Hurricane Ike

I lived through several hurricanes during my time in Galveston, TX, but none of them compared to Ike. The images on TV are devastating. Crystal Beach is literally gone - underwater, as it if never were land, but just another tiny sandbar in the Gulf of Mexico.

The Balinese Room, where my grandfather used to gamble (illegally), is gone - completely. Probably forever. Supposedly, there is a Texas law which prohibits new structures from being built over the water along the seawall. But if an existing structure is destroyed, and they pylons survive, then you can rebuilt on top of the pylons. I am not sure if the pylons survived. I've been told by friends who stayed on the island (they didn't follow the mandatory evacuation) that it was "completely destroyed".

My brother's high school friend, Leroy Naschke, had parents on the island who opted to stay in the San Luis Resort, where Giraldo Rivera and many other news crews were stationed to cover the storm. Leroy's parents were in an interior stair well of the hotel at 2:00 am when the storm hit. A 25' x 30' slab of concrete was torn off the exterior facade of the hotel, and they all thought they were going to die within. It turned out to be a cosmetic piece and the building remained structurally intact.

My childhood friends, Craig and Jim Kelso, told me that their parent's house on Driftwood Lane has/had ~2 feet of standing water inside and fish stuck to the drywall. That is going to smell lovely in a couple of days.

Craig told me that only about 50% of Galveston's ~60,000 residents actually evacuated. Craig, an employee of UTMB, decided to evacuate when the hospitals evacuated ALL patients a couple of days before the storm. Good thing b/c the hospitals' power is down, and their emergency generators aren't working. They are totally powerless.

I hear a lot of comments from non-islanders like "they get what they deserve by not evacuating" or "why would you not evacuate if it is mandatory?". Craig and I discussed this yesterday. He called it "hurricane fatigue". I was born and raised on Galveston and stayed on the island during a few major hurricanes. We lost power, roofs were torn off, there was flooding in the streets, etc. But it really wasn't all that bad, as a kid. I slept on the couch in my living room for Hurricane Alicia, right next large windows a couple of blocks from the Offats Bayou. We chose to evacuate for Hurricane Gilbert, and returned home to find very little damage anywhere on the island.

So if you've grown up or spent much of your life in a place that is often struck by hurricanes, you tend to become accustomed to them. Evacuating is a big pain (supplies, gas, lodging, food, etc), and you leave your house/property unprotected from looters. I'm rambling here but the point is that after you've been through a handful of hurricanes, you tend to not worry about them too much, and evacuating the area is often more of a pain than staying in your own home w/no power for a couple of days.

Example: Craig Kelos's photo of wind damage from Hurricane Eduardo (Aug. 2008):



It was expected to worsen into a bigger/stronger storm but downgraded to a tropical storm by the time touched down. From the Houston Chronicle: "For now, most computer models bring the storm straight into Galveston Island, but there's typically some error in forecasts 36 hours before landfall."


Still waiting to hear from others. Some of my family's cell phones are dead, and they have no power, so there is no way to contact them. We know they are fine, but we have no idea what, if anything, happened to their home.