HOUSTON (CN) - Droves of Houston residents turned out at a downtown convention center Tuesday, with truck and car loads of supplies for the more than 9,000 Tropical Storm Harvey evacuees inside.
Ever Flores, 33, stood against a folding wooden table backed up against the George R. Brown Convention Center wall on Tuesday, chain-smoking cigarettes as people walked past holding plastic bags stuffed with blankets and clothes or rolling suitcases and carrying small dogs.
Frazzled families huddled together, trying to get their bearings, as volunteers in rain slickers directed traffic bearing down on the center in a steady rain.
Two long lines of cars and trucks loaded with supplies inched past heading for the drop-off area at the back of the center.
Houston police overseeing the scene from a storefront precinct in the side of the building told people carrying supplies on foot that the pedestrian drop-off zone was in the front of the building, and suggested they give their loads to the drivers.
A man gave a plastic bag ripping through with several packs of wet wipes to a woman in a small hatchback, its backseat laden with large pillows.
Flores said he and his brothers arrived at the George R. Brown Convention Center at 6 a.m. Tuesday. An African-American man with blood shot eyes wearing a baseball cap approached him and mumbled a question, “Have you seen anybody walking around here with my identification? It’s my White House credentials.”
Flores shook his head and gave the man a cigarette before lighting up another of his own.
“I’ve seen a lot of people talking to themselves and people coming in with injuries. We had a few we had to get medical support for. One lady was bleeding from her head,” he said.
He said he was taking a break because his volunteer brigade got swamped this morning and he was tasked with separating pillows, towels and clothes brought in by a huge crowd of people who overran the drop-off point as police looked on.
Flores, a graduate student, said his southwest Houston neighborhood was flooded by Brays Bayou and his elderly neighbors had been evacuated by boat because the water had reached chest level.
He smiled and seemed in good spirits, not dwelling on the flood damage to his car and house that needs its leaky roof repaired, or the families of evacuees inside the center.
“Other people got it worse,” he said. “It was sad seeing all those kids. It was heartbreaking.”
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An elderly black woman stood next to her large plastic bag filled with toilet paper, adult diapers and clothes against the sliding glass doors of a closed hotel across from the convention center, looking out on a scene of ambulances and Army trucks and a line of Houston residents waiting to get inside to help out that stretched around the block.
She intermittently left her shelter to peer around a street corner at cars coming around the corner.
“I’ve been out here for two days. I’m waiting for my son to pick me up,” she said.
She said her and her neighbors in the Fifth Ward, a predominantly African-American neighborhood just minutes northeast of downtown, had been evacuated in a school bus.