Time hasn’t healed all wounds from Hurricane Beryl for some Harris County residents.
One year after the July 2024 storm caused billions of dollars in wind damage and knocked out power across the region, 1 in 8 residents reported their lives were still “very” or “somewhat” disrupted by Beryl, according to new survey results from the Houston Population Research Center at the Kinder Institute. Recovery has been particularly slow for households making less than $25,000 annually, with about 1 in 4 reporting their lives remain very or somewhat disrupted.
The institute has been tracking the recovery of Harris County residents since the first few weeks after the disaster, and its most recent survey also captured data from Fort Bend and Montgomery counties. A few patterns emerged from Harris County over the past year, including a surprising uptick in continuing disruption compared to late 2024.
Dan Potter, co-director of the research center and lead researcher on the survey work, said the latest results mark a shift from late last year, when residents were “feeling good about the progress they’d made and expected it to continue.”
“Now, a year down the road, residents are having to grapple with the reality of repairs that are still needed, credit card bills from unexpected hotel rooms or refilling the fridge that are still unpaid, and their expectations that these things should already be resolved but they’re not,” Potter said.
Major Latin, the disaster case management program manager for Cypress-based Hope Disaster Recovery, said his nonprofit has encountered hundreds of households in recent months still needing help with home repairs. While many residents made some fixes after the storm, they haven’t received enough federal or community aid to afford costlier repairs.
“We’ve come across people who are in different stages of their recovery,” Latin said. “Maybe they’ve received some FEMA money upfront and they were able to repair a part of their roof, but they weren’t able to repair interior damage. Or maybe they were able to get their fence fixed, but there’s still something else that needs to be done.”
A stalled recovery
Beryl caused an estimated $2.5 billion to $4.5 billion in property damage, and workers across the region lost wages with businesses closed due to power outages.
To better understand the disaster recovery process, the Kinder Institute’s Houston Population Research Center has asked about 4,300 to 5,300 Harris County residents to describe the impact of Beryl on their lives at three points: a few weeks after landfall, four to six months after the storm, and roughly one year later.
Many, though not all, of the same residents took the mid-2025 and late 2024 surveys. The results were weighted to reflect the county’s demographics.
In the immediate aftermath of the storm, 23% of respondents said their lives were somewhat or very disrupted. By late 2024, the share of respondents reporting their lives were somewhat or very disrupted fell to 11%.
That figure, however, ticked higher this June and July, when 13% reported those levels of disruption.
Much of the increase came from respondents with an annual household income of less than $25,000. Twenty-seven percent of them cited ongoing disruption one year out, up from 17% in late 2024.
‘Kind of stuck’
Latin said he wasn’t surprised by the slowing rate of recovery.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, has already delivered the vast majority of disaster aid it will provide. FEMA data obtained and analyzed by the Kinder Institute shows about 459,000 Harris County households were eligible to receive about $495 million through the agency’s Individuals and Households Program, its primary avenue for delivering post-storm aid.
Large community and disaster relief nonprofits also are struggling to support disaster recovery, particularly as the federal government broadly scales back on awarding grants to them, Latin said.
“If you can’t cover the costs yourself, you’re often relying on these community organizations,” Latin said. “And if they don’t have the funding for it, you’re kind of stuck.”
A final big infusion of federal aid will soon arrive from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, with about $150 million going to housing repairs in Houston and Harris County.
Still, that money totals a fraction of what’s needed for housing fixes not covered by insurance policies or previous government assistance.
As of early 2025, federal estimates suggested there was about $800 million in needed repairs between Beryl and the May 2024 derecho, which damaged tens of thousands of homes. (The federal data doesn’t specify the amount of needed repairs attributed to each storm.)
“For many in the Houston area, the string of natural disasters and their impacts from 2024 are a thing of the past, but that is not the case for everyone,” Potter said. “By better understanding the long-term recovery needs in the community, it is possible for local, state and federal policies and programs to be developed to do something about it.”
