PrairiePundit

Houston Chronicle: A Galveston oceanographer envisions a day when residents of coastal areas near Houston have less to fear from hurricanes. Protecting the region from a hurricane’s storm surge, says William Merrell of Texas A&M University at Galveston, is simple: Extend Galveston’s seawall to the island’s West End, build a similar structure along Bolivar Peninsula and construct massive Dutch-like floodgates at the entry to Galveston Bay. Merrell’s “Ike Dike” idea, which would cost at least $2 billion not including land acquisition expenses, has gained momentum in recent weeks. Gov. Rick Perry’s post-Ike Commission for Disaster Recovery and Renewal reviewed the concept and unanimously recommended that the state fund a feasibility study to look at flood control efforts along the entire Texas coast. “When I first heard about it, I thought it was a pretty outlandish project, but the more I’ve thought about it, the more I think we need to look into something like this,” said Bil...

Houston Chronicle: Citing an urgent need for cash to keep this fragile island city functioning, local leaders called on state legislators Wednesday to summon the same resolve that helped Galveston rebuild after a devastating hurricane a century ago. Revenues from property and sales taxes and other sources are dropping so sharply that layoffs of city employees are imminent even after the city slashed spending and cut all its employees' pay by 3 percent, City Manager Steve LeBlanc told the House Select Committee on Hurricane Ike on Wednesday. He asked that the state refund all or part of the sales tax revenues generated on the island for two years and provide a long-term, low-interest loan from an emergency fund that's now empty. ... Getting a hundred percent of a shrinking pool of sales tax receipts does not sound like a sustainable lifeline. I am not sure what the answer is for Galveston. If the community is to remain viable, they need an industry that can survive devastatin...

Christian Science Monitor: This island city has a long history of rebounding from nature's most devastating blows. It withstood the hurricane of 1900, the country's deadliest ever, and is in the midst of picking up the pieces after hurricane Ike's furious assault in September. But Galvestonians didn't expect the next storm. Last month the city's largest employer, the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB), announced it was laying off 3,800 people and would downsize the teaching hospital that is a central part of Galveston's economy. "We can get back from Ike because there's a will to do it. It's what I call the Galveston spirit," says the city's mayor, Lyda Ann Thomas. "But UTMB was like dropping a bomb on the community." The convergence of natural and economic disasters is forcing the city to search for new answers, especially in the midst of a nationa...

Houston Chronicle: Hurricane Ike's storm surge slammed into the picturesque Shoreacres bayfront in the predawn darkness, turning houses into breezeways as it knocked out walls on its relentless push inland. Today, exactly two months after Ike hit, the scene remains one of utter devastation. Chunks of the brick facade from one house are strewn across its driveway. A toilet lies upended on a front lawn. In one house, sodden clothing hangs in closets exposed by missing walls, creating a tableau that resembles a child's doll house left out in the rain. Eighty-eight percent of the 693 homes in this southeast Harris County community were flooded, including many that stayed dry during Hurricane Carla in 1961, Hurricane Alicia in 1983 and Tropical Storm Allison in 2001, City Administrator David Stall said. Only about half of the 1,500 residents have returned. Because the scale of Ike's destruction was so vast, it was easy for small coastal communities like Shoreacres to be over...

NOLA: When David Breaux returned to his home in Bridge City, Texas, three days after Hurricane Ike, this is what he saw: An empty, ruined coastal town of 8,500 still soaked from a 14-foot storm surge that swirled through every building -- its every street and rooftop thatched with loose marsh grass driven inland from the wetlands just beyond the town. Think Chalmette after it drained from Hurricane Katrina's deluge. In the blur of the following weeks, Breaux remembered that he had a cousin "who did some kind of recovery work" in a New Orleans nonprofit agency. That would be Tina Marquardt, director of operations at Beacon of Hope, the much-honored Lakeview organization that dispensed practical how-to information to bewildered New Orleanians after Katrina. He called her. "My first question was, 'How do you get through this? Where do you even begin?' I didn't know where to start." And so it happened that Breaux, having visited New Orleans twice f...

Houston Chronicle: When he takes the stage tonight in St. Louis, soft-rock legend Neil Diamond has an unusual speech planned amid wildly popular renditions of America and Sweet Caroline . He wants to tell fans about Oak Island: the heaping, rotting piles of debris; the hundreds of homes washed away; and the people, some still sleeping in tents and cars, struggling to rebuild after Hurricane Ike decimated the area in September. Two weeks ago, after his concert in Houston, Diamond paid an incognito visit to the small, unincorporated hamlet in Trinity Bay and was shocked by the devastation. Ever since, he has given something of a stump speech about the former fishing village at each of his concerts. And, operating almost completely under the radar, he has promised to donate 100 percent of the gross merchandise sales at 20 concerts to assist in the rebuilding of the small community, which sits just a few miles south of Anahuac in Chambers County. If sales continue, proceeds could excee...

NY Times: Much of the University of Texas medical school on this island suffered flood damage during Hurricane Ike , except for one gleaming new building, a national biological defense laboratory that will soon house some of the most deadly diseases in the world. How a laboratory where scientists plan to study viruses like Ebola and Marburg ended up on a barrier island where hurricanes regularly wreak havoc puzzles some environmentalists and community leaders. “It’s crazy, in my mind,” said Jim Blackburn, an environmental lawyer in Houston. “I just find an amazing willingness among the people on the Texas coast to accept risks that a lot of people in the country would not accept.” Officials at the laboratory and at the National Institutes of Health , which along with the university is helping to pay for the $174 million building, say it can withstand any storm the Atlantic hurls at it. Built atop concrete pylons driven 120 feet into the ground, the seven-floor laboratory was designed...

Houston Chronicle: More than a third of the heaping piles of debris in front of Houston households have yet to be touched by the army of laborers tasked with cleaning them up, and may not be for at least another week. Solid waste officials and contractors say the process has taken a few days more than originally envisioned because they have moved more than twice the expected amount of felled trees and other detritus shaken loose in Hurricane Ike. The total volume in the city and county is staggering, possibly as high as 12 million cubic yards, or enough to fill up the Astrodome more than six times, according to city and county officials. And costs could exceed $200 million, as much as 50 percent more than what local officials originally set aside. At least three-fourths of that is expected to be reimbursed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, officials said. ... I have relatives in Florida who confronted a similar situation with the purchase of a portable saw mill. They turn...

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 o...

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Houston Chronicle: There's a new landmark in Gilchrist, one of the towns on Bolivar Peninsula that Hurricane Ike ravaged and left for dead. The fire station is gone. The post office is gone. Every structure on the gulf side of this tight-knit community is gone. Except for one house. Standing tall, as if in defiance of Ike's windy, watery wrath, is the home of Pam and Warren Adams, who built the place in 2005 after Hurricane Rita destroyed their older home on the same lot. On Friday, the first day many residents were allowed back on the peninsula, the couple returned to their Church Street home, ready to help and hug the neighbors whose homes no longer stood with theirs. "I think I'm going through survivor's guilt," Pam Adams said. "But the fact that the house is standing, that it survived, is awesome. Gilchrist is still here. It's faith and hopefulness." ... The photo of this house which accompanies the story has been seen around the world an...

NY Times: Two weeks after Hurricane Ike blew through Southeast Texas , cowboys on horseback and in helicopters are still trying to round up thousands of head of displaced cattle. The storm’s surge carried cows up to 20 miles from their pastures in coastal Jefferson and Chambers Counties. Dead cows can be seen rotting in the forks of trees, and lone calves wander looking for their mothers amid overturned tractors and grain silos crushed like tin cans. “We’re still hearing about Katrina victims, but no one seems to know about this,” said Mike Latta, a rancher and rice farmer in this agricultural community about 10 miles from the Gulf Coast. “It’s total devastation.” Mr. Latta said he had so far recovered only 15 cows from his herd of 400 and holds out little hope of finding the rest, even as rescue efforts continue. Thus far, about 10,000 of the estimated 25,000 missing cows in the region have been found alive. Explaining how any survived the powerful surge with waves reported over 15 ...

Houston Chronicle: Twelve days after Hurricane Ike began an assault that left their city in shambles, thousands of Galveston residents are making their way back home this morning to take stock and begin the long recovery. Officials have warned residents that Galveston Island remains a devastated place with few trappings of civilization and many serious health hazards, but the miles-long traffic jam moving slowly southward on the Gulf Freeway attests to the desire many are feeling to return home despite everything. State troopers and Galveston County sheriff's deputies are heavily patrolling the area, keeping order and making sure drivers stay off the freeway's shoulders. The congestion increases as the reverse evacuation approaches the only causeway to the island, with many drivers who had stayed on the access roads forced to finally merge into freeway traffic. Still, traffic is moving smoothly at 20 to 25 mph and few problems are evident, even though police are restricting...

NY Times: Kimberly Sykes finally threw out the gumbo she made the night Hurricane Ike slammed this city. For a week, she and seven others in her family ate it by candlelight, trying to keep it cool during the day with what ice they could scrounge up. But when a fetid smell arose from the stew on Thursday, she pitched it into the street, scrubbed the pot, and braced herself for another day of foraging for an open grocery store, for ice, for bottled water. “Every other day we have to find a store, because we have to re-up the food,” she said, as the three children in the household wandered aimlessly through the kitchen with bored expressions. For almost everyone in Houston, last week was a lost one. With winds of 110 miles per hour and a high flood of seawater along the coast, the storm paralyzed the nation’s fourth-largest city. Millions of people were without electricity, even a week after it hit. Sewers failed in scores of neighborhoods; a few communities lost running water as w...

The Boston Globe has a compilation of photos of Hurricane Ike and its aftermath. It is a big file to download, but worth it. Hat tip TigerHawk.

Houston Chronicle: Major oil companies are expecting to get back to normal in the Gulf Coast region following Hurricane Ike's fury as more gas stations open and the post-Ike demand starts to wane. For now the demand for gas remains high and some gas stations on Thursday were running dry hours after being restocked. Shell Oil Co. reported that 70 percent of its company-branded stations were open in Houston and Beaumont - more than 360 of the total. Valero Energy opened nearly 20 more for a total of 109 and more than 60 percent of the region's Chevron stations were back in business. ``We are hopeful the fuel supply at Shell-branded stations in Houston and Beaumont will return to normal sometime this weekend, assuming power continues to be restored,'' Shell said. Meanwhile, power was restored Thursday to several more of the 14 refineries that shut down before Ike slammed ashore last weekend. Marathon Oil Corp.'s Texas City plant regained full power, while BP's...

Houston Chronicle: As the ranching industry in Jefferson and Chambers counties deals with the devastation left by Hurricane Ike, Astros left fielder Carlos Lee has stepped up to donate hay and lend his name to shine a light on the struggles being faced by fellow cattlemen. In Jefferson and Chambers counties, there are at least 20,000 cattle in need of hay, feed and water; they also need to be moved, so the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association is working with the Texas Department of Agriculture on farm relief. Lee, who has ranches in Boling and his native Panama, is donating hay and planning fundraisers for the affected cattlemen in Chambers and Jefferson counties. "Right now hay's probably the main thing they need," said TSCRA president Dave Scott of Richmond. "Most of these cattle will have to leave this area. This area is devastated. The salt water has ruined over 85 percent of the range area, so it's ruined for at least a year." Lee, curr...

Houston Chronicle: Shell Oil Co. has redeployed more than 1,000 workers to its offshore facilities as of today, the company said. The company is producing a small amount of oil and gas from its east-central Gulf of Mexico operations. Although Hurricane Ike didn't damage those facilities, several platforms are undergoing post-Gustav repairs that were interrupted when Ike blew through the basin. These platforms include Mars and Ursa. Shell is using the current downtime to do maintenance work on those installations that had been scheduled for October. Shell expects to finish that work and resume production the first week of October, providing Gulf Coast refineries shut down because of Ike are ready to accept oil and gas. ... This is good news for getting the energy back in your tanks. It also demonstrates how bogus the concerns of the environmentalist are when it comes to off shore drilling. Most of these wells are in the the area that the Democrats would ban drilling in other of...

Click on the map at for a larger view. The graphic comes from the Rigzone site which has more info on the damage caused by Ike.

NY Times: An angry snarl of traffic, crawling slowly over 20 miles, snaked its way on Wednesday from the causeway here on Interstate 45. It was full of coupes, sedans and muddy-bottomed pickup trucks. The residents of Galveston were trying to return. Meanwhile, on the northbound side, a line of vehicles headed back toward Houston. After five days, the rescue teams were leaving. Their grim search for survivors of Hurricane Ike had finally been called off. So it goes in Galveston, where everything is somewhat topsy-turvy. People may have food but they most likely do not have power. Flooded basements are drying out, but health and sanitation problems loom. Residents are clamoring to be let back in to inspect their damaged homes — though most are being turned away — and some of the workers sent to help their city are heading out. “I’ve got to get through,” said James Brooks, a retired longshoreman, who was sitting at a service station snack shop off the highway. Mr. Brooks and his wife ...