When Stephen and Ellen Leventhal walked into their home for the first time in 2017 after Hurricane Harvey dumped 1 trillion gallons of water across Harris County, it was unrecognizable.
"We had put things on our dining room table thinking, 'Oh, OK, we'll go ahead and save these things,' but what it did is it knocked the table down in the middle," Ellen Leventhal said. "But the worst thing, it happened to be our anniversary, and we had thought we put our wedding album up high and it was high-ish, but we lost it all. There wasn't one picture left. You couldn't even walk in the house. You had to crawl over things.
Harvey wasn't the first time the couple experienced flooding at their Meyerland-area home. Water also entered their home during the Tax Day Flood of 2016 and the Memorial Day Flood of 2015. Whether you live in a flood-prone area or not, repeated flooding impacts us all because many of these at-risk homes are rebuilt repeatedly with taxpayer-backed FEMA flood insurance.
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