Reading this story on the return to Galveston for many residents, it occurred to me that we really have not heard much about what is going on down there. How many were lost? Will they rebuild?
What exactly is going on down there?
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Xenos
Apparently they are not allowing any flights over the area, so that there can be no pictures of dead bodies. Unlike Katrina, where people drowned in their own houses, it is thought that a lot of the victims may have been swept out to sea, and while many corpses may wash up over the next few days, many will never be recovered.
Lee
This Story seems to indicate many of those that stayed behind were washed out to sea.
Before the hurricane they estimated that number to 20000.
Yes TWENTY thousand.
While it is horrific on a enormous scale, I do not have much sympathy for them as they chose to stay.
Lee
ooops to clarify, 20k on Galveston island.
90k total in the entire mandetory evac areas.
SnarkyShark
I am from Galveston, and I actually live on Seawall Blvd. They were going to open up the causeway for a “look and leave’ policy, but the day they tried that the causeway got backed up for 15 miles. They rescinded that order, and we are back to being able to visit-“someday”. I have hopes that my Apartment is ok, and thank The Flying Spaghetti Monster every day that I am a renter.
Word has it that the seawall did its job, and structures behind it got only wind or flood damage, but no surge. The west end got toasted, and there are causalities there. The east end of the island and the port/UTMB/Strand got hit hard and had deep flood water and some surge.
Bolivar Peninsula is a nightmare, and rumors of fairly high death tolls abound. They tried to suppress information, but several local reporters got up Perry and Skeletors ass and backed them down.
Word has it that anywhere the Feds intervened they did more harm than good. This excludes the Coast Guard and other military assets which did a bang up job.
Some people in the north side(Conroe) will be without power 2-4 weeks. The Bay area (Clear Lake, Kemah, etc) is devastated and I am not hearing diddly from there.
This should be the most expensive clean up ever, and between AIG, Lehmans, and the general state of the economy should bankrupt our asses but good.
Have a nice day
Marshall
What’s happening ? They are covering up the casualties in the best Soviet fashion. They did that with Katrina, too. Does anyone remember that ? They were unknown, unknown and then, suddenly, weeks later, 1836. I wonder how many people actually know that – and, in the Katrina case, most people know that it was bad. I bet the numbers here are comparable. Probably won’t find out until November 5th or so.
It’s a mess – take a look at this, from this private site.
If we had a real press in this country, this would be front page news every day.
Ned R.
Good to hear from someone from Galveston, thanks SnarkyShark — glad you’re okay. Can you say whether the reports over at the Galveston Daily News are worth following?
Binah
I’m in Stafford (SW Houston area) and our power is still out and has been out since 7:30pm Friday. We had some wind damage (shingles, siding, fence). We didn’t get a ton of rain, but the wind did enough.
Most of the people in our office also still have no power. Though strangely enough, one lady from Baytown got her electricity back early Wednesday before work. Otherwise, only the guy from Katy has his power back.
carsick
I haven’t heard much about the aftermath of Ike either but I’m in Cincinnati and just spent the last four days without electricity because of the aftermath of Ike blowing through here and taking out 90% of our regions electric grid.
My mother, also in Cincinnati, isn’t expected to get power back until the weekend. We had a four hour wind storm with no rain but up to 60 mile an hour winds. It was sunny the whole time. Strange storm.
Wayne
Read this-
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=1088&tstamp=200809
And look at this-
http://cache.boston.com/universal/site_graphics/blogs/bigpicture/ike_09_15/ike11.jpg
I went thru Andrew, which was bad, but had little surge impact. The IKE surge damage is just unbelievable.
Xenos
Tho Boston Globe picture is amazing. Looks like Westhampton after ’38 Hurrican. God’s wet-vac just cleaned the place out.
dslak
That picture also makes me think that the people who lived there must have been spending a lot of money to get grass to grow on what is essentially a giant beach.
DougJ
So many of the people in the arena were underprivileged anyway, so this is working out very well for them.
dewberry
I’m from Houston, although temporarily residing in Austin with my kids (one got bronchitis afterwards and we couldn’t stay with him). Husband is back in Houston, going to work and taking care of things.
Houston is a mess, but entirely fixable. There is minor damage (and major in some spots), but it is spread out over such a huge area. At this point, power is the biggest issue, and they’re working as hard as they can. But the only estimate they’ll give for most of Houston is sometime after next Monday. Many businesses and stores have opened back up, some on generators, some with restored power. So, if you have money, you can drive to restaurants and eat out and send your kid to the camps that have popped up to help during the time when schools are out. If you don’t have money, you have to rely on the FEMA distribution system and that involves long lines and confusing information.
There are a number of smaller communities–Crystal Beach, Gilchreast, High Island, Oak Island–that are completely washed out. There are people who survived, but there are so many houses swept out to sea. If people tried to ride out the storm in those, I fear.
Galveston is a public health disaster. There is no sewage system (yikes!), no running water, no power. That said, in many ways they were lucky.
The storm surge was much less on Galveston than it could have been (in fact, if the hurricane had hit to the west, at Freeport, all of Galveston Bay could have flooded), so although there was a fair amount of flooding, it wasn’t catastrophic like it is with a tremendous storm surge (and like you saw on Bolivar). I think they’ll rebuild, it’ll just take a long time. I don’t think it’s safe to inhabit, but that isn’t stopping a fair number of people from doing so.
DurangoDave
The death toll on the Texas coast will continue to climb for weeks if not months. It will take that long to figure out who’s missing. Apparently those “good Republican governors” (I’m talking about you, Rick Perry) didn’t do quite as well with this hurricane as they did with Gustav. So we won’t hear too much about it. First responders running out of food and water. Tragedy and farce…
martianchronic
About not feeling sorry for the people who chose to stay behind… evacuation ain’t cheap, ya know. What if you didn’t have a vehicle, or were too broke to drive out of the threatened areas, or find a place to stay, or feed yourself or your family once you got there? What if you had been in one of the areas evacuated for Gustav — which turned out not as bad as feared — and were still broke from that? I think Galveston provided only something like thirty free buses, and that was pretty late in the game. Their mayor didn’t order a mandatory evacuation of all parts of the island ’til Thursday.
My family is fortunate to have enough extra cash that paying the gougers’ prices for gasoline and staying with the kids in a motel a safe disance away won’t break them and even they struggled over what to do with their beloved pets. It just isn’t that easy for a lot of people.
Betsy
The thing that hasn’t been getting coverage in the tongue-clucking over people staying behind (which was a bad thing to do, if you had other resources) is that the mayor didn’t issue the evacuation order until less than 24 hours before the storm came, well after Houston was told to evacuate. Moreover, many people planned to evacuate but did not realize that the storm surge would flood the roads HOURS before the storm itself actually hit. One friend of mine’s uncle drowned in his pickup truck trying to evacuate. So please, please, try to remember when you’re judging that many people made poor choices, but they were making them in circumstances that were not of their creation.
Talking with friends who have been back, there is a wide range of destruction. Some lost everything. Others had barely a half-inch of water in their homes. Many don’t yet know. The island is not habitable right now, due to lack of sewage facilities, running water, electricty, and mosquito-borne disease.
I thank you for mentioning it on this blog – the destruction of our city was terrible, terrible, and it dropped from the national news in less than a week. It breaks my heart.
D. Mason
Not freedom of the press.
Lee
There were numerous reports of various cities driving thru neighborhoods in trucks begging people to leave and people still stayed (evacing them on the spot if they wanted).
It was 5am Thursday when the National Weather Service sent out the “You’re gonna die” warning giving residents 2 days to GTFO.
Betsy
By the way, there’s a Facebook group called Galvestonians Stay Connected-Hurricane Ike that has a lot of pictures and info from people who have been back.
dewberry
I think this is a point a lot of people miss. It cost us $1000 when we evacuated in advance of Rita. For this event, I spent close to $500 before hand, stocking up on supplies, gas and water and buying plywood to cover the windows. I am lucky that we have the time and the money to do what it takes to prepare–after all, my husband is salaried and gets paid whether he’s at work or is at home boarding up the house. Lots of people simply can’t miss work.
In Houston, we were asked by our government officials to stay and ride out the storm, for the benefit of those who were in the storm surge-threatened areas. If you’re going to ask people to stay, you have to get help to them quickly or next time they simply won’t stay. And we’ll have another Rita mess on our hands, where more people died in the evacuation than in the storm.
SnarkyShark
Yes. They of course are putting on their best face on it, but all that info is up to date and correct.
The neighbor hood I am working in is without power, but other areas around are starting to come back on. Food and gas are less uncertain, but this isn’t over yet.
The Seawall will be found to have done its job and that will make Galveston itself worth rebuilding.
We should build a good rail to Galveston, and concentrate on rebuilding Galveston with an eye to making it as Hurricane proof as possible.
With the coming Recession/Depression, people in Houston need a cheap place to day trip to for a rare day of relaxation.
Who knows how this will turn out, but it is very very interesting.
South of I-10
The Texas people who have already replied know a alot more than I do about what is happening there. I have been hearing some conspiracy theories coming out of Texas, mainly that the number of people who were either killed or are unaccounted for is much higher than is being reported and that the damage is being downplayed. I have heard that this is happening because no one wants an embarassing republican hurricane fail right before an election.
Here in LA, 24,000 homes were flooded along the coast.
martianchronic
Evac to where? Did even the police and emergency workers have an answer for the question “And then what will happen to me?” It is hard to walk away from everything you’ve got, especially if it isn’t much, and just throw yourself on the government’s — especially FEMA’s — tender mercies.
I’d like to think I’d have gotten on the truck, but if I couldn’t take my dog? I don’t know. Maybe I’d talk myself into thinking it wouldn’t be so bad to ride it out. And I see a lot of pictures of people with dogs in the aftermath pictures at the Chronicle.
It’s easy to sum it all up as people “chose” to stay, but that really obliterates the details of the situation. A lot of people made stupid decisions or waited too late to make the right one, a lot of people felt trapped into making the decisions they did, and a lot of people felt they really had no decision at all.
Nikolita
The last I heard a few days ago, 17 people had died in Texas and Louisiana (I think). That’s just what CNN and/or the local news here in Canada was reporting though, and it’s possible I’m not remembering correctly. I just remember it wasn’t up in the hundreds or thousands (yet).
BOI
I am from Galveston, and my father stayed during the storm and will not leave. He is one who critized NOLA for not taking warnings but didn’t heed them himself. We live behind the SeaWall had a couple of inches in the house. It sounds like everything on the bay-side (north side)is ok, but everything unprotected on the gulf side is damaged. He was able to get out to the west end two days ago and just got cellphone service back. For galveston itself, most of the west end are second homes, or were when i lived there. Unfortuantly not the same is true for the surrounding communities on the east side of galveston. They were the ones hardest hit.
salcam
Missouri City here – still no power. Damn hard to feed 9 Galveston refugees with only a grill…ugh. We’ve been lucky with an unusual cool front making the temps bearable, though, so not all is bad.
My Dad lives in Galveston and got on for a few hours Monday to assess; he’s behind the seawall and had some flood and wind damage, but not nearly as bad as the Bolivar peninsula got. Hearing from our Galveston friends that the body count is being hidden and the reason for the no-fly zones was to hide the visible bodies from the media.
I wonder if we’ll ever get the real story? They are still keeping home and business owners off the Island with no announced date for allowing them back in.
Darkness
Weather Underground’s main blog, linked above, is definitely the best source of information. Given the number of rescues of people washed into the bay (34 last I read), it seems a large number must have drowned. They can’t count the dead in the communities NE of Galveston until the figure out where the debris washed off to. The houses are simply gone.
Given the increasingly difficult economic situation for the entire country, I’m hoping this country can have a real discussion about sustainable development. The developers run the show. Really, really run the show. Whether it be moronically distant Inland Empire “commuter” communities on California, or developments in river flood plains in the midwest, or coastal communities just waiting to get scrubbed off the map every 50-100 years, we need to rethink this process for laying out our cities. The developers don’t give a crap. They build like mad, wherever the hell they please, and when they can’t they buy out city hall, and then do as they please… by the time mother nature, or high gas prices decimates the place, they are gone. They have their money and what the heck do they care?
DurangoDave
I just spoke to a co-worker whose cousin is a rescue worked in the Galveston area. I hate to be gruesome about it, but he said they were running out of body bags. This is definitely not making it into the mainstream press.
Here is the latest on power restoration in the Houston/Galveston area:
http://www.centerpointenergy.com/staticfiles/ike/ike.html
PeterJ
Weather Underground? THE Weather Underground?
I guess Ayers is behind all of this.
;)
Darkness
Comrade PeterJ, Sometimes you DO need a weatherman to tell which way the wind blows. Or in this case, tell you the storm surge is going to be huge, even if the wind ain’t blowin’ as hard as it can.
tavella
The astonishing thing about this picture is that from this before and after, that one surviving house was picked up and moved a block, intact. If you look at the before and after, you can see the matching blue dots of the building in the SW of the picture. The brown building and parking lot a little east of it has left a distinctive footprint even after destruction, one you can see behind the house in the Boston Globe pic. And the house is now a block farther away from that footprint.
Tsulagi
Had no idea the damage from Ike was so extensive until reading some of the comments here and following some of the links. Complete sympathy for those living in the Galveston area or have family there.
Glad to hear that.