Almost a month has passed since Hurricane Ike came churning ashore from the Gulf of Mexico, altering the future of Galveston County and its residents in ways and to degrees neither fully calculated nor realized.
People already were celebrating a return to normality, but that word didn’t necessarily mean what it had just 30 days before.
Even the story of the dead had not been fully told. The official count was 72 killed across the country as both direct and indirect result of the storm — 15 in Galveston County.
Officially, four people had drowned in the county, two on Galveston Island, one in San Leon and a woman whose body had been found in a huge debris field in Chambers County, northwest across Galveston Bay from the Bolivar Peninsula.
Goat Island
It appeared the death toll would be highest among residents of the low-lying, unprotected peninsula.
Another six bodies, one man, one woman and four unidentified even to that extent, had been found in a second jumble of debris on Goat Island in Galveston Bay just north of the peninsula. The cause of their deaths had not been determined by Saturday, according to the Galveston County Medical Examiner’s Office.
About 200 people were listed as missing on an Internet database maintained by the Laura Recovery Center, an organization that typically lists abducted children. About 100 peninsula residents were listed, some by nickname or description alone, on a similar site compiled by the Gilchrist Community Association.
All the numbers, derived from reports by relatives, friends and neighbors were uncertain. The vast debris field in Chambers County had not been completely searched.
County officials warned that some of Ike’s victims might never be found.
Diaspora
This was certain: Ike had scattered the population of Galveston County and it remained so almost a month later. Some people still were living in other states or Texas cities. Many more were living nearby, but still not where they had before. Almost 30 members of one family had for a time lived in one La Marque house. It was an extreme, through perhaps not the most extreme, example of the new normal. People all across the county took in relatives, some took in friends, some neighbors, some took in strangers.
People in San Leon were living in Federal Emergency Management trailers. More than 400 people were living in a tent city run by the American Red Cross on the campus of Alamo school in Galveston. About 800 were using facilities there.
Others lived in their own tents in their own yards or in the gutted shells of their own houses.
The shelter was scheduled to close Oct. 26. City officials said they had found 200 places for people to live.
Trailers
Mayor Lyda Ann Thomas had requested 500 two-bedroom trailers from FEMA for people who had no place to go. City leaders were unsure about where to put them. Two of the biggest pieces of open land in the central city already were covered with tons of debris scooped off streets, sidewalks and yards.
The Galveston Housing Authority was working to repair its buildings. Only a few were livable, however, and most of those units were for the elderly, rather than the poor, of which the island had many.
About 90 percent of the Galveston’s public school teachers and staff members had returned to work, although many are still living off the island.
Only 60 percent of Galveston’s population — 34,000 or so of the 57,000 before the storm — was living on the island, City Manager Steve LeBlanc said. No one knew how many would ultimately return.
The city was considering layoffs.
Recovering
So was the county’s largest employer, the University of Texas Medical Branch, which incurred more than $700 million in Ike-related expenses. The storm flooded 750,000 square feet of space on first floors of buildings on the 84-acre campus, which is just yards from Galveston Bay.
Its main revenue generators, including the 500-bed John Sealy Hospital, were shut down. Most of the medical branch’s 12,000 employees were idle. Paying them cost almost $70 million a month.
Only last-minute intervention from lawmakers last week saved medical branch leaders from having to lay off 4,000 people, a third of the organization’s work force.
That was a reprieve, not a solution, lawmakers warned.
Scores of businesses across the county had reopened, many under much altered circumstances. Banners reading “Now Hiring” were hung on walls and parking lot fences all over the county. Businesses owners said people who wanted to work couldn’t find places to live.
Like the human toll, no full roster of dead businesses had been compiled, but Galveston already had lost two of five supermarkets operating before Ike, and Dillard’s department store, which had been the anchor at Mall of Mainland in Texas City, said it would not reopen.
Owners of many businesses that had not reopened vowed they would; Jan. 1 was a common goal.
Utilities
Most utilities were back in most of the county, Bolivar Peninsula and parts of the island’s West End being notable exceptions. About 10,000 people still were without power, many of them in the island’s historic downtown, where floodwaters swamped meters and breaker boxes.
People reported difficulty getting natural gas turned back on and were getting frustrated.
The county government hoped that basic utilities such as water and sewer could be restored on the peninsula by November. More than 7,000 customers there still were without power.
The city of Galveston had cited some West Enders, desperate to stabilize their houses and utility connections, for taking sand from huge piles plowed from the roads and owned by the public. Much of that sand may have come from beaches in the central city, where waves at high tide now lapped at the base of the seawall.
Bermuda Beach Drive was “flat gone” and would have to be rebuilt.
Damage
A month later, the full extent of Ike’s damage was unknown. The Texas Windstorm Insurance Association had processed 76,000 claims and paid out $3 million to policyholders to help with living expenses. It lowered its estimated liability from more than $4 billion to a little less than $3 billion.
The National Flood Insurance Program had no estimate of its liability.
The city of Galveston estimated that 75 percent of island houses sustained flood damage.
Some property owners reported being shocked to learn windstorm policies didn’t cover damage from storm surge.
Conflicts were brewing at about which, wind or water, had caused damage at some places.
Repair Or Rebuild
Frustration was mounting among property owners about whether they would be allowed to repair damage, or be forced to demolish their homes and businesses and rebuild them to newer codes. Structures damaged to more than 50 percent of their value would have to be rebuilt to meet federal flood insurance standards. The federal insurer said it would cover only the cost of the actual damages, however.
Some worried whether any but the island’s most wealthy would be able to rebuild, and whether Ike would provide one more reason for the poor and the middle class to move inland.
Looting
Looters were after copper wiring in damaged buildings and had pulled it from power poles on Bolivar Peninsula. Police accused one group of stealing the aluminum handrails off the steps leading from the seawall to the beach.
People reported doors forced open with crowbars and apartments looted in one downtown loft building.
Police had received more than 70 theft complaints and had arrested 12 people.
One man suffered a gunshot wound and another was charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon in an incident some attributed to growing tension between residents and people living in the Red Cross shelter.
No one had been reported shot for looting, but several people had erected signs offering to do so.
Boats
Boats of every description were grounded in unlikely places across the county. Some bore spray-painted notes on their hulls offering to sell or begging debris crews to be gentle.
The Narcosis, a 32-ton motor yacht, was aground for almost a month between two houses in Clear Lake Shores, until crews with a huge crane returned it to the water.
The sailboat Sassy still lie on its starboard side in a parking lot west of 61st Street.
The schooner Mystic Mariner rested nicely on its keel a few yards inland of Offatts Bayou, as if retired ashore as a monument to the island’s seafaring history.
Debris
And everywhere rumbling trucks with hydraulically driven steel claws scraped the sidewalks and streets of Ike’s debris, which was taken to huge and growing heaps on Broadway and the seawall.
The president of one debris company estimated the amount to be 1.5 million cubic yards and to cost as much as $50 million to deal with. The effort would last perhaps two years.
Everyone agreed the road to recovery would be long and hard and that the trip had just begun.
Such was the story almost a month after Hurricane Ike.
