Hurricane season only lasts six months, but for Gulf Coast communities, recovery efforts never end.

Houston resident Wilbert Cooper is still recovering from Hurricane Beryl after the storm caused two trees to fall and damage his home last summer. 

“I don’t see a recovery because it’s always something else happening,” Cooper said. “After one storm, there’s another storm.”

Resilience amid relentless climate crisis and political theater seems ever more difficult for Cooper, his neighbors, and local disaster relief advocates.

Cooper’s home was without power for days alongside 2.5 million other homes, schools, and businesses during the Category 1 hurricane, which passed directly over the Houston area on July 8. As hundreds of thousands of residents struggled to find food and contact loved ones, several local volunteers helped him remove the trees. Half a year later, he said his neighborhood has a long road to recovery. 

“You still have a few houses with tarps on the roof,” Cooper said. “You have houses with trees in them. You have houses that are not being rebuilt. You have a house that’s been rebuilt that nobody’s living in because they’re worried about the mold.”

Cooper’s grim reflections are familiar to Fred Woods, a resident and community activist. His family has lived in the neighborhood for over a century. Woods feels that his community and other Houston-area communities deserve better recovery assistance.

“We do our best,” Woods said. “We try to help ourselves, we pay our taxes, we pay our fair share, and we don’t deserve to suffer. We deserve to be cared for, especially in our hour of need, and we deserve to see recovery.”

The city of Houston has a long history of neglecting the well-being of its Black neighborhoods. In 1979, Northwood Manor, a neighborhood in northeast Houston, was a site of controversy as residents sued the city and the state of Texas for choosing to build a garbage landfill in the neighborhood. At the time, Texas Southern University professor Robert Bullard and his graduate students found that all five city-owned landfills and six of the eight city-owned incinerators were placed in predominantly Black neighborhoods.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Beryl, Woods refused to see history repeat itself. As president of the Northwood Manor Civic Club, he coordinated with several organizations and pressured elected officials in the city and county to meet his neighbors’ needs. He was successful in getting immediate needs met, but Woods said he is concerned that governmental decision-making has hindered progress.

“It does not help that our state government is in constant conflict with our local governments,” Woods said. “Not getting any of the Harvey money from 2017 made it that much worse when Imelda hit in 2019 [and] when Beryl hit in 2024.”

The “Harvey money” was the $1.3 billion Harris County and Houston requested to recover from Hurricane Harvey, a devastating storm that hit Texas and Louisiana in August 2017. Although Harris County and Houston sustained the most damage, the Texas General Land Office (GLO) determined that neither locale would receive money from the $1 billion in federal relief funds that arrived in the state in 2021. 

Last month, the Department of Housing and Urban Development determined that Texas discriminated against residents based on race and national origin when distributing Hurricane Harvey federal aid. Christina Lewis, Region VI director of the Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, wrote that the GLO “focused mitigation resources in communities that benefited smaller populations of rural White Texans over communities of urban Black and Hispanic Texans, particularly those closer to the coast and more prone to flooding from hurricanes and other natural disasters.”

“The United States was founded on racism and slavery,” said Felix Kapoor, the co-director of Home Repair and Community Organizing at disaster recovery group West Street Recovery (WSR) and a member of the community advocacy group Northeast Action Collective (NAC). “Slavery and racism still is a very big part of what we do and who we are, and I think it takes a lot of the elite—the folks in power and those with privilege—to really sit down and unpack, what does it mean to be anti-racist?”

Both WSR and NAC have been central to disaster relief and preparedness for residents like Cooper as well as to widespread advocacy efforts, including the discrimination complaint against Texas. Kapoor said he considers the aftermath of a disaster as an opportunity to locate and repair long-term systemic inequities, with impacted residents leading the way.

A long-term and sustainable recovery requires people … to have the [home repair] skills and be able to put attention and have experience towards what recovering, responding, and preparing for a disaster looks like.

Felix Kapoor, West Street Recovery co-director

“We want this to be a solidarity—not charity—model,” Kapoor said. “We want this to be something rooted in mutual aid so that this grows. A long-term and sustainable recovery requires people living in the neighborhoods to have the [home repair] skills and be able to put attention and have experience towards what recovering, responding, and preparing for a disaster looks like.”

In January, the Houston area experienced below-freezing temperatures. Many residents and experts worried the state’s power grid couldn’t handle the incoming demand, given the widespread outages the area experienced after Winter Storm Uri in 2021.

Stefania Tomaskovic, coalition director of the Coalition for Environment, Equity and Resilience (CEER), said any power discrepancy can be potentially life-threatening for residents. “A lot of the people we work with in northeast Houston are vulnerable community members, many of them elderly. Many of them have health conditions, and that lack of power really impacts their well-being.” Some older residents could fall ill due to a lack of air conditioning or be unable to refrigerate essential medications, Tomaskovic said.

Utilities company CenterPoint Energy faced the most public outrage after Hurricane Beryl because thousands of residents struggled without electricity as heat-index values rose to the 100s. The company’s outage tracker was unavailable immediately after the storm, so many residents used the Whataburger app to monitor power restoration efforts. CenterPoint is a regulated monopoly, meaning that the state of Texas has given it the exclusive right to be the sole electricity provider in the area. 

Tomaskovic and residents have focused their advocacy on the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUC), the state body that sets regulations for utility companies such as CenterPoint. Over the years, CEER has intervened in a utility rate case hearing and provided extensive public comment on the state’s attempt to create resilient infrastructure and energy efficiency programs.

The PUC issued a report in November 2024 on CenterPoint’s handling of Hurricane Beryl, recommending that Texas lawmakers improve communication between utilities and customers during disasters. This recommendation is partly due to public outrage and engagement from groups such as CEER.

“When the outage tracker went down for days, people had no way of knowing when help was coming,” state Sen. Molly Cook (D-Houston) told Prism in an emailed statement. “That’s unacceptable. We need stronger oversight, investments in resiliency, and clear accountability when utilities fail to meet basic service standards.”

Cook said she has filed multiple bills to help address the situation, including proposals to study the feasibility of burying power lines in high-risk areas, designate electric services as essential for senior living facilities where people rely on elevators, and require the PUC to ensure utilities strengthen infrastructure for communities that need it most.

It remains to be seen how the PUC will grapple with resident advocacy as CenterPoint defends its interests, aiming to push more than $1 billion worth of costs of repairing Hurricane Beryl’s damage onto Houston-area customers.

As the Gulf of Mexico warms every year, increasing the likelihood of more destructive storms, Tomaskovic believes a focus on creating resilience is a pathway through the ongoing climate crisis.

“Resilience can sometimes be this buzzword of ‘the ability to be punched down and get back up,’” Tomaskovic said. “And that kind of description really hurts me because a lot of the people we’ve worked with have gone storm after storm after storm. And I would like for us to get to a point where it’s not about being punched down. It’s about being lifted up and getting to a spot where these storms aren’t doing the level of damage to people’s homes and people’s lives.”

Editorial Team:
Sahar Fatima, Lead Editor
Carolyn Copeland, Top Editor
Rashmee Kumar, Copy Editor