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CHULA VISTA, CRYSTAL CITY — Gabby Perez painstakingly preserved her mother’s home after she died 15 years ago. There was the wall of family portraits, the rosaries and kitchenware, and personal belongings that her late father, who had a knack for holding on to things, piled up.
Only the house was nearly empty now. Most things were washed away in floodwaters last week.
“I’m hurt,” Perez said, her head cocked to the side, staring at the hollow residence. Just a handful of portraits she managed to grab in a pinch survived. “That’s all we had (of my parents), and we lost it.”
“It’s sad,” said her husband, Eusebio, who goes by Tres. “It hurt me seeing her going through the photos of her family. That’s all she had left.”
A flood ravaged this decades-old, predominantly Hispanic neighborhood to the south of Crystal City on Friday afternoon, after the nearby tributary roared its way into that part of town. Perez and many other families scrambled to flee their childhood homes when the county issued an emergency evacuation order.
In the wake of the flooding, Chula Vista, a working-class, low-income enclave of Crystal City, has begun scouring the debris and examining the cratering foundations of the homes their parents had built — grappling with immense loss and an onslaught of new questions about whether they can afford to rebuild.
For swaths of Central Texas, it’s become an all-too-familiar story. Rain pummels the region in the summer, oversaturating the soil and swelling rivers. The excess water floods the region, sending communities into disarray as they attempt to evacuate. In parts of Uvalde and Kerr counties, as much as 28 inches of rain fell over several days. Two people died.
“We didn’t know it was going to flood out like it did,” said Zavala Emergency Management Coordinator Jesse Guajardo.
“We didn’t know it would end up this way”
On Monday, the sun bore down on Chula Vista and the songs of crickets drowned out everything else, barely 24 hours since residents were allowed to return home. After a harried evacuation, many didn’t know what they’d find. Some were lucky to come back to minimal damage. Others lost everything. Residents shared in the shock, grief and the mounting unexpected expenses of a tragedy.
Demolishing the home seemed the logical choice for Javier and Agustín Santana, whose childhood home was flooded. Agustín, who lives in a trailer home next door, evacuated with his dad, Juan, to a relative’s place in town. Juanita, their mom, was at work. They knew to leave because Agustín’s wife was monitoring Facebook for updates. And when she saw the floods breached the Crystal Ballroom, a storied venue for weddings and quinceañeras, she urged them to leave.
The two brothers surveyed their childhood home, which their dad had built in the 1980s. The water tore through the foundation, they said. And their parents, 72 and 69, have no insurance on the house. They demolished another home to build this one. It is a whirlwind of new anxieties for the family, who are managing the dad’s dialysis and their mom’s diabetes. They had few answers about what comes next.
“We didn’t know it would end up this way,” Juan said. “What we built with so much effort.”
Some homes were spared, like Amandina and Carlos Ortega’s trailer home. Built on stilts and raised above the ground, the home did not flood. Nonetheless, Amandina and Carlos, 65 and 66, fled the neighborhood on Thursday at the insistence of their family, particularly Amandina’s daughter-in-law, who had been monitoring social media. On Friday, they returned home to pack more things, but were met with a sudden rush of water and a helicopter overhead from which a megaphone ordered them to leave.
The retired couple’s expenses accumulated quickly, between hotel stays and cleanup. The home also has to be fumigated again, which will run them hundreds of dollars. Two cars stopped working.
“We were depending on our family for information,” Amandina said. “We called the county, and they said for us to go on Facebook. I don’t think we have it.”
Zavala County relied on social media for warnings
In Crystal City, less than one inch of rain fell that week. The town flooded after the Nueces River rushed downstream with water it had accumulated in Uvalde County, jumping from 8 to 30 feet overnight from Thursday to Friday. Zavala County officials were relying on social media and door-knocking to alert residents.
County officials established an emergency operations center on July 15 to coordinate rescue efforts across Zavala’s unincorporated areas, including Chula Vista, La Pryor, north of Crystal City, and Batesville, which the floods reached, said Guajardo, the emergency management official.
“All the risks that we were addressing were because people had not evacuated as they were told,” Guajardo said, adding that the evacuation orders issued that day were voluntary. First responders rescued more than 100 people, said Guajardo.
County officials deployed their first mandatory evacuation on Friday for residents of Chula Vista, Guajardo said. The county mostly relied on social media to alert residents, while the sheriff’s office sent personnel to the neighborhood.
Guajardo said most were notified with ample time before the floods reached Chula Vista, but referred questions surrounding the timing to the sheriff’s office.
The sheriff’s office on Tuesday declined to answer questions, saying he’d issue a press release on social media. County Judge Jesse Gonzalez also declined to answer questions Tuesday.
The river damaged 183 properties. Nearly half of those were reported as unlivable by their owners, Guajardo said. And the county, he added, has exceeded the federal government’s available funds in its first disaster declaration.
Rebuilding will take time, money
Families in Chula Vista remain unsure about how to start rebuilding their community.
Residents here are either retired or rely on a single source of income, such as Social Security payments or disability benefits. Others rely on their family members, many of whom are hundreds of miles away. Financial relief could be on the horizon as the federal government gathers information on the extent of the damage, but those payments are still far off.
Perez, whose house was swept by the floods, is taking days off from her job at a telemarketing company, where she works in billing. Since authorities reopened the area on Sunday, Perez and her family have spent hours cleaning up, missing work. They’ve also tried to help other families, at one point cooking 75 burgers to pass out.
There’s much left. She still has to clean out a room full of her dad’s things, which she hasn’t worked up the courage to do. She does not get paid for the days she’s not working. The family is unsure how they’ll afford to fix the house or help her brother, who is partially disabled and lives in the house. They launched a GoFundMe to take donations. So far, people have donated $310.
While they’re relieved no one died, they’re still reckoning with the structural damages.
“We’re happy nobody was hurt,” she said. “But it’s sad, it’s heartbreaking, to see all this.”
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