When Anthony Patel opened the doors to his newly constructed Days Inn & Suites in February 2017 he had no idea what awaited him down the road, weather-wise.

The 50-room, two-story, extended stay hotel at 7340 Memorial Blvd. ended up flooded six months later when Tropical Storm Harvey dumped a historic amount of rain on the area.

The first floor of the hotel saw about 2 feet of water. Boats across the parking lot and over the nearby highway offered rescue, as they would in a river or ocean.

“We had to take everything out,” Patel said. “We remodeled, added new drywall, flooring, bedding, cabinets.”

Patel said it took about a month to reopen a portion of the hotel but 90 days until the bottom floor was reopened.

“We had to change out the tiles, too, everything and we hired an interior decorator,” he said.

The repairs were only recently completed and the entire first floor has now been reopened.

“Everything is new,” he said. “The hotel had just opened last year on Feb. 20, 2017, then we had to weather the storm.”

Days Inn was just one of many hotels in Port Arthur severely damaged in the flooding. Tammy Kotzur, executive director of the Port Arthur Convention and Visitors Bureau, said as of the end of February and beginning of March there were about 318 rooms still shut down for repairs but most should be open by the summer.

Some, she said, are just waiting for furniture to arrive.

About 600 hotel rooms in Port Arthur were damaged during the storm and repairs take time.

Hotel rooms in the area were always a hot commodity, with lots of industrial workers later displaced residents and emergency aid workers in need of shelter. But rooms became rare because first floors of nearly every hotel in town were water damaged after Harvey and rooms were hard to find.

Only two hotels, the Holiday Inn Express and Town Place, did not suffer significant damage by the storm.

This story appeared in Volume 3 of The Port Arthur News Profile, April 22, 2018