After Hurricane Harvey floodwaters forced its closure less than a year after its opening, the HEB in Kingwood has reopened. And loyal customers were ready and waiting.
“It’s a little cold today,” says a laughing Armando Flores, the Senior Vice President for HEB Houston. “I think we might have had twenty folks waiting at 6:00 AM, but the traffic has picked up since then.”
The 105,000 square foot store opened in it new location – across West Lake Houston Parkway from the original location – in October of 2016. Ten months later, Harvey flooded the new location with seven feet of water.
"It would never be good for any store to go through what this store had to go through. Everything was replaced. We basically took the store back down to the concrete and started from scratch again, which is what took us as long as it did to get back open again,” says Flores. He says there will be markers throughout the store to remind customers of the damage sustained during the flood.