Needville directs residents to Guy, TX after sewage issues caused by Beryl shuts down post office

NEEDVILLE, Texas (KTRK) -- The remnants of Hurricane Berly have left a mess of the mail services in the town of Needville.

"People are mad," Shelly Sullivan said.

"It's frustrating, it's rough," Needville resident Richard Johnson.

The Needville Post Office was left non-operational after Hurricane Beryl on July 8 and has remained that since.

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"Not one person in town can tell you they've seen somebody working there," Sullivan said.

People like Sullivan, who rely on a P.O. Box, now have to travel ten minutes to a nearby unincorporated community of Guy, Texas, nestled in Fort Bend County. However, they are having difficulty keeping up with the influx of customers.

"At the Guy post office, it's a very, very small office. The line was wrapped around the building, and people were standing in the heat. They are only open for two hours on Saturday. One Saturday, there were cars parked all the way down I-36," Sullivan said.

Johnson is retired and said he can pick up mail in the middle of the day when traffic is down, but he had to learn that lesson the hard way. ABC13 caught up to him outside the Guy post office, picking up his bills.

"I have to pay them. If they're late, I don't know how much I owe, but I have to pay them," Johnson said.

Tammy Scheffer had no idea she would have to go out of her way to change her address after showing up at the now-closed Needville office.

"It puts a damper on my schedule; I may have to switch things around a little bit," Scheffer said.

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Businesses are feeling the impact, too. Needville Animal Hospital is across two lanes of traffic from the now-closed post office. Employees used to be able to make the short walk across the road for bills and some animal medication, but the now-locked doors mean a five-minute errand could take an hour.

"Just like everyone else in town, we've been really frustrated and not been able to go get our mail readily and not able to reliably send things out," Needville Animal Hospital vet and owner Hannah Spacek said.

Accessing a P.O. Box requires you to present government identification. The P.O. box for the vet's office is in the owner's name, Hannah Spacek, so she's forced to move appointments and be away from her patients to try and get the mail.

"We thought it would be pretty simple, you know, to go down to the other post office and get our mail, but there's just not the capacity at the other post office to service everyone in town, so it ends up being a really long wait time," Spacek said.

Neither the postal service nor the owner of the building, a company in New York, could provide ABC13 with the answer on when the building may reopen.

"There's no answers, no nothing," Sullivan said.

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