Houston residents pick up the pieces 2 weeks after Harvey
HOUSTON -- Everything is bigger in Texas, including the clean up.
More than two weeks after Harvey flooded the Texas Gulf Coast, thousands of Houston residents are still picking up the mess the storm left behind.
Pat Arthur was rescued from his front porch by a boat. His home couldn't escape the storm.
"Everything's gone," Arthur says.
Twenty-three years worth of memories now thrown into a pile in his front yard -- ready for the landfill. But he says they plan on staying for awhile.
It was still raining outside when Mike Gregg started gutting his home. Everything soaked by the two feet of water had to be removed and thrown away.
"Everyone's fine. Everyone's healthy. And I've got a big support system," Gregg says.
But the hardest thing for Gregg to get rid of was his wife's piano.
"It was very valuable to my wife," he says holding back tears.
It was the last thing they splurged on together before starting their family.
For Edward Zilton's cleanup crews, the amount of debris seems endless.
"I've been here for the last two storms and this one is actually a total catastrophe, it really is," Zilton says.
Each truck holds nine tons of debris. The crews fill up roughly 28 trucks a day. Cleanup is expected to take months.
Harvey submerged Sandra Carrasco's home in 10 feet of water.
She lost everything, and days after the storm, the mother of two says she hadn't seen a government agency or relief group drive down her street. She says she feels like they've forgotten about her.
But like many people here, Carrasco and her family didn't wait for help. When we caught up with her this past week, her home was already cleared out.
"There's no waiting. It's get the things done, and get it done now," she says.
And while national attention shifts to mother nature's latest wrath named Irma, Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner says there's still a lot of work to do.
"The cameras are going to move on. People are going to move on. And the attention is going to move on. But the people directly impacted, they don't move on. They are left in a position of having to recover," Turner says.
The city of Houston was built on oil and gas but what will fuel this recovery -- is elbow grease.
