A month after Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Texas, there is still a simple way to tell if a particular street flooded in Houston. Just look at the front lawns.

Debris rose as the water receded and residents returned to gut their ruined homes, disgorging the contents curbside. There is so much to remove, and trips to landfills are taking so long, that the region is months away from clearing it all.

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Those unwilling or unable to pay private companies hundreds of dollars to shift the detritus are waiting for the city to remove it. But Houston’s mayor, Sylvester Turner, warned at a council meeting earlier this month that it could take until Christmas to deal with.

In a Friday update after clashes between council members over the handling of the problem, Turner said landfills would operate 24 hours a day as more than 300 trucks collect more than 8 million cubic yards of debris at a cost of more than $250m.

Some of the worst-affected neighborhoods are located around Eldridge Parkway, a busy road in west Houston’s energy corridor where many oil and gas corporate offices are located and a few routes remain closed because of high water. Here, piles of rancid rubbish curl like a wall around a complex of dozens of townhomes opposite a library.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Construction workers toss bags of trash into a dumpster outside the Wortham Theater Center, which was severely damaged by flooding. Photograph: Godofredo A. Vasquez/AP

Late last week, a trio of contractors sweated as they plunked large kitchen appliances on to a flat-bed truck. “The whole job’s gonna take probably a good two months,” said one, Anthony Brown.

Built in the 1970s, the houses are framed on three sides by a creek that branches off from the Buffalo Bayou, a major flooding source during Harvey that extends more than 50 miles from Houston’s western suburbs through downtown and out into Galveston Bay. The massive Addicks and Barker flood-control reservoirs and dams, which feed into the Bayou, are less than two miles away.

What four weeks ago were cherished possessions now languished as flotsam, junk chucked indiscriminately a few yards outside front doors. Flies zig-zagged over rotten food next to mattresses, door frames, wall panels, furniture, board games; more or less anything that was on the ground floor in late August. Spanish-language pop music blared from the bowels of one house being cleared out by contractors. Next door, a warning was posted out front: “You loot, we shoot.” But all that remains seems worthless.

A traffic cone protruded horizontally from the second-storey wall of one house, by a window. Olga Weber pointed at it. “That’s where they rescued me, right there,” she said. Weber is a maintenance worker at the complex and was the last to leave – by rescue boat, after she attached the cone to attract attention and wrote a cry for help on a bedsheet draped outside the window.

Bob Williams, tasked with restoring air-conditioning to some of the homes – a vital way to help them dry out and limit mold – gestured at the desperate scene, redolent of an explosion or a tornado’s devastation. “This, it would make you drink but I don’t drink,” he said. “It’s what made me smoke again. I hadn’t smoked for six years.”

Laura Goncalves has lived here for a decade. Her ground floor is an empty shell. Wearing a face mask to protect against the noxious smell, her daughter helped with the clean-up. “I’m 61 years old,” Goncalves said. “I was $22,000 away from paying off my house so I could retire in four years. And now I have to work until I die.”

Her voice wavered. “I’ve worked hard, two jobs, to pay for this house, to update it. And it just in two days was all gone. You call companies to come and clean and spray and they’re charging you $5,000. I don’t have the $5,000, I haven’t gotten any money from the insurance yet.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A jogger runs along a trail at Buffalo Bayou Park on 12 September 2017 in Houston. Photograph: Jon Shapley/AP

‘The numbers for flood insurance are pretty low’

Harvey made landfall in Texas as a category 4 hurricane on the evening of 25 August, severely damaging several places near the coast. It weakened into a tropical storm but stalled, soaking parts of the Houston area in four days with an excess of 50in of rain – about what the city might expect in an average year. More than 80 people were reported killed in Texas and an estimated 136,000 structures in Harris County, which includes Houston, were flooded by a trillion gallons of precipitation.

The aftermath is endured at multiple speeds: the slow grind of bureaucracy and delayed responses caused by the scale of the disaster contrasts with the urgent need to clear and treat buildings before mold and structural damage may render them permanently uninhabitable, and the natural desperation to return quickly to a semblance of normal life.

Goncalves said the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) provided a $500 critical-need payment a few weeks back. A couple of days ago she called and spent five hours on hold before being told someone would be in touch, but it might take 30 days.

There are jarring visions of the everyday and the abnormal side by side, as gardeners tend to manicured lawns and bushes around the corner from streets scarred by mangled heaps of belongings. Grassy medians are pockmarked with signs advertising contracting services and handwritten placards with the phone numbers of house flippers willing to pay cash for flooded properties.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Elizabeth Thomas watches videos on her mother’s phone outside their Fema provided hotel room in Houston on 10 September 2017. Photograph: Christopher Aluka Berry/Reuters

Fema set up a disaster recovery centre in a struggling shopping mall near George Bush Intercontinental Airport, where flood victims can go to register for assistance, ask questions and seek low-interest loans. Last Thursday, bag-carrying shoppers ambled past the unit, which is next to a wig shop and a mobile phone accessory store.

More than a dozen people waited for help, some for more than an hour. Maria Carrasco, a 72-year-old walking with the aid of a cane as the result of a foot operation and back problems, came because her hearing aids had water damage and she needed help to replace them, but had trouble getting through on the phone.

Peter Herrick, a Fema spokesman, said 40 such centres are open in Texas. Herrick said Fema had completed more than 220,000 inspections and approved assistance for about 250,000 people across Texas as of last week, with more than 800,000 having registered for help. About $1.1bn had so far been approved in grants and federal loans.

By the end of Saturday, Herrick said, more than 87,000 flood insurance policyholders in Texas had received more than $727m in advance payments. But most people in Harris County do not have flood insurance.

“The numbers for flood insurance are pretty low because of the size of this event,” Herrick said. “A lot of these people live outside of the high-risk areas for flooding and so they weren’t required to have flood insurance and many of them chose not to.”

Several thousand residents in west Houston living near the reservoirs saw their homes inundated, or existing water levels rise and stay high for days, when the US Army Corps of Engineers opened gates to release water into Buffalo Bayou in an attempt to manage the flow and prevent even more widespread flooding.

“It wasn’t even raining at all and it just kept going up and up,” said Weber, the apartment complex worker.

Releases are expected to continue for three or four more weeks and the decision is now the subject of legal actions, with an initial hearing scheduled for 8 October.

“It’s not a case where we’re alleging that they were negligent and we have to prove that they made mistakes, or anything like that,” said Derek Potts, whose law firm has filed a class action lawsuit. “It’s much simpler than that.

“The underlying principle is the fifth amendment of the United States constitution – that the government cannot take property without just compensation. The cases allege that the government decided to release water which would basically damage or take citizens’ property to save other property. That qualified as what we call a taking.”

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A Corps spokesman referred the Guardian to the US Department of Justice, which declined to comment on the suit.

“We were out of the house for a week before the water went down enough to be able to get in,” said a man who identified himself only as Mitch, standing outside his home in a modern middle-class neighborhood near the bayou in Cinco Ranch, just west of the Barker reservoir, where some mounds of wreckage were 6ft high.

Mitch said while he understood the government’s choice, he has approached a law firm to join a lawsuit. Before Harvey, he said, he and his neighbours were unaware they lived in a location at risk of being “sacrificed” as a flood-control tactic.

“We spent the last two weeks just tearing everything out, trying to salvage what we can and start the rebuilding process. And we’re still looking at another three-to-four weeks before we can move back in.

“I’m going to finish the rebuild but if there’s a buyout program I’ll take it and I’ll leave. I’ll live somewhere else.”