Flooding continues to wreak havoc on Southeast Texas homes

LUMBERTON, Texas — Bobby Rector brought his dream home in 2002, a fixer upper in the Candlestick neighborhood in Lumberton.

He’s spent the last 22 years renovating it so it would be the perfect fit for his family, but last nights storms washed all that hard work away.

“Last night the rain was just incredible, I couldn’t hardly see the house across the street,” said Rector.

Not long after the rain began to fall, the water started to pour in and Rector scrambled to try stop the flow.

“Putting towels down at the foot of the door thinking that was gonna stop the water from coming in,” Rector said.

However, the towels could only do so much before the line of defense was breached, and Rectors home was soon at the mercy of the water.

“15 minutes later it was just, all across the house,” said Rector.

Now his family is left to clean up the mess.

“Installation, sheet rock, carpet, tile, everything. I mean it’s everything. It’s everything from 2 feet down. And you know you’ve gone through the house, and seen that I’ve spent just countless hours remodeling this,” said Rector.

Rector pulled up the same flooring he had spent so many hours putting down and threw out many of his belongings.

This process made all the more painful by the fact that he had just finished remodeling his home.

“I told her I was hoping that I would wake up and this would be a dream. But when you do your own work, you own it you know? And I did my own work, and it makes it that much harder. I don’t know if I could do it again,” Rector said.

Rector called in Rainbow International of Beaumont, a restoration company, to assess the damages.

“We come in we see where the water is going. We have some special instruments here we can use a FLIR,” said Scott Traylor, Co-owner of Rainbow International.

A thermal FLIR gun finds the water damage that you may not see in the walls.

“You see that purple spot on the wall there where the pointer is, that right there indicates that wall can possibly be wet,” said Traylor.

Traylor also uses a tool called a non-invasive moisture reader, to measure the amount of moisture in the walls and the floors.

“And that beeping tells me that this wall is definitely wet,” said Traylor.

Once they find the water, then comes the repairs.

“They can be as inexpensive as 2 or 3 thousand dollars, or all the way up to 20 or 30 thousand dollars all depends on how much material we have to take out of the house,” Traylor said.

As he repairs his home, Rector hopes the city of Lumberton fixes the drainage in Candlestick neighborhood.

“I could with a pure heart sell this house to someone, and say we used to have a problem but they got it fixed,” said Rector.

The Lumberton city manager says the city acknowledges the issues with drainage in the neighborhood, and that it is taking steps to fix the broken pipe that they think lies at the heart of the issue.