Behind the Lines

I Don’t Like Ike

For Houstonians, the hurricane was not a disaster, just an enormous inconvenience. That didn’t keep us from griping about it for three weeks.

by Mimi Swartz

November 2008

patrice says: Since I live in THE IKE ZONE I can't really find an article about someone whining about the loss of electricity funny. My parents (in their 70's) lost their home and it's contents - so it's not very funny to us. 95% of Bridge City, 80% of LaBelle/Fannette, 98% of Sabine Pass, 98% of the Boliver Peninsula is gone and you were whining about 3 weeks of no electricity and the lack of restaurants? Geez - IF only that's all that had happened here. Why not report on the lack of true help from FEMA and our State for the victims? How the insurance companies aren't paying up in a timely manner (if they pay at all). How about Jefferson County officials who can't decide IF or WHEN or HOW HIGH a person has to rebuild their home? We have officials from the federal, state, and county telling people to raise their home 6-8 feet - how in the world do you raise a brick home on a slab? DUH Come tell the world what a huge cluster the recovery effort is when you throw in government officials without a clue! That's real reporting. (October 30th, 2008 at 7:44am)

1 more comment | Add yours »

“Houston looks . . . wounded,” my husband, John, said, choosing the word with care. I couldn’t disagree: More than three weeks after Hurricane Ike blew through town, the streets are still piled high with debris, and Houston’s beloved trees—mighty oaks, pines, pecans, and sweet gums—are still crashed into rooftops or chopped into mournful stumps at curbside. The traffic is, if anything, worse than before the storm; getting to the Galleria from downtown on Westheimer is both glacial and life-threatening, as every major intersection poses a new cognitive challenge: red light, blinking red light, or no light. The southeast side of the JPMorgan Chase Tower, a symbol of local pride, is boarded up like a slumlord’s warehouse, with hundreds of windows shattered not by vandals but by the wind. Houstonians, so accustomed to sprinting from the slightest unpleasantness, still seem enervated by Ike’s wrath, as if they cannot quite comprehend that a hurricane—and just a category 2 at that—could bring them to their knees. “I’m tired of this,” a friend told me, as if she had any option besides moving away from the coast. “I went through Alicia. I went through Carla.” More than forty years of storms and selective memory mean that most people assumed we’d be all cleaned up and back to normal by now, which proves nothing more than that Houstonians remain optimistic beyond reason and oblivious to the streams of fragility coursing through their assiduously modern city.

For most of my life, hurricanes have been a minor inconvenience. I was very young and far from the coast during Carla, in 1961, and spent Alicia, in 1983, inexplicably cat-sitting for a friend in West University. I remember that the eye passed over sometime in the late morning and that there were many downed trees and that my friend Tim broadcast live from downtown, reporting on falling glass from the Chase Tower. Even though some people waited three weeks for power, I went back to my apartment, turned on the lights, and resumed my life. It was the 2005 one-two punch of Katrina and Rita that forever changed my attitude, and that of my fellow Houstonians. Never mind that much of the devastation in New Orleans was created by collapsing levees—people had seen the social fabric unravel, and it wasn’t pretty.

As Ike approached, my first decision was the traditional one: Go or stay. I chose the latter because Ike was reported to be a big storm but with only category 2 winds. Three years ago, Rita had headed for Houston as a category 5, a difference of about 50 miles per hour and ten to fifteen feet in storm surge. I left then with our son, Sam, on orders from a tense troika that included my boss, husband, and mother and spent nine hours on the road to San Antonio while the storm turned east, missing Houston completely. (“I’m not doing that again,” my then fourteen-year-old told me definitively.) So on Thursday, September 11, I tried not to be anxious as I awoke to the familiar sound of hammers, drills, and table saws, as neighbors boarded up their windows before they left town. As befits my eccentric neighborhood, one Heights resident used Christmas yard decorations to cover the windows—candy canes and gingerbread men—while another used custom-fitted sailing cloth. The atmosphere remained relatively festive until Mayor Bill White and county judge Ed Emmett held a somber press conference to urge those who lived in particular zip codes to leave. The rest of us were supposed to stay put. With our family’s stay thus justified—my husband, a newspaperman, had no choice—I suddenly realized there was nothing in our cupboards except for the cans of Sylvia’s yams and lima beans I’d bought during Rita. I raced to my neighborhood Target, where they were sold out of the edible canned goods, along with the crank-up radios that had been piled high weeks ago; ditto most of the flashlights and batteries (a few tiny LED penlights dangled pathetically on hooks). Trips to four other stores—I’ll bet RadioShack has a crank-up radio!—and one near fistfight at a gas station left me pooped but prepped, like a Girl Scout who had crammed for her disaster preparedness badge.

I wasn’t nervous until the calls and e-mails started: the links to Eric Berger’s SciGuy blog in the Houston Chronicle, where a debate raged over how destructive the predicted 22-foot storm surge might be; the phone conversation with my CNN-addicted mother, who was already hanging crape about Galveston (“It’s . . . gone”); the “hope you’ll be okay” e-mails from people I barely knew; and the billing, by Anderson Cooper—surging our way—of Ike as “a storm as big as Texas.” Until lunchtime Friday, as Ike closed in on the Texas coast, the sky was clear, and there wasn’t much of a breeze. I could still cling to the notion that the storm might turn in another direction. I spent the afternoon with Sam, passive-aggressively storing patio pots in my husband’s office, collecting feral cats (two out of three), and listening to my son complain. Though he had never gone through a hurricane before, he insisted that it was “not coming here” so “why were we doing all this?” Then we waited, while the clouds built. Hours later we went out for a last dinner of Mexican food. Then, while my husband went back to work for the night, Sam and I went home to wait some more.

By then, the television selection was all Ike, all the time. I had missed previews of Sarah Palin’s interview on ABC News Thursday night because of Ike news, and catching the full interview broadcast on Friday night was even more hopeless. This was a storm in which technology quickly blurred the line between helpful and hysteria-inducing: One TV station’s Web site allowed me to punch in my zip code and learn what wind speed I could expect in my neighborhood, while another suggested I text the station my phone number, and it would text me back if a tornado was approaching my neighborhood.

The rain and wind didn’t start until about eleven o’clock; half an hour later, like a scene out of a disaster movie, one of my neighbor’s daughters banged on our front door, pleading for help. Sam and I dashed two houses down to find her father, Tim, on a ladder, looking poleaxed at his roof: A branch from a sweet gum had crashed through, “just like Michael Jordan sinking a basket,” he said, shaking his head. About four hours later, an oak next door fell through another daughter’s bedroom, leaving the roof and the room open to the elements when it finally started to pour. (She was, thankfully, off at college.) A few blocks away, storm winds lifted up the roof over a neighbor’s kitchen and blew it down the street.

Sam and I slept through that and more in the kitchen with our lanterns, the crank-up radio (RadioShack had come through), and the snoring golden retriever between us. Fear, I soon remembered, felt less like panic and more like numbness. I woke up once to hear a report that Brennan’s restaurant was in flames (fire trucks couldn’t get there because of the storm), another time to see snow on the screen just before the power went out—by then millions of people in Houston and Galveston were in the same boat—and, finally, at about six, to see Sam texting a friend who complained that, OMG, she had lost power while she was flat-ironing her hair. We went back to sleep for a few more hours and then woke for good around eleven, to our world transformed.

The first thing I heard was my neighbor Steve’s generator rumbling at full blast, supplying him with electricity. It wasn’t just me who was covetous; my neighbor Allen suggested his wife and I don short skirts and knock on Steve’s door, then lure him outside so Allen could overpower him and take control of his property. (Lord of the Flies came early to our neighborhood.) The streets were carpeted with leaves and broken tree limbs—Sam and I could not get out the back door because so many had fallen on the porch. The most-industrious neighbors were already out clearing the storm sewers to stop flooding. A light drizzle was still falling, and the air was eerily, unseasonably cool.

We would soon learn that in some areas outside Houston, the destruction had been absolute. Galveston was fighting for its life, and the low-lying communities of Kemah, Seabrook, Bacliff, San Leon, and La Porte were decimated by flooding. But at that point, ignorant of these other, far harsher realities, the damage to Houston seemed tremendous. Like just about everyone else in the neighborhood, Sam and I went out to have a look. White Oak Bayou near our house looked menacingly bloated, and the fallen trees had worked like aerial buzz saws: Porches were severed from houses, roofs had caved in, power lines dangled only a few feet above the street. Good neighbor Steve suggested Sam and I walk west, not east, because a tree had fallen on a gas meter in the latter direction and the poison was now leaking steadily into the air. “We could blow at any moment,” he said.

Pages: 1 2  next »