Hurricane Ike Affected You, Whether You Know It Or Not

My area of Texas was relatively unscathed by Hurricane Ike. Oh, sure, there was a little bit of wind, and some much needed rain. Bus loads of evacuees took shelter in the larger cities, although I never saw them. After the evacuees went home reports about the hurricane faded from the news, overshadowed by the political and economic turmoil.

Like most of you, I get up every morning and have a cup of coffee before I set about the business of “normal” work every day. In the evenings, I cook a hot meal and then relax in front of the television or the computer before I take a nice long shower and snuggle into bed. I don’t think much about that hurricane. Although I had some work postponed until spring because of it, it didn’t affect me much.

Or, did it?

Last week, I called a friend of mine who lives on a farm near Beaumont, Texas (the farm is 10 miles inland from the coast). If you aren’t familiar with the geography of the area, Beaumont is a small city on the Texas coastline east of Houston. It’s nestled right up next to Louisiana. People there were still trying to recover from the ravages of Hurricane Rita, but they weren’t directly hit by Hurricane Ike.

I figured my friend’s life must be getting back to normal now that they have electrical power again. I was SO wrong!

When she answered the phone, she told me she was relaxing after her first bath since the Hurricane. She said, “Yeah, I was stinky, but everybody is.” For the next hour, she regaled me of the harrowing tales of the aftermath of the storm.

It wasn’t the hurricane itself that did the most damage — it was the surge of water that followed it. They had evacuated their farmhouse, but came back after the storm passed to try to save the animals from the rising water.

Driving the highway toward their home, they rounded a bend to see water white-capping over the highway (10 miles inland from the shore). They had to abandon the car and swim to their house, in water surrounded by floating animal carcasses, snakes, and alligators.

Her family had prepared for the storm as best they could. They had purchased a generator and a new grill so that they could cope with the lack of electricity that they knew they would experience. Rather than leave those on the back deck to be damaged by the wind, they put the new purchases in the garage. The deck was undamaged, but the garage was flooded. Their generator and grill floated away.

Yes, most of their stuff was ruined, but that wasn’t the worst of the story. She said that whole towns in the area were washed away. She told me of her 76 year old Daddy trying to save his cattle. He was one of a handful of cattle ranchers in the area, and he worked his cattle on land that had been in his family for several generations. He had somewhere around 1500 head of cattle before the storm. After the storm passed, any that were left alive were stranded on high ground surrounded by water that was as deep as 15 feet in some places.

Those ranchers all banded together to try to save any living animal they could. On horseback, they rode through water that was chest deep for the horses to get to the cattle and drive them to high ground. Once they had the cattle rounded up, the folks tended the sick and wounded ones and nourished them all with water and hay that the Cattleman’s Association trucked in for them.

Saving those cattle was risky business. As the riders plunged through the water, they were surrounded by floating dead animals, alligators, and other unseen dangers. Trees were under water, so they had no landmarks to keep from getting lost or stranded. From before dawn, until after dusk, these people worked round the clock to save the cattle.

In the end, her Daddy will have a fraction of the herd that he had. All the calves are gone, so it will be another breeding season before he can begin to rebuild his herd. But that isn’t the worst of it.

There is no land to graze the cattle! The land along the coast, that once supported grass for the cattle and rice and such, has been flooded with salt water. It will be two years before the land recovers enough to be able to sustain a crop! You can’t breed cattle that you can’t feed.

My friend told me that they have moved back into their house. The yard smells like “the beach on a bad day,” but when you leave the yard, the air is filled with the stench of death and decay. Everything is a shambles. “Normal” is not a word that will describe their lives for a very long time.

As my friend told me these tales, and many others, I told her, “We don’t hear about this in the news!”

She said, “Of course not. We are a rural area, and we aren’t whining to the government for help. We are helping ourselves. We are working together to salvage and rebuild our lives.”

My friend also told me, “Shelly, no one now living remembers a storm that did as much damage as this one.”

The other day I heard someone have the audacity to say, “Well, it’s sad that they lost everything, but they do live in the path of hurricanes. They shouldn’t live there.”

Think again.

The people living on the Texas Gulf coast are not affluent folks with beach homes. They are working class people who provide services from which the rest of the nation benefits. If you use fossil fuel to power your car or your home; if you eat beef or rice; if you eat anything that isn’t grown in your local area and has to be trucked to your market in a vehicle powered by fossil fuel; then someone has to live in that area. There has to be a community to offer support services. That means that someone has to live in the path of hurricanes.

Folks down there are helping each other, but we can aid them, too. If you have a few dollars to spare, you can make a donation to the Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund.

It will be years before the folks along the Gulf coast recover. Until they do, our economy is going to struggle. Hurricane Ike may no longer be in the news, but everyone in the nation will be feeling its effects for a long time.

Related posts:

1. In Harmony
2. Suspended In Time
3. Bluebonnets and April Fools
4. “Shelly, God Wants You To Fry”
5. Throwing In The Towel