Hurricane Beryl made landfall on July 8, leaving the Greater Houston area facing power outages and debris damage. Amid recovery efforts, Montgomery County Precinct 2 Commissioner Charlie Riley sat down with Community Impact to discuss the hurricane’s impact and recovery efforts. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What is the preparation for a weather event like Hurricane Beryl look like before it gets here?

As you know, with hurricanes, you almost have a week's lead time. Not knowing potentially where the impact is going to be, we prepare for the worst. And sure enough, the eye [of the hurricane] came either right over us or right next to us. And so the preparation that we do is—is it going to be either a wind event or a heavy rain event? For us, those are the two areas that we focus on. Clearing up any debris, any brush, any of that kind of stuff to ... head up before you have that wind event. Then for drainage facilities, [the preparation includes] clearing ditches, mowing, all of those types of things.

There's a lot of prep on our infrastructure. Pumps are maintained, or generators are cycled and made sure that they're running at full capacity. A lot of testing of our critical infrastructure is done ahead of the hurricane season. So there was a lot of that type of prep going on. ... [Additionally,] the preparation of the small equipment— chainsaws, tractors in sharpening blades—all those kinds of things happen during that week as well.

Do you know how many residents were without power?

I don't know the true number. Again, judging from what I've seen of the places that I've gone, like my neighborhood and River Plantation, Westwood and some other places, what I'm seeing in those subdivisions—90% of our precinct, if not more, lost power. Most everybody in Precinct 2 lost power for at least a day. The majority of those people lost power for a day to five or six days.

How did the community respond?

Well, I think they responded the only way they could respond. They hunkered down, waiting on the storm to get through. Once that happened, they’re just like anybody else, they had to get out and see what kind of damage they had, or what kind of damage they could [remove to] get out to where they needed to go. We try to help one another. That's the main thing we saw. We saw a whole lot of people helping each other, and then they responded on trying to get their power restored, trying to get their yards cleaned up, trying to help anybody they could.

Were there any big infrastructural damages to the precinct?

We've had a couple of cross pipes under roads that we're looking at that we may have to change out because of all the water and debris that got jammed up inside these pipes, tore up some of these pipes under the road.

As far as building structures in Precinct 2, as far as countywide, county-owned buildings and Precinct 2—none of our buildings had any damage on them that I know of. We're pretty sure that we know that by now. Now structural damage was big over in [the River Plantation neighborhood], there's a lot of homes in River Plantation that ended up with trees on top of their houses. There's ...anywhere from 50 to 70 homes over there that had substantial amounts of tree damage. I think it will take us around two and a half to three months to clean up all the debris. Now that's not taking into account the homes that have to be repaired. But that's not us that will be doing that, but some of these folks, it's going to take over a year to get fully recovered, if they can do it within a year.

We're doing all we can do every day, trying to get out and get the trees cleared up, trying to get all the roads open. All of our roads are back open. They may not be clean of all the debris off the sides of the road, but you can get up and down the roads. So that's the main thing we had to make sure we could get everybody in and out to where they could go. All of our traffic signals that we [could get up] between ours and the state traffic signals on state roads and county roads are back up and working. We've had some problems with some of the signals not functioning right after the power came back on. We're getting around to getting all those reset the way there should be.