Houston Family Opens Home To 11 People, 6 Dogs And 1 Cat Displaced By Hurricane Harvey

There’s been an overwhelming outpouring of support for those in need of shelter, food and more in Houston after Hurricane Harvey.

And Nicole Richert certainly did her part to help out. She and her family took in 11 people, six dogs and one cat to give them a nice, dry place to stay. That’s right. Eleven people and seven animals.

Her Houston home was luckily not touched by the flood, has five bedrooms and was the perfect place to give families in need a place to go.

Before being welcomed into Richert’s home, these people and their pets were stranded at a Shell gas station.

She and her husband have three sons of their own, but when she found out that people needed a safe, warm, dry place to temporarily call home, she had no problem offering them shelter.

“We were willing to put people wherever,” Richert told People magazine. “I wasn’t even a little bit nervous about having strangers come and stay. It was ‘see a need, meet a need.’ We didn’t even hesitate.”

Her kind deed started out as a mission to find a woman who was “a friend of a friend” her aunt had called to tell her about. The aunt’s acquaintance was stranded at a Shell gas station, and when Richert found her, she also found other people who were at the shell station with nowhere to go.

She kept coming back to the Shell station until every person there was either coming with her or had secured another place to stay.

After spending days together, one of the people Richert took in, Patsy Rae Creighton, told People, “It’s unexplainable,” she said. “We are all kindred, like a little blended family.”

The response to Richert and her kindness online has been amazing.

“Wonderful humans at work in Texas. Just beautiful to see. People helping one another and loving one another, without race, politics, etc. It’s just genuine human kindness here,” one Facebook user wrote.

And Richert isn’t alone in her efforts to help those displaced by Hurricane Harvey. Plenty of Texans have taken it upon themselves to rescue and feed others, and it’s been incredible to hear about the stories online.

For example, these bakers who were trapped at El Bolillo Bakery used their downtime to bake tons of bread for those displaced by Harvey, and their deeds did not go unrecognized online. Many have called them “heroes.”

If you’d like to pitch in, too, here are just a few ways you can do so. No effort is too small.