When Hurricane Harvey hit in late August, Greater Houston area cities and residents found themselves affected and without many resources. Pearland Constable Buck Stevens saw a need for an organization in Pearland that provided help with recovery to the city, and so the Pearland Recovery Assistance Team was born.

“I’m one of those kinds of people that is a collaborator and an organizer,” Stevens said.

On Sept. 1, Stevens held a meeting with town leaders to discuss what needed to be done. Later that day, Stevens, along with Rick Torrison, acquired the warehouse on Shank Road that would become PRAT’s headquarters for the next three weeks.
“We’re still seeing the recovery process going on. Recovery takes much longer than the disaster,” Stevens said. “The recovery process takes forever.”

PRAT was up and running from Sept. 1-14 with the following week being used to shut down operations. Over the course of its tenure, PRAT saw 350 volunteers who fielded phone calls, loaded up the warehouse and mucked out, or sanitized, 30 houses.

“As a group we said, ‘We cannot continue to send people in to houses that have mold and all those things … we couldn’t knowingly send people in, so we stopped mucking,” Stevens said.

PRAT worked closely with nonprofits, such as Samaritan’s Purse and Crisis Cleanup, the latter of which is located in Friendswood. The volunteer base itself did not maintain a nonprofit status, and was made up residents and locals.

“I say it’s an organization, but it was just a group of people who organized,” Stevens said.

PRAT served residents in the Pearland area as well as surrounding cities like Friendswood and in other parts of Brazoria County.

“It’s the timing of everything,” Stevens said. “I mean, yeah, we’re all helping each other but it’s those little things that are the key parts of all that.”

Stevens was pleased with the outcome of the organization as it was the first time it rallied into action. In the future, he would like to see an improvement in social media strategy for the organization as well as more communication between the city and organization.

“Next time this happens, I am going to have a set of policies already outlined, so that if I have to reach out again, and if I have to have an admin group again, they’re already going to know what to do,” Stevens said.

PRAT’s efforts will continue whenever there is a need for the organization even if it no longer operates under the same name, Stevens said. Stevens envisions an entity like the Pearland Area Citizens Corp. absorbing PRAT.

“What’s going to happen with PRAT … it will probably become a part of [Pearland Area] Citizens Corp., I’ll keep the website around, I’ll keep it up and running, it’s another page on the Citizens Corp. website. Whether or not we use the word ‘PRAT’ anymore, I’m not sure of, but it’s not going away. And the vision I had to have some kind of recovery effort—that’s not going away either.”