After Matthew, long road to recovery ahead for Hilton Head’s Woodlake Villas

The Aguado family is sleeping in their neighbor’s living room.

The Bagginis spend their nights in a motel.

Dozens of their neighbors in Hilton Head Island’s Woodlake Villas community are bunking with friends, family or at church shelters.

None of the roughly 30 displaced neighbors — many of whom speak Spanish as their first language — know exactly when they’ll they be able to return to their homes, which were heavily damaged by Hurricane Matthew flooding.

“We’ve heard it could be weeks, months, maybe a year,” Woodlake resident Vanesa Rosso said. “We just don’t know.”

Carolina Baggini — with Rosso translating from Spanish to English — said when she entered her apartment after the storm, the first thing that hit her was the smell.

The lagoon behind her home flooded the apartment with foul smelling water, soaking the carpets and seeping into the drywall.

Property management staff told her to remove her things from the apartment, but she has nowhere to store clothes, furniture and other household goods.

“The big thing is storage right now, they need facilities for their belongings,” property owners association board member Don Brashears said.

Eric Esquivel, co-chairman of the Lowcountry Immigration Coalition and publisher of the Spanish language La Isla Magazine, has been spending time with Woodlake residents, assessing their needs and arraigning assistance the best he can.

“We were concerned. We heard there were a lot of issues here,” he said. “So, we’ve brought water and food and cleaning products.”

Rosso said neighbors have done what they can to help each other.

But she said there appears to be a lack of an organized recovery effort in the community, a roughly 200-unit complex on Mathews Drive mostly occupied by residents who rent their homes from private owners or companies that own multiple units.

“I don’t have a clue who is who” in terms of contractors and volunteers working to remove carpets and perform other flood remediation work, she said.

Julian Aguado said he called the company he rents his home from last week to inform them about flooding in his unit.

“They called somebody, and then somebody called somebody else,” he said, but “nobody came to help us.”

Aguado, who has experience with residential maintenance, decided to take matters into his own hands and removed the carpet from the apartment himself.

But even with the moldy carpet removed, the home was too damp for Aguado and his family to stay in overnight.

“Our neighbor gave us the opportunity to sleep in their living room,” he said. “It’s dry there.”

Brashears serves as president of the homeowner’s association at nearby Tabby Walk Villas and is helping lead the clean-up effort there.

“My hands are so full” at Tabby Walk, he said.

But Brashears said he plans to widen his focus to Woodlake as soon as he can.

“Once I get a breather (at Tabby Walk), I’m going to get over there,” Brashears said.

Brashears, also president of the Hilton Head Island Rotary Club, said the club working on fundraising efforts to help locals in need, including Woodlake residents.

In a message to residents posted on the community’s website earlier this week, Woodlake POA treasurer Bob Arundell wrote that “despite everyone’s best efforts, complete recovery is going to take time.”

Until then, Woodlake neighbors are left to ponder what’s next.

“We just don’t know what’s going to happen in the future,” Aguado said.

This story was originally published October 20, 2016 at 4:50 PM with the headline "After Matthew, long road to recovery ahead for Hilton Head’s Woodlake Villas."