With more than 13,000 Tigers living in Houston, the Trinity network collectively felt the heartbreaking impact of Hurricane Harvey in August 2017. Alumni near and far banded together in the aftermath to help one another begin the road to recovery.
"You guys have to get out of there. It’s not safe to be in there,” Rose Huber Keshavarzi ’01 pleaded with her parents over the phone as flood water from Hurricane Harvey began gushing into her childhood home. It was 3 a.m. in Houston on Aug. 29, 2017, and the city had just released the Addicks and Barker Reservoirs. The Huber’s home—the heart of their family, packed with memories of countless birthday parties and holiday gatherings—was filling with water quickly as her parents peered over the railing of the second floor.
But Keshavarzi was in Miami, only able to monitor the situation from afar. She logged onto Facebook and began hurriedly asking friends in Houston whether they had boats, whether they could just check on her parents. With the power out, her parents had been turning off their cell phones intermittently to save battery, so Keshavarzi heard from them sparingly.
A week later, Keshavarzi was facing another hurricane head-on: Irma, a Category 5 storm making a beeline for Miami. With her planned flight to Houston cancelled because of the impending hurricane, Keshavarzi scrambled to book another ticket. Her motivation was now twofold: helping her parents in Houston and evacuating Florida.
Keshavarzi spent the next three days in a frustrating, continual pattern of booking, canceling, and re-booking. With Miami International Airport ceasing operations, she finally secured the last flight out of Fort Lauderdale before it shut down, too.
“It was mayhem trying to get out of town,” she says. “People were going crazy. I mean, completely crazy. There were machine guns and dogs at the airport. People were getting arrested after being combative about their cancelled flights.”
With 6 feet of water in the childhood home of Rose Huber Kesavarzi '01, volunteers used kayaks to remove valuables.
Touching down in Houston, Keshavarzi didn’t know what would be in store. After the familiar drive to her parents’ house, piles of debris swallowing the sides of the roads, she raced in, eager to see her parents. Her heart dropped as she watched them slowly amble around the house, aimlessly wandering from room to room in shock.
They looked out of place in a house that didn’t match Keshavarzi’s memories of her childhood home. Muddy footprints splattered across the marble floor, puddles swirling in a blended pattern with gray and white tones. Molding beige curtains, soggy with grime, slumped against ornate columns. Reflections from the crystal chandeliers scattered across rotting, dingy walls streaked with coffee-colored water, a reminder of where floodwater had risen six feet and remained for 10 days. The top half of the affluent West Houston house told the story of decades of joyous, vibrant life the Hubers had built inside; the bottom conveyed the tale of a family who had been gutted and now had to do the same to their home.
Where would they even begin?
SPURS sisters helped Rose Huber Keshavarzi '01 muck her childhood home in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey. Pictured top right are Aubrey Chambers, Keshavarzi, and Nicole Odusch Oakes '01.
In stepped Aubrey Chambers ’06, armed with SPURS beer—named for its blue and yellow packaging, the sorority’s colors—and hands-on experience with mucking other homes. They didn’t know each other, but both being SPURS, the women were linked by an unwavering bond. Together, SPURS sisters rallied around Keshavarzi, doing everything from chopping into walls to carrying out ruined furniture. They also found her a car and a carseat, and they took her son to the zoo to avoid mold exposure.
“It was a roller coaster,” Keshavarzi says, “and the Trinity group was there with open arms.”
And while Keshavarzi relied heavily on her SPURS sisters for aid, no one knew the older man who showed up two days later with his own supplies and his own lunch, ready to work.
Like Keshavarzi, Warren Wright ’75 watched helplessly from afar as Hurricane Harvey struck Houston. Having resided there for 30 years, he now lives the retired life in Colorado Springs, Colo. He watched in awe, “painfully aware of how widespread the devastation was,” and felt a longing to help the city he knew by heart.
“I’m retired, and I have a truck. It’s that simple,” Wright says. “They needed people that could swing a hammer or haul furniture, so I just felt like I had the right resources to go down there and volunteer.” Wright made a call to Kathleen Knolle ’75, a Trinity friend, to secure a place to stay. Other than that, he drove down to Houston without a plan, sure that he’d be able to find someone who needed help when he arrived.
Wright loaded his truck to the brim with extra gas, 20 gallons of drinking water, construction tools, and a blue duffel bag of snacks in the passenger seat. Taking a deep breath, he set off on the 14-hour drive back to his hometown.
Warren Wright ‘75 loaded up his truck with supplies and drove to Houston from Colorado Springs to volunteer after Hurricane Harvey.
For his first few days in Houston, Wright tagged along with Knolle and her husband during volunteering trips with their local church, mucking houses for various parishioners. One evening, after Wright had stripped off his clothing and left it in the proper bucket outside—they never wore their work clothes indoors because of the mold exposure—he received a notification that Dave Mansen ’76 had tagged him in a Facebook post. The same Aubrey Chambers had posted in the “Trinity University Alumni – Houston Chapter” Facebook group that Rose Huber Keshavarzi desperately needed volunteers to help with recovery efforts for her parents’ home. Feeling a personal connection to Trinity alumni, Wright changed course and dedicated the rest of his time in Houston to the Huber house.
While Wright, Chambers, and old and new Trinity friends rallied around her, Keshavarzi talked for hours on the phone with her husband, a surgeon who stayed behind in Miami to help with emergencies at the hospital. The day she landed in Houston, a mandatory evacuation of her home in Florida had been ordered. Since then, Hurricane Irma had hit Miami—and Keshavarzi’s house—hard. Dealing with two different homes damaged by two different hurricanes, Keshavarzi looked forward to her family vacation in Mexico, planned well before either disaster had made its appearance.
After seven days, Wright felt his body beginning to tire. He headed back to Colorado Springs, while Keshavarzi hopped on a plane to indulge in the much-needed trip. But an earthquake struck central Mexico, the location of her family’s vacation, the day after they arrived.
Keshavarzi laughs sadly, “They say it comes in threes.”
Marty Thompson ’95, ’96 plopped down on his couch, exhausted after a long day at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston. He fiddled through his pockets, his fingers stumbling on an unfamiliar length of rope, slightly textured with a cool metal ring. He pulled it out slowly—a blue dog leash.
It didn’t make sense for a dog leash to be in the home of someone with a self-admitted “slightly irrational fear of dogs.” Yet, a smile began to creep across his face. Thompson stood up, clutching the leash in his hand, and hung it on a hook by his front door, the cord lazily dangling against the white wall. He would keep it.
“It is a reminder to me of a day that everything was really simple,” Thompson says. “I had a safe place to be. I had food. All of my needs were met... Everything else that was going on in the world kind of stopped and didn’t matter. It was like we were in a suspended reality.”
Thompson had volunteered at the shelter set up at the Convention Center after hearing about its opening on the news. Just a short bike ride away, Thompson pedaled to the shelter as soon as the roads cleared. “I think I was like just about everyone else in Houston, just trying to find a way to do something because we’d all been sitting there watching it for several days,” he says, describing the helplessness he felt observing the hurricane barrage his city on television news reports and outside his window.
Thompson describes the chaos in the shelter when he arrived, a “constant stream of people” wanting to volunteer mixed in with the “thousands of people that had been scooped up and deposited there because the place that they lived in was underwater.” Not sure where to go, he spotted a friend from high school working at the Red Cross volunteer check-in desk. Reading the fatigue in his friend’s eyes and voice, Thompson offered to take over his shift. The position seemed natural for Thompson, a teacher for more than 20 years.
“I have a loud voice, being a teacher and someone who’s used to giving instructions and telling people what to do,” he says. “I’m used to just taking control of the situation. Oftentimes it involves a hundred eighth graders; now it happened to be a sea of adults.”
Thompson spent the morning signing in volunteers and organizing groups of them to deploy to different areas of the shelter. In the afternoon, he slipped away from the desk, stumbling upon the dorm specifically set up for evacuees with pets. Hundreds of cots were evenly spaced out across the hall, each with a kennel placed within arm’s reach of the bed.
Despite not being a “dog person,” Thompson walked dogs the rest of the afternoon for people who were elderly or immobile. Strangers turned into friendly faces connected by shared adversity.
“Even though we live in a fairly toxic, polarizing political world, Houston didn’t have Republicans or Democrats,” Thompson says. “The silver lining of the whole hurricane experience for so many Houstonians was that it is such a large city, and it just started to feel like it was a small town. I think there was a moment where every single person was trying to figure out, if they weren’t someone needing help, ‘What can I do with the talent that I have? What can I do with the time that I have, to lend a hand to somebody else?’”
The Monday after Hurricane Harvey receded from Houston, Chris Newport ’08 showed up at the same Convention Center eager to lend that hand. Because of his previous positions in the city of Houston, including chief of staff for Mayor Annise Parker from 2014-16, Newport was “lucky to know what was happening, where it was happening, and the people that were involved.”
When asked why he wanted to volunteer, Newport says, “I think anybody that was in Houston at the time knows the answer to that question. You want to respond to it because it’s a way to gain control, particularly when you’re dealing with an event that’s caused by Mother Nature where you don’t have very much control.”
Newport quickly got the chance to take control of the situation in a much larger way than he expected. Appointed shelter director by Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner, he was launched from days of sourcing warehouses and moving trucks to running the entire Convention Center shelter.
Crises filled the first few hours of his new post. U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and his wife had just arrived, hoping to make a donation, while the Convention Center’s inaccessible loading dock was temporarily paralyzing the donation process. Outside, a helicopter was stranded in the air, needing to land to fill up with supplies for other affected areas.
Despite the crazy start, Newport says most of his days passed in a more calm manner, troubleshooting issues that would flare up every few hours. One problem he dealt with, he laughs, was fending off celebrities who wanted to visit the evacuees. But Beyoncé made it through, and Newport has the picture to prove it. However, he’s frowning in it to communicate his displeasure about the disruption it caused to the people he felt an instinct to protect.
“I quickly gained that sense of wanting to shield them and allow them to process and find how they were going to transition to the next phase of their recovery as peacefully and privately as possible,” he says.
At the end of a long day of dodging A-listers, Newport would plop down on his couch with his wife, Allison Newport ’07, ’09. In the 20 minutes he’d manage to stay awake, she would give him the latest updates on recovery efforts around Houston from social media. That day’s report: A group of Trinity Zeta Chi sisters were collecting money for clothing and other basic supplies for Laura Whiles ’99, whose home took on four feet of water during the hurricane. Martín Schwed ’12 was gathering a group of Houston chapter alumni to help him receive and organize donations at BBVA Compass Stadium. And a squad of SPURS sisters, who had already helped muck the Hubers’ house, were now about to tackle the home of Melissa Juliano Griffith ’01.
The aftermath of the home of Melissa Juliano Griffith ‘01, which flooded with 5 feet of water during Hurricane Harvey.
Griffith pulled up to an odd and unfamiliar rental house. The old, quaint house with flaking white brick exterior and partially hidden by pine trees was much different than Griffith’s normal home in Houston—but then again, this wasn’t her normal life, either. Displaced after the released Addicks and Barker Reservoirs filled her home with five feet of sewage water, Griffith had searched desperately for a temporary house. Turned away from hotels because of her family’s two dogs, Griffith clamored alongside thousands of evacuees to find nearby rental homes, now a scarcity in Houston because of the high demand. Griffith stepped down the curving, pebbled path to her new house, with no possessions other than a duffel bag filled with clothes and the few valuables she could grab in the wake of the flood.
It was Sept. 3, and after evacuating to her family’s lake house for a week, Griffith had just arrived back in Houston. It was her birthday, and she wanted to spend it with her family and friends in her hometown, even if not in her home. Three of her SPURS sisters, along with her husband and son, were waiting for her at this new rental house. While she drove back, Griffith thought about the help she may or may not get when she returned to Houston. It had been more than a week since Hurricane Harvey hit, and her neighborhood had been one of the last to dry up. “It was hard waiting and hoping that the volunteers would still be there,” she says.
But a team of Tigers appeared, responding to Griffith’s Facebook plea. SPURS sisters helped with grueling mucking work, while Rose Huber Keshavarzi, who had just started remediating her parents’ home, walked Griffith through the recovery process. Trinity friends who had disappeared for a decade came out of the woodwork to lend a hand, such as Scott Mury ’00, who arrived sporting a Trinity shirt, and Dave Caldwell ’00, who brought the lunch of Tigers—Whataburger.
That team of alumni, according to Tami Ellis Clark ’03, is part of the “unspoken benefits of attending a small school. Trinity is small, but it’s powerful because the connections you make are so long-lasting.”
SPURS sisters came together to muck the home of Melissa Juliano Griffith '01 in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey. Pictured on the right are Nicole Odusch Oakes ‘01, Griffith, and Jill Amaon Royle ‘01.
Clark says the power of these connections naturally brings Tigers together in times of need. “Even if it’s been a while since you’ve seen each other or talked, if there’s someone who’s enduring such unspeakable devastation, it’s just this natural response to rally together and show up. You just have to show up.”
So Clark showed up for Griffith on her birthday, arms weighed down by bags of clothes and boxes of kitchen supplies, all bought with money collected from Griffith’s SPURS pledge class. Alexia Epting Davie ’02 and Lyndsey DiBello Knight ’01 met them, and from there, the SPURS sisters began the process of making “a brand new and completely empty house...more of a home,” Griffith says.
But first, a celebration. Candles topped a triple-layer chocolate birthday cake, their glow softly illuminating the loopy, hot pink-frosted handwriting on top. A vase of blooming yellow roses, the SPURS sorority’s flower, sat on the countertop. The women alternated sipping champagne while stocking the refrigerator and taking bites of cake while blowing up air mattresses. They propped up a five-foot-tall teddy bear named “Harvey” in Griffith’s son’s new bedroom, empty but soon to be filled with toys and craft supplies mailed by Tigers as far away as London.
While the women put away dishes and silverware in the kitchen, they took turns flipping through the pages of photos from Trinity days, the albums some of the few personal possessions Griffith grabbed from her home before evacuating. As they giggled over memories from dress-up parties and bid days, Griffith felt herself grinning. The road to come would be tough, but for tonight, she would enjoy herself as her friends and family ushered in a new year—and a new chapter—of her life.
“It was such a stressful and scary time not knowing,” Griffith says. “Every day something was changing... And it was so comforting and reassuring to know that I had all this help pouring in. People were not afraid to come forward offering anything they could that they thought might help, and I feel like that really epitomizes the resiliency and determination of the Tiger community.”
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