A Charred Life 
Letter From Galveston
No Man’s Island
A year after Ike, my hometown is still reeling from a storm without an end.
satishece says: Those factors existed before Ike, and they will continue. www.freshdls.com (August 9th, 2010 at 9:37am)
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One of the first friends I visited was Vandy Anderson, whom I have known since we were in junior high school. He had been a co-owner of and newsman for the local radio station, KGBC (“Keep Galveston’s Beaches Clean”). For decades, whenever a storm had approached the Island, he had stayed on the air around the clock. He and his wife, Sue, live in a condo development behind the seawall in the western part of the city. “Don’t go to the front door,” he had warned me. Driving into the paved alley, as I had been instructed to do, I found them sitting in the entrance of their garage, their view limited to nearby units in the development, sipping soda and enjoying the breeze from a sturdy floor fan. Vandy said that the development was virtually empty; only a few residents were back. “It never occurred to us that we could be flooded,” he told me. “There has never been water here.” But the surge that came in from the bay rolled across the Andersons’ part of the Island, smashing through homes until it petered out. I had seen several homes on the edge of Offats Bayou that were a total loss. We talked for a long time, and finally I asked if I could use the bathroom. Vandy directed me to a chemical toilet that I had assumed was for workmen.
My next call was on Tom Curtis. We had grown up on the same block—his older brother had been my high school debate partner—and we had been colleagues for a time at Texas Monthly. Like Vandy, Tom has always been a student of Galveston. He brought out his laptop and played a video that he had made about nine months after the storm. Frame after frame flashed across the screen, accompanied by Iris Dement’s haunting song “Our Town,” which seemed like Galveston’s anthem. “And just like they say, nothing good ever lasts . . .” An image showed the damage to houses located in what is known as Fish Village, because all the streets are named after denizens of the deep. “Go on now and say goodbye to our town . . .”
I don’t want to leave the impression that Galveston, having been inundated by Ike, is now inundated by a surge of pessimism. That is not its nature. Though the city had not experienced a major hurricane since Carla, in 1961, its civic consciousness includes a gritty resilience in the face of calamity. Part of the ritual of growing up here is learning that the residents of Indianola, a nineteenth-century rival port in Calhoun County, gave up after their town was destroyed by a storm, but Galveston, upon suffering the same fate, did not. To this day, the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States is the 1900 Galveston hurricane, with a death toll estimated to be eight thousand. Many citizens thought the city should relocate to the Mainland, but the head of the Moody family said, as the story goes, “If everyone leaves, the hunting and fishing will be better for the rest of us.” And so the city rebuilt to face the elements.
Now it must do so again. Today danger comes not only from the sea but from Austin, where the University of Texas regents control the fate of the UT Medical Branch, the Island’s biggest employer. Ike’s floodwaters rendered John Sealy Hospital unusable, and the regents shut it down, laying off 2,500 workers and closing the psychiatric and children’s hospitals. Left unaddressed was a consultant’s recommendation to move the hospital and clinical operations to League City, which would have been a death sentence for Galveston. The crisis seems to have passed, as state and federal funding to rebuild John Sealy and the medical complex is now available. But I saw no discernible activity there on my trip—not one car, not one patient—and there is considerable skepticism among civic and political leaders on the Island about whether UT System administrators will honor their commitments.
After a day and a half, I had seen most of the city. It doesn’t take long; the Island is about a mile and a half in breadth and 27 miles in length, and no one ventures “down the Island” for the last twenty or so of those miles except for vacationers, weekenders, and golfers. I had driven out there immediately after the storm and had seen how homes built after the adoption of stringent building codes in the nineties had survived Ike far better than older construction. And I did not feel a need to return.
I was, however, interested in the fate of the poorer neighborhoods wedged between the railroad yards and Broadway, on the bay side of the Island, which I vaguely remembered as a place of frame houses and aging housing projects. It was the first part of the city to be hammered by the reverse storm surge, and it reminded me of New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward after Katrina: uninhabitable. The housing projects were gone, bulldozed to the ground. None of the remaining homes looked right. The force of the water had knocked them a little askew. It was awful. The city has plans to build new projects, but what people say (not for attribution) is that they hope the former residents do not come back. Crime, you know. In their absence, the much-maligned school system posted its best ratings ever.
This is life in Galveston a year after Ike, but the bigger question is, What will Galveston be like in two years, or five, or ten? The entire populace is on edge over the prospect that this hurricane season could bring another large storm. I must have heard the phrase “if we can just get through the summer . . . ” from a dozen people. But, of course, there will be another hurricane season next year. One of the proposals for securing the Island’s safety is an “Ike dike,” the brainchild of a Texas A&M University professor named Bill Merrell, which would protect the Galveston Bay region against the worst-case scenario of a category 4 or 5 storm that came right up the Houston Ship Channel. The giant engineering project would try to hold back the storm surge from entering the bay, where it could wreak havoc on the refineries and petrochemical plants in the bay’s upper reaches. The Galveston Seawall could be extended westward for the length of the Island to San Luis Pass, which separates Galveston County from Brazoria County, and eastward along the lightly populated Bolivar Peninsula to High Island. The crucial feature would be gates that would remain open in good weather but shut whenever a storm approached.
The biggest issue Galveston faces, other than its exposure to hurricanes, is getting people to live on the Island, where the land area is limited and danger lurks on all sides. The economy is surprisingly diverse: thousands of jobs at the Medical Branch, another thousand or so in the offshore oil-field service facilities on Pelican Island, ongoing construction of beach condos from one end of the Island to the other, and lower-paying but still numerous positions in the hotels. The problem is that about half the people who work in Galveston live and pay taxes on the Mainland. Plans for an interurban rail-line link to Houston are into the design and planning stage. The hope is that people who work there will want to commute from Galveston.
These are dreams. But in a way, dreams have always been what Galveston is all about. That is why people decide to stay here, surrounded not only by water but also by the city’s own tragic history. Galveston breeds a loyalty that one is reluctant to breach. And so life goes on, and we dream that the next hurricane will never come.
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