In Storm-Ravaged Galveston, Echoes of New Orleans
By Hilary Hylton / Galveston
It is has been three weeks since Hurricane Ike blew ashore on Galveston Island bringing up to 20 feet of Gulf waters over the low-lying land, killing a still yet to be determined number of residents -- several hundred remain missing -- and inflicting billions of dollars in damage. The television satellite trucks and cable news stars are gone and the nation's collective eye has turned elsewhere. But thousands of area residents now live in a stench-filled world where the incongruous is normal and the dangerous real.
The slow descent into the Looking Glass land that hurricanes create begins just south of Houston along Interstate Highway 45, the road to Galveston Island. The first odd note is the number of blown out billboards and signs. The gold has gone from the Golden Arches, the toll-free phone number on the billboard for the class action law firm has been torn and tossed to the wind. Then the blue tarps begin to appear, stretched taut over the rooftops of strip malls and apartment buildings.
Crossing the bay, the wetlands are dotted with a sofa here, a plastic garbage can there and suddenly along the causeway, a flotilla of beached, battered boats appears, awkwardly stuck in the median, wedged against highway signs, land-bound, askew and sad. Capturing the wholesale destruction of a hurricane is difficult. We learned that with Hurricane Katrina where the images, no matter how awful, were insufficient measured against the reality. The most overpowering sensation is the smell, a stench that seems to imprint itself on the brain's memory bank, suddenly wafting back hours after you have left the scene. It's a phenomenon well-known among homicide detectives and soldiers.
Like Katrina, the tragedy is found in the particular and often reflected in the horrors facing the most vulnerable. In November 2005, three months after Katrina blew though New Orleans, 82-year-old Marguerite Simon sat on her front porch on Egania Street in the Ninth Ward. Spread out on the bushes along the path to the front door of her small home was an American flag, drying in the sun. The tiny, small-boned woman wearing rubber boots and a paper mask, had smoothed out the crumpled, wet flag that had draped her late husband's coffin.
Three weeks after Ike swept across Galveston, 74-year-old Francis Sullivan -- "I'll be 75 on the 17th if I make it!" -- is on her front stoop and eyeing a small triangular wooden trophy case on her living room floor amid a stinking pile of family belongings. The box contains the flag that had draped her husband's casket six years ago. It is an ironic coincidence, a reporter's happenstance, brought about by a random turn down a neighborhood street that looks like so many others on the island -- lifeless homes with leafless, saltwater-poisoned trees, battered fences hung with soggy towels, shattered windows, and front yards filled with piles of wet carpet, soaked clothes, moldy pots and pans, beach chairs and books, all water-laden, useless, even dangerous from soaking in the diseased stew, and hung about with the smell of decay. Perhaps 20,000 households share this circumstance, according to Galveston Mayor Lyda Ann Thomas.
"It looks like someone picked up my home and shook it," Francis said. "It looks like a mixmaster inside and smells like I don't know what."
Francis fled the island and the home where she had lived for "40 odd years" with her husband, a sea captain for Texaco, taking only a few photographs and the bank books for the Galveston Grandmothers Club. It was the first time she had left during a storm. In 1983, Hurricane Alicia, a category three storm, had blown hard but with no surge. This time, Hollywood Heights, her West End island neighborhood just two blocks off the beach was quickly put under water by Ike. A moldy black water line high on the yellow siding shows where the water had crested, perhaps as high as 15 feet. The green storm shutters had held, but had been blown open and the water flooded into the home. The back bedroom's wooden floor had collapsed. Somewhere in the hole she hopes to find her husband's treasured sextant from his seafaring days.
The volunteers from the Baptist Church had come by earlier in the day and cut down the battered, ancient oak tree that had shaded her backyard. It had fallen, ripped up by the winds like a weed. A small sign in the yard remained in place: "She who plants a garden, plants happiness." Her barbecue and garden shed had stayed put. Francis laughs but not heartily.
See photos of Hurricane Ike here
For Marguerite Simon on Egania Street in New Orleans, it had been a small statue of the Virgin Mary that had weathered Katrina. Strange, but that is way the world looks after a deluge, all at odds and unfathomable. "Yes, you have to laugh, but it don't come from the heart," Marguerite had said, her voice trailing off.
Incongruity rules. For Post-Ike Galveston, like Post-Katrina New Orleans, the weather has been glorious. As the suns falls in the west, the brown pelicans head eastward, as they always do, to the wetlands, flying parallel to the 10 mile seawall that islanders had hoped would have held back the surge. As the birds head home, a constant parade of dump trucks line up in a parallel path heading west along the seawall road to a massive emergency landfill by the airport. The city expects up to 1.5 million cubic yards of debris will be removed from homes an businesses. Out on the water, where swimming is still forbidden because of fears of disease, the seagulls have claimed new perches on pilings that once supported beach bars and restaurants, among them the famous Balinese, a nightclub where the Rat Pack partied.
There is order emerging from the chaos. Randalls supermarket and its in-house Starbucks is open, but with the island water and sewer system still not functioning, portable toilets have been lined up outside. Dozens of moldy, battered refrigerators ripped out of the low-rise seaside condos are corralled on street corners. Stacks of new drywall stand outside. Just two blocks from the beach, a tall wire fence has been erected around the gas pumps and doorway of Luke's Supermarket and Deli, a 50-year island institution where West Enders could sit out front and munch on barbecue and boudin.
"A.R. Lucas is alive," the Galveston Daily News proclaimed last week. The owner of Luke's had stayed on in his West End corner store, hoping to be there for his neighbors and customers after the storm passed. As Ike came ashore, he was injured, a bacterial infection set in and doctors in Houston had to amputate his lower leg. "The people of Galveston have a special resilience and toughness about them," Daily News publisher Dolph Tillotson wrote this week. "Perhaps that comes from generations of dealing with adversity. Fire, wind, water, disease and warfare have failed to dislodge the people of Galveston."
In 1900, more than 6,000 island residents perished in a hurricane. Many of the dead were taken out to sea for burial but even though their bodies were weighted down the tides brought them back. For over a month there were mass funeral pyres around the city. There will be no burning on the island this time. Fires are forbidden. There is a dusk-to-dawn curfew and residents are warned to get shots for tetanus and hepatitis before returning. Downtown, with its brick and ironwork Victorian-era buildings -- once dubbed the "Wall Street of the Southwest" -- is a ghost town. The only sound is the low howl of dehumidifiers sucking moisture out of bank buildings and churches.
In the harbor, most of the luxury yachts have left for safer moorings, while across the channel the massive floating oil rigs ready to be towed to sea have stood firm. But a large shrimp boat, 50 feet long or more, sits on its side in the parking lot in front of Willie G's Seafood and Steakhouse, wedged between a crushed parking lot tollbooth and the tramline rails, its anchor hanging like a noose over the roof of the tram stop.
Many of the 45,000 islanders who evacuated are coming home and the Daily News is offering free advertising as businesses reopen. The land-side bars on the seawall boulevard are open and the motels filled with construction crews. There is a fresh stack of new Spanish roof tiles atop the legendary Hotel Galvez and a few evening joggers have even returned to the seawall.
Francis Sullivan has no idea what she is going to do. Her house is a total loss. She has few clothes, just $38 in food stamps, and her Social Security pension, but she has few complaints. The National Guard charged her cellphone. The Salvation Army has fed her. Meanwhile, Texas state agencies have received over 600,000 requests for various forms of assistance and support from victims of the storm.
If worse comes to worse, she says she will clear out her garden shed, toss out the toys ("The last batch of kids that went through here were my great-grandkids"), and pitch a tent in the back yard if the city lets her. "If God is with me, I'll be fine. The only prayer I want people to pray for me is that God will give me the strength to do what I have to do -- no more that," she says.
Click here for an excerpt from Isaac's Storm, Erik Larson's book on the 1900 hurricane.