The Story from Houston
For the week we were without power, I said several times that I was glad we weren't in Houston. A week beyond the end of the power outage here, there's still no end in sight in Texas. This is a real story from a real person deep in the heart of Texas. These accounts have been prepared by Karyn Popham, Houston, Texas (lkpopham at yahoo dot com).
News from Houston, Friday (9/19)
Galveston Island is heading into a major public health crisis. No water, no operating sewage system, no power. Weeks to go before even old town Galveston has them. One operational emergency room. People are coming down with diarrheal illnesses. When the poor mayor says the city is "uninhabitable", she means it. Meanwhile she has a city councilwoman who demands to know why first responders get preference for the tetanus shots! (BTW, if you recall your junior high civics, Galveston is still using the form of government which it cobbled together in the fall of 1900-and which became a model for many cities throughout the country.) The mayor had to extend her own emergency powers (so she can attend the planning meetings with the state) without a vote of confidence from her council members. Give me a break, council woman.
Ten thousand people are still on the island, and for the first time I am beginning to understand why they ignored the "mandatory" evacuation order. Those who left can't come back. If you left with three days worth of clothes, and can't get back to deal with flood damage to your house immediately-well, your house is basically gone, because the mold will have destroyed the interior. As to the contents-there's a curfew in force even here in Houston, but that's not keeping the looters at bay. At one ritzy bayfront community on the mainland, they've been showing up in boats and taking what they like from the houses.
The U.S. Navy arrived today and has taken over at least one POD (point of distribution) from the Army, handing out water, MREs, and bags of ice. Perhaps that will release the Army for more guard duty. The police are understandably stretched thin, as most of them have been on duty round the clock for a week. Nor are they always equipped for this sort of thing-the "first responders" who rescued people from Bolivar after the storm were the game wardens. I kid you not. They had the kind of "air boats" that you see used in the Everglades (no underwater motor), and they were the only people able to get in or out.
That included the news media, by the way. News helicopters were not allowed to fly over Bolivar or the west end of Galveston the first couple of days. There was a lot of ingenuous responses about who was responsible for the ban, but ultimately, it's the feds who control airspace and flight plans. My first assumption was that they didn't want pictures going out of floating bodies. The political cynics say they didn't want any pictures going out that might remind people of post-Katrina New Orleans, and that rings true to me.
FEMA's reputation is mud in this town. We were told that FEMA had supplies pre-positioned four hours away. Two days later we were being told the trucks were "on their way". I won't bore you with the details. Let's just say that when your county judge (the county equivalent of city mayors in this state) has to set up the truck routing system for relief supplies (fortunately he's a logistics expert and could do it literally overnight), someone has seriously dropped the ball with the planning.
On the other hand, if SYSCO is a publicly owned company, buy their stock. They distribute groceries. THEY had their route managers making their standard order calls Monday morning! And delivering! If a restaurant has power in this city and is a Sysco customer, they're serving.
Verizon is creating great public relations by setting up emergency cell phone centers. Come in and charge your phone, whether or not you're a Verizon customer. Make calls and send texts for free. Macy's, on the other hand, gets mixed reviews from my viewpoint. Someone in their public relations department should really yank their breathless "Shop for a Cause" ads. I'm sure they were planned months ago, but frankly, they leave a bad taste in my mouth. Unfortunately, I'm sure there are many people in Houston who will find a little recreational shopping just the thing. The Galleria management, on the other hand, scored points by opening the mall immediately and saying you were welcome to hang out in their air conditioning and use their power outlets to recharge your cell phones.
In the meantime, our local paper is, in my humble opinion, doing a terrible job of coverage. But then, this is the Chronicle. This is the hometown newspaper that tries never to say anything negative about this town. This is the paper that broke the Enron story on an inside page of the business section, with a lead-in about "you know how sometimes you balance your checking account and you discover that you owe the bank $200?..." They point you to the interactive map on their Web site to find out when your power might come back on. They don't print anything about which major employers are expecting employees to report and which aren't. No word on the status of downtown. I did see one mention that all 600 windows of one skyscraper (Chase?) blew out. Downtown didn't lose power because all the power lines are buried there-but it's a war zone from the broken windows. There's probably a great line about people in glass houses that would fit in about here...
The Chronicle's photographers, however, may win some prizes. Friday's front page had a stunning shot of the waves shooting up behind the 1900 memorial on the Galveston seawall. That memorial is now gone.
The official death toll in Texas is 26; I understand that Ike tore a swath through much of the Midwest and that millions of other people are suffering from his toll on the nation's power infrastructure, and that some deaths (I'm unclear on the total) have occurred all along his path. My guess is that the real death toll may be in the low hundreds here in southeast Texas, but they are never going to find the bodies from west end or Bolivar. They've done a house-to-house search, but how do you search a house that is no longer there?
In the meantime, there is at least one case where an "independent living" facility has abandoned everyone living there-the staff haven't been seen since a week ago Thursday, and the frail elderly living there have no power, water, food, insulin...
Insulin shots and dialysis are two MAJOR health issues that may take an enormous number of uncredited lives before this is over. The medically frail should be evacuated before a hurricane-period. Of course, Rita's big tragedy was the bus that was doing exactly that, evacuating people on oxygen from one of the assisted living centers here in Houston. It crashed up near Dallas. The oxygen tanks exploded. No survivors.
Katrina and Rita were Houston's learning opportunities. We learned. I've heard that being an adult means being able to learn from other people's mistakes. Our mayor is an adult. Bill White is an extraordinary man-and an effective one. Ed Emmett, our county judge, has also come through a hero. Michael Chertoff appears a fool. (The head of FEMA isn't showing his face on Houston television-Chertoff, as his boss, took all the on-air interviews. And blew it.) President Bush looks slightly less an idiot than he did with Katrina, but mainly because they've kept him away from the press except for carefully scripted moments. He came, he helicoptered, he got on Air Force One and left without answering questions.
Oh yeah, I gather the entire national economy has gone into the toilet while this has been going on, and the country is finally waking up to the fact that it's goddamn dead broke?
I have seen no mention or pictures of the Red Cross doing anything. I'm sure they are running shelters in other parts of the state, but they're not making a big impact here. The elaborate plans created by post-Katrina FEMA may have isolated them to running shelters elsewhere. I don't know, and if it's true, I don't know if it was politically motivated.
Before this turns into a rant, I will close with the observation that the PRIORITY-URGENT message I just received from the University administration was a listing of the YMCAs that are handing out free ice at 2 pm this afternoon. Does that tell the tale?
Sleepless, cranky, and wordy as ever,
Karyn
Hurricane Ike updates and corrections: Monday (9/22)
I haven't seen the paper yet this morning, so I'm operating off of yesterday's news. But from what I hear from the rest of you, you're not getting anything at all, so here goes.
First, a correction: The memorial to the dead of the 1900 Galveston Hurricane did NOT wash away, at least according to the Houston Chronicle. They say that it's still there, but that the explanatory plaques were torn off-and that one of them is resting against the side of the seawall.
Another correction: The "west end" of Galveston Island is not as severely damaged as Bolivar. Much of it is still there. The houses are uninhabitable, but there's more there than blank foundations or forlorn stilts, at least in some places.
The mayor of Galveston, who Friday declared her island "incapable of supporting human life", is letting residents return 8 am Wednesday. They still won't have services, but obviously the political pressure from residents who evacuated is overwhelming. Those behind the seawall can return and stay. The west enders can come, look-and leave the island by 8 pm Wednesday night. That might give you a clue.
Bolivar is as bad as I first reported. Indeed, it may no longer be Bolivar peninsula. Reports are that several "cuts" were ripped through it-it's a very narrow spit of land. It may now be the Bolivar archipelago. We'll have to see what Mother Nature does over the next year. (I'm now realizing that Galveston Island was probably once part of Bolivar, until a hurricane ripped open the passage between them...)
The General Land Office is going to wait a year, too. By law, anything below the "vegetation line" is public beach, and nothing can be built within (1000 feet?) of the dunes. A lot of beachfront properties are now ocean-front properties-their foundation piles are being lapped by the waves. GLO is giving Mother Nature a year to rebuild the Galveston beaches. After that, houses will be condemned and a new beach established.
Excellent before-and-after satellite photos from the U.S. Geological Survey: click on one of the three pre/post options in the left-hand navigation panel.
One major landmark in Galveston is definitely gone. The name of it escapes me at the moment-sorry-but it was a nightclub that was built at the end of a very long pier. During the Roaring 20s, when Prohibition was in force, it was a favorite place because, by the time the cops could get from the entrance all the way down the pier to the club itself, all the booze would be gone. Most of Galveston's ocean-front piers washed away even before Ike actually made landfall; the storm surge was that bad; I watched them, live on television.
One entertaining rumor that is true: there were a lion and a tiger loose on Bolivar Peninsula during the storm. The tiger and its owner swam to a Baptist church for shelter; the paper has a picture of it lolling on the altar. The lion, from an exotic pet seller, is still loose, and animal control officers are in no hurry to try to capture it. (Texas law, as you might gather, is rather loose on the subject of keeping big cats as "pets".)
Unbelievably, because Houston's water supply has been declared safe, PODs (points of distribution) within the Houston city limits will no longer be distributing bottled water once current supplies AT THE POD run out. So people who live in apartment houses (where electrical pumps have to move the water to upper floors) and have no power are supposed to do what? Get in their cars and go buy it at the grocery store, I guess... Meanwhile, FEMA is paying some truckers $500 a day to sit and idle in the Reliant stadium parking lot because it won't unload them-says the supplies are no longer needed.
Meanwhile, a substantial number of people (at least a third) in Harris county (Houston) still don't have power. And the heat is back. Don't let news reports of "so many hundreds of thousands of people" have had power restored fool you. CenterPoint can only report "customers". A single house-or condo building, if it's joint electrical power-- is a customer, no matter how many people live in it.
For Friday's map of power outages (one week after the storm), see this site. A slightly different tilt (note "substantial") is visible at this site.
To lies, damn lies, and statistics, let us add "graphics"-as Tufte so eloquently explains to us.
CenterPoint has repaired, it claims (according to the Chronicle), all the substations and such, and is now down to the block-by-block, house-by-house stuff. CenterPoint's claim seems a little suspicious in that, according to the Sunday Chronicle, raw sewage is still pouring into Buffalo Bayou (which goes right through River Oaks to downtown, where Houston was founded). The Chronicle says the problem is "lift stations" that don't have power yet. And instead of pointing out that the sewage system also needs to be a priority in restoring power, it simply assures people that once power is restored, the problem will dissipate on its own. I'd like to see the EPA and the people who enforce the Clean Water Act have a discussion with someone...
Most school districts are still closed; Houston ISD is opening in stages beginning Wednesday. Of course, people with elementary-school kids can't go to work until the kids are safely back in school, so the ripple effect is massive. Texas Children's Hospital and Hermann Children's Hospital have both reported a 20% increase over usual emergency room usage, and not because doctor offices are without power. These kids are falling off of trees. Note I didn't say "out of" trees. My guess is some of these falls are from stacks of piled tree limbs and trunks, which are in many cases six to eight feet tall. At least one small child fell off a balcony while mom was in the bathroom-the danger of open windows and patio doors as people try to stay cool.
Some parents are angry because they can't go to work because reopening schools hasn't seemed a priority. Others are angry that there child is being expected to go back to school with no clean clothes or a bath.
Meanwhile, everyone is clamoring for power lines to be buried, while the Chronicle is editorializing against it on the grounds of expense! The problem with being the captive organ of big business is that you often can't see the long-term economic benefit for the short-term cost. Jesse Jones would be ashamed. (He owned the Chronicle, and got the Houston Ship Channel built, among other things.)
Gotta go get some actual work done. Thanks for letting me blow off steam.
Cheers, Karyn
from the Southeast Coast of Texas USA
Hurricane Ike: Wednesday (9/24)
30% of metro Houston still has no power. I'm not talking Galveston island-I'm talking HOUSTON. These people have been without power going on two weeks. A lot of people won't have power for another week-at best.
The historic nightclub at the end of the pier (now destroyed) whose name I couldn't remember was the Balinese Room.
I had it backwards: the lion was in the church on Bolivar peninsula, the tiger was on the loose. Sorry, guys, I'm getting real tired. (I'm still a little confused on this subject-it was NOT an African lion, with a mane. Either it was an American mountain lion, or it was a lioness. In any case, four hundred pounds of big cat...) And a television interview tells me that the same guy owned both of them. Between me and the Houston Chronicle, facts are slippery things...
Galveston's curfew is 6 pm to 6 am. People on the east end behind the seawall can come back as of today, but are warned to bring all their own food, water, and fuel, and to have a tetanus shot beforehand. No children allowed. Those on the west end can come back, look, and leave before curfew.
I was puzzled by Galveston's request to residents to shut off their gas before they left-but I understand it now. Every gas meter on the island was under salt water. They are therefore corroded and must be replaced by a licensed plumber. And they must be inspected by a city inspector before they can be turned back on. Likewise, virtually every electrical meter on Galveston has been damaged by salt water, and must be replaced by a licensed electrician and then inspected by the city before service resumes.
Guess how many city inspectors Galveston has? Three. A perfectly reasonable number in most circumstances. They're working on getting additional people in...
Houston has a midnight to 6 am curfew, indefinitely.
According to the news last night, there are 900 (!) loaded trucks idling in the Reliant Stadium parking lot. The feds won't release them and, obviously, aren't doing very well in sending them anyplace else. The idea that people with no power don't need ice escapes me. And the heat has returned-going back into the high 80s/low 90s. (Our previous cool front was a bit of an anomaly for Houston in September.)
Contrary to my sister's reporting to me, Reliant Stadium was not destroyed. It does, however, have SIGNIFICANT roof damage, so of course it has storm and rain damage inside. The idea that they're going to play a home game there October 5 sounds like fantasy-land to me, but we shall see.
Many, many traffic signals are still down. The result, Monday, was the worst traffic in Houston since the Rita debacle. I left work at 7 pm, when it's usually a 20 minute door-to-door trip home. Took me more than an hour. Even the freeway was crawling.
Meanwhile, Puerto Rico has had 26 inches of rain in 24 hours.
I'm scooting around using my walker-why don't they come WITH the tennis balls? It's really hard on carpet...
Add to your disaster preparedness kit: sunscreen and insect repellent.
The mosquitoes are unbelievable. The first weekend, one man was taken to the hospital with over a thousand bites. Now the damn things are not only numerous but huge. It will be interesting to see if we have a surge in mosquito-borne illness.
Of the eleven storm-related deaths listed in yesterday's paper (the first formal listing), two were from drowning, and three were from lack of dialysis. At this point, I truly think that lack of access to medical care is going to kill more people than the actual storm surge and winds.
Note that this was a cat 2 storm; by the time the wind got to Houston, we were only seeing sustained winds of 39-45 mph, with gusts to 75. You travel that speed all the time-what's the big deal? Cause if you blow on a tree or a utility pole at 40 mph for five or six hours, and then gust to 75, there she goes.
Texas Commission on Environmental Quality says that as of yesterday there were still at LEAST a quarter-million people "in the Houston region" without running water. The TCEQ data show that of 659 public water systems in Harris county (Houston), 85 are NOT operational (serving 203,000 people) and they can't contact 134 (serving 234,000). (Galveston County, which is basically Galveston Island and the Bolivar Peninsula, has 10 operational, 3 out of commission, and 12 unable to contact.)
FEMA, as I've reported, will no longer distribute bottled water within the Houston city limits, because the water supply has been declared safe to drink, so 900 trucks of supplies sit idling at Reliant Stadium with their food, water, and ice. I don't get it.
In surrounding counties, people on ranches, etc. use well water. No power, no water pump, no water. WHY have these trucks been parked since Sunday????
Maybe it's time for our mayor to go back over there and say another bad word. (Famously even-tempered, our mayor became even more of a hero when he let his severe displeasure with federal government foul-ups show. He actually went to Reliant Stadium and said, "we need to get these f*cking trucks out of here" [meaning, and out to where they can do somebody some good!]. At the time, he was referring to hundreds of electric-line repair trucks that had come in from all over the country to help us. Governors from other states have demanded he apologize. )
One very pleasant surprise has been the Army Corps of Engineers. They run a "blue roof" program. If your roof is salvageable but leaking, they come and put blue tarps over the damaged parts, free of charge. Go, ACE!
The SPCA is asking people to adopt misplaced animals for ten days. If at that time they haven't found the owner, you can adopt the animal or return it to the shelter.
Mayor White has set up a special relief fund to "help fill unmet human needs" in the five counties hardest hit (Brazoria, Chambers, Ft. Bend, Galveston, Harris). If it was donate to that fund or to a national relief charity, I would ask you give the money to White's group, as he has proven beyond a doubt that he knows how to spend it wisely . The other option I'd recommend is my sister school's "Disability Emergency Assistance Project", which is trying to get batteries, generators, insulin, etc. to people with medical needs who "sheltered in place", as we were asked to do. UT School of Health Information Sciences at Houston.
I'll shut up for a while now.
Cheers,
Karyn
The News from Houston, Friday (9/26)
Today's New York Times has a story on the cattle roundup, which has actually been going on since September 14. What strikes me about this story is that it made the Times because it is seemingly offbeat and bizarre; there is no mention of Houstonians still without power, or the devastation of Galveston. That seems to be typical of what little has been playing in the national media about post-Ike recovery: the whimsical, not the harsh reality. I guess we don't have great visuals. In Houston, our houses aren't underwater. A third of us are just living in the 19th century.
The seminar I was supposed to teach has just been cancelled for non-attendance, so I'm back.
In case you're wondering, no, faculty weren't upset at the absentees. They understood. Two of the four faculty just got their own power back on yesterday. Those who evacuated from low-lying areas often either can't return or don't have anything to return to. We're still "post-Ike", two full weeks after the storm.
The Houston Chronicle reports today that at least 225,000 kids are still out of school and at least 45,000 pre-schoolers are still without daycare. Half the school kids rely on their school to feed them two meals a day (breakfast and lunch). Ten school districts are still closed completely; others, such as the Houston Independent School District (HISD), are re-opening schools as they get power and have repairs made. About 70 HISD schools are still closed. 15% of the areas preschool slots are still down for the count.
At this point in the year and two weeks post-storm, relatively few people, even those who get paid vacation days, are going to have any left. If you can't work unless you have child care, and you don't get paid unless you show up for work, what happens when 100,000 families lose their paychecks?
And all because our power grid is still hanging off of telephone poles, just as it did in the 19th century.
Newer suburbs in places such as Ft. Bend county, which have buried power lines, never lost power. The nation's fourth largest city ground to a standstill. Does this make economic sense to you?
Me neither.
Ask your city fathers some hard questions. What if a hundred-year storm hit your city, or a hundred-year flood?
And if they tell you not to worry about such an unlikely event, vote the idiots out of office.
IMNSHO.
Cheers, Karyn
in Southeast Texas, hit by a "minor" Category 2 hurricane 14 days ago.
News from Houston (9/28)
According to today's Houston Chronicle, more than 400 people are still listed as officially missing. Sixty of these are from Bolivar Peninsula, 200 from Galveston Island. (Many of the rest are from low-lying areas on the mainland.) Some of these, it is hoped, will still turn up alive, evacuated but out of touch with friends and family. But for those who are known to have been in their homes, the odds are basically nil. I'm afraid my guess of a death toll in the low hundreds is going to be a minimum.
As of 7 am this morning, CenterPoint Energy reports 247,000 customers (remember, a customer is a meter) without power-about 11% of its entire service area. I'm not clear if that includes Galveston or not.
Though Ike officially made landfall on Saturday, September 13, many people lost power Friday night, the 12th. So it's two weeks and two days without power for a not insignificant part of Houston's population.
One person has suggested in the Chronicle's Letters to the Editor that if CenterPoint had turned OFF the power grid before the high winds came, it would have saved many lines and transformers that didn't go down but sparked when touched by wet tree limbs. Does this make sense to our technophiles on the list?
Estimates are that Ike generated a minimum of 5,000,000 cubic yards of storm debris; I'm not clear if that's in Houston or in Southeast Texas, but if that figure were for Houston proper it wouldn't surprise me. As of noon Friday, the City reports it's collected 985,248 cubic yards-and really, it hasn't made much of a dent! (That's more than 24,000 truck loads, if you're wondering.) They have, quite sensibly, been focusing on clearing streets (they were out the Sunday after the storm). The debris piles from people's yards have not, at least in the southwest part of town, been touched yet.
There are three kinds of debris piles in my part of town: huge collections of what my sister calls "tree trash" (rapidly turning into a fire hazard), substantial piles of fence parts, and small piles of things such as roof shingles, decorative pediments, etc. Oh, yeah, and a lot of carpets and carpet padding! The Solid Waste Management Department hopes to have the "first pass" of vegetative debris done by October 18: that means at least one pass by the trucks down every street in Houston. That will be, of course, more than a month post-storm. It will be months before everything is picked up. They are calculating that they are picking up each day (they've pulled in many contractors) what they normally collect in a month.
Of course, in Galveston, it's not tree trash, it's buildings-or what remains of them and their contents. And as I may have mentioned, the storm surge not only swept over Bolivar peninsula, it pushed the pick-up sticks that had been the houses and businesses into huge piles into the Bay. The Houston Ship Channel-which is the largest port in the country by volume-was closed for several days as a result. Cleanup in those parts of Southeast Texas will be measured in years.
Now they are searching those piles for human remains. I don't see how they can-millions of small boards, thousands of large beams, appliances, nails, sharp objects, heavy furniture, snakes, alligators (yes, really), cars, telephone poles, entire roofs, boats-how do you search that kind of debris, especially when it's sitting in feet of water and mud? But they are. So far, although there are hundreds of cars underwater in marshes, etc., no one has taken on the task of searching them.
In Pearland, a suburb south of Houston about one-third of the way between my part of town and Galveston, 59% of one Zip code and 12% of another are without power. The water has been declared safe to drink, but the sewer system is operating on emergency power and usage has to be minimized. They've asked residents to merge their fence parts with the other building debris but to separate out the appliances.
In Brazoria county, they are asking people to cut trees and branches into no more than 12-foot lengths. That ain't tree trash-that's trees.
Many people do not realize that batteries are hazardous waste. Care to guess how many exhausted, non-rechargeable batteries there are in Harris county right now? Care to guess how many people are going to bother to take them to one of the FOUR depositories that can accept them?
As far as I know, Houston's curfew is still on. Small incidents sometimes tell a tale. Friday night after a late night at work, I tried to get a fast food meal. First place I went to was usually open 24 hours, but was closed at 10 pm-"because of curfew", which is midnight. Perhaps they were worried about employees getting stopped. Down the street, they were open, but both their outdoor menus were gone and the steel stand containing the ordering mike was on the ground-you drove up and ordered at the window. Today, getting lunch on the way in to work, the first menu sign was up, the second (behind the mike) was gone, but the mike itself still worked.
Why am I working on Sunday afternoon? We have grants due. The National Institutes of Health changed their policy this summer (wisely!): instead of deciding on a case-by-case basis, if you're in a federal disaster area, you automatically have a grant deadline extension of one day for each day your institution was closed. But of course even after we were "open" our servers were down for a few days, one building is still damaged, and some staff were out for two weeks. So we grind through the weekend.
I discovered Thursday that the damage to the Medical Center isn't always obvious. Went for my mammogram, and the machine they'd have preferred to use on me was out of commission: on the 7th floor of a 22-story building, there was water through the ceiling. The technician didn't know what had happened, but my guess is that a window blew out on the 8th floor.
The universe responds to my questions, even if I haven't framed them correctly. I was in a bookstore for the first time in months yesterday (taking care of my mom hasn't given me any time off-I was at work or my mom's), and found a Tor paperback called "Category 7". It's by a respected meteorologist and a novelist; unfortunately (in my view) they turned it into a thriller rather than a disaster novel. Of course, there is no such thing as a "Category 7"-the scale tops out at 5. Unless mad scientists and the government are manipulating the weather. However, I gather from the acknowledgements that disaster preparedness office in New York City is well aware of what a Category 5 could do, and has extensive plans for what to do. The problem is that most New Yorkers, when queried, say that in event of a hurricane they would take shelter in the city's subways. Evidently this meteorologist has created a half-hour t.v. special on hurricanes for the city, and his station runs it every year. Has anyone seen it?
I've now seen a post-storm picture of the Chase Tower downtown-it didn't lose ALL it's windows; indeed intact floors seem to alternate with blown floors-but a total count of 600, as reported, wouldn't surprise me.
I've now seen a post-storm picture of the Chase Tower downtown-it didn't lose ALL it's windows; indeed intact floors seem to alternate with blown floors-but a total count of 600, as reported, wouldn't surprise me.
Go to picture 3 on the Houston Chronicle website for Chase Tower; I'm going to assume that the order of the photos is set and not random, so that these numbers will mean something. That's plywood, not golden sunlight, in the windows.
See picture 5 for a graphic illustration of how a hurricane can permanently re-arrange the landscape.
Picture 32, taken at San Felipe and Voss, is a few blocks from where I live, across the street from my neighborhood grocery store. #77 is a block further on.
If you flip through the rest, realize that the Heights neighborhood is NORTH of central Houston! As is the street T C Jester.
#65 and # 75 have some spectacular colors in it. #89, of Texas 288 near 610, is of the officially preferred route into the Texas Medical Center.
#111 was taken about 18 hours before Ike made official landfall.
In second round of reader Ike photos at the Chronicle website, #45 confirms a rumor I heard: that there was a boat on the front lawn of UTMB. That's the University of Texas Medical Branch on Galveston Island. Want to know what's really scary? There's a Level 4 CDC lab there!
#103 is one of the most unusual photos I've ever seen. A brilliant way to make the point that Galveston was the bullseye of this storm.
#113-117 show some of Ike's damage in Cuba.
News from Houston (9/30)
From the Health Science Center's new president's newsletter (he's a surgeon; he loves it; he had it written into his contract that he gets to do surgery one day a week):
"The Monday after the storm the ORs were open and staffed, and the elective surgery schedule was completed without difficulty despite limited water supply, electrical capacity and air conditioning."
I know we're a "can do" state, but don't you think "without difficulty" might depend on your point of view? And this was ELECTIVE surgery!
Meanwhile, Galveston has no hospital. At all. UTMB is looking at $400,000 in damage. The UTMB emergency room can stitch you up or give you a tetanus shot, but if you need to be admitted, they have to transfer you to the mainland; the hospital itself isn't open. When they say Galveston is letting residents come back, they mean able-bodied adults with no special health care needs who can cope with mold, snakes, and few if any services. In other words, it's pioneer days.
5% of CenterPoint Energy's customers (remember, a customer is a house or business) are still without power. That's 114,000 customers. Most of these are going to be house-by-house fixes, as CenterPoint says it has finally finished all transformer repairs and replacement of line fuses (which affect hundreds of customer at a time).
Life is not "returning to normal" in Galveston or Bolivar peninsula. Within Houston, if you've got power and your children's school is open and your boss's business didn't go bankrupt in the last three weeks and doesn't go under in the next month, I suppose you could say that life is getting back into its routine.
At this point, I don't have much to add that you can't glean from the Houston Chronicle's Website, so I will cease and desist. But you might compare what I've told you from what you learned from your own local media or the national news, and draw your own conclusions.
The mantra, which I did not know during the Rita evacuation, is "run from the water, hide from the wind." Here's the catch: It's the storm surge that will kill you.
That's the water that is pushed ahead of the hurricane.
It can arrive long before the wind and rain do.
Though they have nice charts of what happens on average, there is no tidy correlation between the category of the storm and the size of the storm surge. Ike was a category 2 storm in terms of wind. But in part because of its long fetch (time over open water before hitting us) and the angle of landfall (it came in dead on 90 degrees to the shoreline), the surge was more like a category 4.
And the storm surge arrived many hours before it even started to rain.
When the weather folks tell you that a hurricane is going to make landfall around 2 am Saturday morning, they mean that's when the eyewall is going to hit-the highest winds. But they don't explain that.
They don't tell you that it's going to start being windy and raining Friday afternoon-though one might guess that. They don't tell you that Friday afternoon, the winds will have picked up to the point where helicopters can't fly.
And they don't tell you that the storm surge is going to begin Friday morning.
That's one reason a lot of people died: They thought they could evacuate Friday morning. They couldn't. Long before noon, the roads were completely flooded out, impassable even to four-wheel drive high-riding trucks.
It might seem reasonable to leave low-lying areas 15 hours before predicted landfall. It didn't occur to hundreds of people that by then it would be too late.
One woman's vehicle was at the repair shop. She got it back Thursday night, loaded it up, and (seemingly wisely) thought it best to get some sleep before leaving in the morning. When she tried, she discovered she couldn't. She got lucky; they managed to rescue her by helicopter before they had to stand down. As they hoisted her into the copter, she watched her truck be completely submerged in water.
If I have calculated correctly (a big if right now), a cubic yard of water weighs a little over 1600 pounds.
Many, many people, particularly on Bolivar, heard "category 2", knew they could ride out a category 2 storm surge, and stayed. One woman's eloquent last words were "I think I may have screwed up this time." Then her cell phone went dead as her house was swept away.
Run from the water.
Karyn Popham
Houston, Texas
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