HOUSTON – A Bellaire family washed out their rental home by Hurricane Harvey feels forgotten by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
The agency, based on fallout from another storm, denied claims for help three times.
The house Amir Borhani rented in Bellaire flooded on Memorial Day 2015. He moved out for a year. Borhani moved back in with a roommate, his girlfriend Alicia Atkins.
They claim no one required the couple to have flood insurance. However, FEMA said it warned Borhani to purchase insurance or risk being ineligible for assistance in the event of another flood.
Borhani claims he got that notice after Hurricane Harvey.
His now empty former home still holds fond memories. Some of them are recorded on his daughter’s phone, others washed out in the storm.
Many more remain soaked with pain from FEMA promised help that never came.
“It’s exhausting,” he said. “I’m tired of it and it’s almost like you fight so much you just want to give up. Why keep fighting if they’re going to tell you no appeal after appeal?”
Floodwater five-feet deep wrecked everything inside his rental home, including once framed artifacts from Apollo 11 and 13 and flags flown in space. Borhani’s mom, Melba, who worked 40 years distributing mail to Astronauts at NASA, left the items to her son when she died five years ago.
“Besides her passing (losing the artifacts) is the hardest thing I’ve had to endure in my life,” Borhani said.
Then, he applied for help from FEMA. They turned him down three times because of a prior flood.
Letters from the agency claim he needed to carry flood insurance. Without it, even as a renter, it left him and Atkins ineligible for FEMA help.
“I feel like I don’t matter,” Atkins said. “I feel like I’m just an application in a stack applications just tossed to the side 'cause they don’t want to deal with it.”
Atkins lost her job after the storm. Borhand, a popular member of the Houston Rockets’ Red Rowdies, runs a food trailer and convenience store with his dad. Still, he is barely affording rent for his family’s temporary apartment.
“It’s already hard enough for me as a man to have my hand out to somebody, to do it for my family. It’s demoralizing,” he said.
Neither feel they can afford hope in promises from FEMA.