HOUSTON, Texas – In the historic Acres Homes neighborhood in Houston, on a street where hard-working parents raise their children, a monumental mess has been growing larger and more dangerous every day for three years now.
“It’s absolutely horrible that we have to live with this”, Kerrie Gray said, while clutching her son’s hand on the couch.
Here, every morning, Kerrie, a U.S. Postal Service worker, mother, and grandmother walk outside the house she has lived in for 47 years and just shakes her head in disbelief.
You see, right next to Kerrie’s home, the modest little wooden home her mother willed to her when she died, lies a massive, mountain of trash, broken glass, building materials, old furniture, discarded tires and bags and bags of stinking garbage.
The sight and smell of this outrage greet Kerrie every day.
It’s a growing trash heap that has cast a disgusting, stomach-turning, pall over the entire street where Kerrie and her neighbors live.
“It’s been just horrible. The flies are horrible and everywhere out here. The kids can’t play out here, you cannot sit outside your own home, and it’s just more horrible every day”, Kerrie said.
Calls to the City of Houston’s complaint line from neighbors up and down this street have done nothing to change the problem.
“No one does anything. We are told your complaint has been filed and we will send someone out to take care of it and then there is nothing. Just nothing happens, and nothing has happened, and that is why this problem is so big now”, Kerrie said.
With nowhere else to turn, that is when Kerrie wrote to Spencer Solves It, pleading for help.
Now, we at the Spencer Solves It project is going to be spending all day Wednesday with two crews of volunteers from two different companies, 1-800-GOTJUNK and Lansdowne Moody, a large construction equipment dealer that sells and rents all kinds of heavy machinery to move earth and soil and grasses and bush, we are going to remove every scrap of garbage and debris and clean this disgusting mess up for the people who live on Sandle Street.
“If you can actually do that, it will be incredible and I would be immensely grateful”, Kerrie says.
It will happen, and it all begins Wednesday, Sept. 22 at 5:45 am.