. But she knew the stents in her chest and arm had to stay dry. “I can’t go in that water, there’s no way,” she said.

Hurricane Beryl killed at least seven people and knocked out power to 2.5 million more as it slammed into Texas’ largest metropolitan area Monday morning. Like Harvey before it, the hurricane hit some Houston residents harder than others.

After 14 years of living in their family home in the Little East York neighborhood north of Houston, Cormier and his sons Devon and Dougie have come to expect this kind of situation. “We’ve always had to worry about water, always,” Devon said. “That was true before Harvey and it’s still true.”

Historically Black and brown neighborhoods like Cormier’s suffered particularly devastating flooding during Hurricane Harvey in 2017. The city has known since at least 2014 that poor drainage infrastructure in neighborhoods of color made them particularly vulnerable to catastrophic flooding, but has failed to take action.

Six years later, as Beryl’s floodwaters rose, Jennifer Cormier couldn’t help but think of Harvey, when she found herself stranded in her home, surrounded by flooded streets, unable to reach her local dialysis center and unsure when the waters would recede.

“Nothing has changed,” she said. “In all these years, nothing has changed.”

Cormier’s usual dialysis center texted her Monday afternoon to reschedule her next appointment for Wednesday. She doesn’t know how she’ll get there.

Meanwhile, Cormier’s power remains out — as it does for everyone for several blocks in every direction — and severed power lines hang just above knee-high floodwater in Cormier’s side yard.

“But if you go down south, where the money is, it’s not like that,” Devon said, before echoing his mother’s refrain: “Nothing’s really changed.”

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