More and more people are taking it upon themselves to step up and help victims of Hurricane Harvey, including one local family who used to call Houston home.
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WPTV spoke with one family who just moved away from Houston months ago and now lives in Jupiter, barely missing the catastrophic flooding that has now ravaged their neighborhood.
Diana Light is watching helplessly from afar.
“This was all a road and now it’s just a river," she says, pointing to a picture on social media of bridge she used to drive over every day in Houston.
Her family just moved to Jupiter from Houston about eight months ago. Their old neighborhood is now underwater.
"Which is crazy to see, that where you used to go walk and your kids used to play is underwater," she said, pointing out that miraculously, her old street is the only one with homes not underwater. “It’s very hard to feel like my heart is still there, and we’ve still here."
In an interview with WPTV at her home on Thursday, she said it’s hard watching the people she cares about suffering in the city they called home for so many years.
“I have friends that, their houses are under water and I had a dear friend of mine, she was up on the roof of her house with her paperwork and her dogs," she said. "To look back and see everything that's happening, I just want to help. I just want to get in the car and go help some people."
She explained why the flooding is such a problem in Houston.
“In Florida the soil is more limestone and sand, so when the water comes down, it has somewhere to go. But in Houston, it’s clay. It’s like a bowl," she said. "It just sits there. Doesn’t really have anywhere to go."
She said the clean up process with be long for her friends and former neighbors.
"People have lost everything, but they're going to go back and they're going to have to start over. And that just makes me ill, to think of losing everything and all of the stuff they're going to have to go through to get back on their feet, it's just really tough to imagine," she said.
She’s now taken it upon herself to help a family that’s close to her heart. Her friends, the Vintons, lost everything to a flood that struck last year and once again, lost everything this week to Harvey. The father of the family is a Houston police officer and the family's son is special needs, require urgent care in the midst of the crisis.
"[The mother] is a resilient woman. She's such a strong person. I think people who have special needs children is just a special breed of special, resilient people," said Light. "When they were rebuilding their last home, they had to be separated from their special needs child because he needed medical care they couldn't provide in the apartment they were staying in. And now they have to go through it all over again."
A YouCaring page has been started to raise money for the family. Light plans to drive around the area to collect donations so she and her husband can haul the supplies to Houston once the waters recede.
“I think the more people can contribute, even a little bit, I think helps a ton," she said. “The people are just unbelievable. So to see them just going through this kind of tragedy, it’s heartbreaking.”
