Harvey touches off nationwide race to clean out thousands of buildings But without flood insurance, many can't afford the professionals.

Volunteers and ServPro employees work together to clean out Houston Northwest Church in Spring. (Lydia DePillis/Houston Chronicle) Volunteers and ServPro employees work together to clean out Houston Northwest Church in Spring. (Lydia DePillis/Houston Chronicle) Photo: Photo: Image 1 of / 75 Caption Close Harvey touches off nationwide race to clean out thousands of buildings 1 / 75 Back to Gallery

The preacher found a bounty of labor Thursday, as volunteers hauled away sodden Sheetrock and ruined carpet by the wheelbarrow, pitching in to get Houston Northwest Church in Spring back in business following Harvey's deluge.

To orchestrate the operation, however — and bring in the heavy fans and water vacuums to clean up the children's auditorium and Spanish-language worship center — senior pastor Steve Bezner turned to professionals from one of the largest disaster restoration companies in the country. It's not a cheap service, but the church's flood insurance policy will cover it.

"Basically you get X number of dollars," Bezner said. "ServPro takes Y number of dollars, X minus Y is what's left for reconstruction."

ServPro is sending more than 8,000 workers from branches all over the U.S. to muck out Houston homes and businesses, part of what ultimately will become one of the biggest cleanup operations the nation has ever seen, and an enormous logistical challenge for the companies undertaking it.

Puroclean, a national remediation company, has purchased 100 recreational vehicles just to house its workers, and will be taking over an entire RV park. Another, Paul Davis, is even talking to a yacht broker about putting crews on boats.

"A little bit of everything," says Patrick Matthew, who runs catastrophic services for Paul Davis.

GOODBYE GLUT: Harvey evacuees may overwhelm Houston's remaining housing stock

Yet even with folks converging from far and wide, the demand for cleanup is so great — encompassing at least 136,000 buildings, according to the Harris County Flood Control District — that homeowners and businesses in need of service may end up waiting for weeks to get it. In the meantime, they will rely on friends and the kindness of strangers for the immediate work necessary to keep mold at bay.

For the majority, who have no flood insurance at all, that might be all the help they get.

Houston Northwest Church already has taken 94 requests for help from families in its congregation, and has been dispatching teams of volunteers to gut the interiors. Bezner drove a reporter through the nearby subdivision of Norchester, which is congested with truck traffic and strewn with piles of debris.

"You didn't see any restoration company trucks down in that neighborhood," he said. "Nobody had insurance."

Preparation for a cleanup effort following a major hurricane starts as soon as it shows up on meteorologists' radars.

When the disturbance that became Hurricane Harvey started stirring in the Gulf Coast, ServPro staged 25 18-wheelers full of supplies in Dallas. It then directed many of its 1,700 franchises to head south, and organized food and housing for staff, turning what are normally independent operators into a unified force.

HARVEYNOMICS: What kind of economic punch will Hurricane Harvey pack?

"We've really sharpened that process. So it's very dialed-in, almost military-like," said Bryan Stone, ServPro's state director for Texas. After the rain and wind start, they start getting leads through insurance companies, and taking calls for help through a central dispatching system that assigns jobs to each crew.

In most natural disasters, demand quickly overwhelms the ability of cleanup companies to respond, especially with unpredictable weather conditions. Normally, business can be slow and sporadic for local franchises.

"The backlog begins immediately for all companies," Stone said. "We just try to manage that as best we can."

Post-Harvey Houston has proven particularly tricky for cleanup crews, with floodwaters receding in some areas only to rise again, and roads in and out of the city completely blocked.

Compounding the challenge, particularly with residential homes, is that some companies are already booked with commitments made before the storm even started.

Belfor, for example, began with schools and hospitals in Corpus Christi and Victoria that were hit first by the hurricane. Now, the company is prioritizing what are sometimes multimillion-dollar jobs for commercial and public clients with whom it has longstanding relationships in the Houston area.

"We're really focusing on our key customers that we've made promises to," account manager Vernon Duty said. "We don't have the resources to do a lot of the residential. In normal business operations, we have a mix of both."

Companies are going to have to improvise a lot as they move through the weeks and months that cleanup will take. Mark Davis, CEO of Puroclean and also the industrial restoration company Signal, is planning to rent an apartment in Houston himself to oversee operations for the foreseeable future.

He hasn't seen anything like this in the two decades he's been in the business.

"It's going to be bigger than Katrina, it's going to be bigger than Ike and Allison combined," Davis said. "This is such a massive storm that even the local and the national companies, they won't tell you they're at capacity, but they are."

SICK OF IT: As Houston dries out, residents ask themselves, stay or go?

Despite the overwhelming demand for services, companies are going to reckon with the fact that many homeowners in areas that haven't flooded before will be extremely cost-conscious, since most don't have an insurance policy to cover the tab. It's unclear at this point how many homeowners will be able to get federal emergency grants to help defray the expense of reconstruction.

Many companies say they're willing to work with customers who don't have the $10,000 or so it takes to clean out the average home. (Prices range enormously, depending on building materials, square footage, and the extent of the damage.)

Often, as with Houston Northwest Church, volunteer labor helps keep costs down.

In the region's near term, even for those who can pay, a professional cleanup crew is likely days away.

Sue Duffield and her husband, both geologists, were among the few to buy flood insurance even though their house in Norchester was only barely in the 500-year floodplain.

"I called a restoration company, and I'm on their list," Duffield said. "But they're bringing people from all over, so it takes them a while."

Fortunately, churches and even school sports teams responded to the need in Norchester.

"Houston is so practical," Duffield said as volunteers from another nearby church ferried items from her house to the curb under a suddenly hot sun. "You just get out and do it."