A Visit to Ike's Total Devastation

CRWRC Newsroom  | October 13, 2008

Having the day off from responding to the emergency needs of people whose homes were devastated in Bridge City, Texas, during last month’s Hurricane Ike, a few CRWRC Disaster Response Services (DRS) workers took a tour on Sunday of the Bolivar Peninsula, where homes were swept away and several people killed in last month’s hurricane.

Jutting out into the Gulf of Mexico on the road to Galveston, the strip of land that narrows to a quarter-mile in some places had been home to scores of houses built on stilts with sweeping views of the Gulf. It is on this peninsula where 23 people remain unaccounted for and most are presumed dead.

According to Sunday’s Houston Post, “the task of recovering remains has been slow, if not altogether absent in some remote areas. Only six bodies have been discovered in storm debris so far, washed up in remote Chambers County marshlands or hidden in the mucky terrain of Goat Island.”

An area that until recently was home to hundreds of permanent residents and a vacation getaway for others is now a stark, water-ravaged, wilderness. On Sunday, people walked along the beach or poked through what is left of their possessions in one of the decimated subdivisions.

Members of the CRWRC-DRS team stopped in places to stare at the cars and trucks buried in sand, some hundreds of yards from the highway. They snapped a few photos and shook their heads at what they saw.

“What strikes me is the total devastation,” said Bert Steensma, of Byron Center. Mich. “This place has been totally wiped out. It makes me think how I would react if everything I had was lost.”

The DRS workers stopped for a few minutes to talk with a man who said he lost several rental properties in the hurricane. One of his homes had easily withstood other hurricanes, but not this time.

Leaning on the hood of his red pick up truck, the man said that it was the fierce swirling of waters from the Gulf that tore the pilings loose from the homes and sent the debris flowing across fields and into Galveston Bay. He said he had no idea, given the level of destruction, how much rebuilding will be done.

“All that are left are slabs or partial slabs. In some places where the houses were near the ocean, there is only ocean,” said Hill Van Denend, a retired science teacher from Zeeland, Mich., and a longtime veteran of doing work for CRWRC, the disaster relief and development agency of the CRCNA.

The only homes that were left standing had been braced by concrete pilings. “So much of everything is gone. I think of the people who had been living here,” said Van Denend.

Police say that the search goes on, especially in the farther reaches of the bayous, many of which have been filled in with foul-smelling sand, silt and shells from the sea.

According to the Houston Chronicle, bodies that have been taken to the morgue remain unidentified. “They lie silently, waiting for forensic evidence — X-rays, scars, tattoos, DNA — to give each a name."

“State game wardens, volunteers with trained cadaver dogs and others have worked for weeks to search remote debris sites and flag areas that possibly hold human remains. But four weeks after the storm, no one has been able to excavate so-called ‘hot spots’ identified by dogs,” says the Chronicle.

Police are limiting access to the peninsula, in part because waves still roll and tumble close to the road, which is itself cracked and washed out in places. Much of the activity on Sunday on the peninsula consisted of emergency energy crews replacing poles and stringing wires for power.

Asked if he thought CRWRC would be asked to help in the clean-up and reconstruction of the area they drove through, Hill Van Denend said, “Probably not. For one thing, there isn’t much to work with. Plus, many of the people who lived here probably had insurance. You won’t find our clients living by the ocean like this.”

For Van Denend and others, the sobering trip was soon over. They returned to their headquarters at Lutheran Church in Port Arthur, Texas, to get ready for another week of helping those with little means try to put their homes, as well as their lives, back together.

Donations towards the DRS response to
Hurricane Ike should be designated: 
Hurricanes 2008 US

 

- Chris Meehan, CRC Communications