2 ride Ike storm surge 14 miles and survive

Houston Chronicle:

Neither Mark Davidson nor Mike Anderson intended to take a 14-mile ride on Hurricane Ike's storm surge after crashing waves and 110-mph winds decimated their beach houses on Bolivar.

Nonetheless, the pair survived — one for 14 hours, another for 36 — as they were swept across East Bay and washed up into Chambers County along with tons of debris from Bolivar beach homes.

What at first seemed implausible — these survivors finding soft drinks, a child's life jacket and even a kayak in the midst of a raging hurricane — is instead a story of two men on two separate journeys with a desperate determination to survive.

Both were rescued among tons of debris, from refrigerators to furniture, compressed like a trash compactor along miles of the mostly uninhabited salt marsh of Chambers County.

Today, the 49-year-old Anderson says it was thoughts of his family that kept him alive. Though his feet are still scabbed and swollen from a flesh-eating bacteria, the other abrasions and ant bites that once covered his body are mostly healed.

Anderson, who spent 36 hours in the water clad only in shorts, was discharged Friday after 11 days in the hospital.

"Sometimes I wanted to give up, but I held on. Thinking of my family kept me alive," Anderson said.

His wife, Dawn, and their two children, ages 6 and 4 months, evacuated their home in Crystal Beach. Anderson stayed behind.

"I thought it would never hit us," he said. "There were people who had sat through Category 3 storms and this was only a 2. Nobody realized the water would be that bad."

But the day before Ike roared ashore, when the sun was still shining, water began to submerge Texas 87, the only exit road for those living on the Bolivar Peninsula.

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There is much more on these guys amazing ride on the storm surge. Fortunately their families had evacuated. Unfortunately they both waited too long to escape before the rising water had cut off the roads out. They both came to rest in a debris field 14 miles inland made up of the remains of their neighbors houses.


Around 400 are still missing and bodies are being pulled from the debris fields where these two survivors were found. The NY Times reports on the rescue efforts for baby squirrels.