America's REBUILDERS

What does it really mean for a business to survive after a fire, flood, tornado, or hurricane? The long, slow road to building back tests the strongest founders and the communities they serve.

- By Liz Brody

Emeka Chukwurah, his father, Onochie, and Emeka's son, Eze, on the former site of Rhythms of the Village.

As the Guadalupe River burst into Karen Taylor’s house and began lifting her toward the ceiling, all she could focus on was trying to get the door open to her 95-year-old mother’s room. Unable to budge it, Taylor climbed on top of the kitchen cabinets. Before she was nearly crushed into the ceiling, she grabbed her tiny chihuahua, dove down into the mix of river, rain, diesel, sewage, and everything else the storm had swept up in its rage, surfaced, and swam. Somehow, she got outside, where she was level with the roof. “I threw the little one on top,” she recalls. Then she climbed on it, too, and yelled at the people coming down the hill.

On July 4, the catastrophic flooding in Texas Hill Country killed more than 135 people, including 27 girls and counselors at the nearby Camp Mystic, causing an estimated $20 billion in economic damage. As Taylor stood on her roof that day, trying to reckon with the fact that she hadn't saved her mother, her calls for help were answered. Rescuers climbed up on a ladder. "I heard glass breaking," she says, "and they go, 'She's alive."" While her mother was saved, Taylor still lost her home that day. Since then, as the executive director of the West Kerr County Chamber of Commerce, she has been helping business owners in Kerrville, Ingram, Hunt, and other towns along the Guadalupe River by distributing grants and providing recovery information. "These are our neighbors, our friends," Taylor says.

"The resiliency of our community is overwhelming. Nobody's given up, they're not moving out."