Oak Island: stories from a wasteland

By Dave Rogers
Published September 29, 2008

OAK ISLAND – Diane Vice was back home, standing outside the church she grew up in.

Not that anything else about Oak Island looked like the town she remembered. Hurricane Ike took care of that a couple of weeks ago.

But one thing Vice knows all too well is the damage a hurricane can bring. The owner of Vice Construction in Moss Point, Miss., has spent the past three years rebuilding from Hurricane Katrina.

“I was raised here from kindergarten through sixth grade,” she said as she looked down Oak Island’s Oyster Street. “My father was a shrimper and we lived in a little house down the road. It burned and we moved to Mississippi.

“But you never forget where you came from.”

Vice returned to Oak Island over the weekend with six of her employees and an 18-wheeler crammed full of food, baby diapers and formula, second-hand clothes, chain saws and generators all donated by businesses in Jackson County, Miss.

The much-needed supplies were for the 500 or so Oak Island residents, all of whom lost everything the night of Sept. 12-13.

“We went through Katrina and it (Moss Point) looked worse than this. We have lots of employees who lost homes in that,” Vice said. “We’re survivors of a hurricane, so we know what it’s like.

Around our House

Ike Photos

I'm posting Ike photos at my Picasa Page. Here are few, though, of the marina near our house.

My Mobile Blog

We got power!

We got power! Only took two weeks and a day. After cleaning up the in-law's yard with chain saws and lawn tractors, we rushed home and flipped the breakers. Everything came up okay.

I had a nephew who lost his house - his family is all okay - so, all things considered, we are doing well. We are all okay, and we have a more or less intact house. Our house came out okay for the most part. The roof was pretty much stripped bare - thankfully it hasn't rained since the day after the storm - and the air conditioner is working, though it sounds like an old DC3. The downstairs carpet is a mess, with some water damage from the rain, and leaves everywhere from being tracked in. Still a lot of clean up to do.

Thankfully, the weather has cooperated, and it didn't get as hot as it does after most storms. Hot, but not awful, not for the Gulf Coast, anyway. It'll be nice going out to the patio because you want to and have too.

Hurricanes are truly awful, but I guess that's the price you have to pay for living next to the water - and we have to live by the water, too far inland is just wrong :)

So, again, all things considered, we came out okay.

Galveston after Ike

Two weeks after Ike, more than 400 are still missing

By LISE OLSEN
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle
Sept. 28, 2008, 1:40AM

Gail Ettenger made her last phone call at 10:10 p.m. She was trapped in her Bolivar Peninsula bungalow with her Great Dane, Reba. A drowning cat cried outside. Her Jeep bobbed in the seawater surging around her home.
Ettenger, 58, told her friend she was reading old love letters by flashlight. "I think I really screwed up this time," she said, according to Monroe Burks, Ettenger's neighbor who had evacuated to Houston.
That was Friday, Sept 12. On Wednesday — 12 days later — her nearly nude body was found face down by a huge debris pile in a remote mosquito-ridden marsh in Chambers County, about 10 miles inland from where her gray beach house once stood.
Two weeks after Hurricane Ike swept through the Texas coast, 400 people remain missing, mostly from Galveston County, according to an analysis of calls logged to a hot line set up by the nonprofit Laura Recovery Center to assist local authorities.
Until Wednesday, Ettenger was one of them.
About 60 of the missing lived on the Bolivar Peninsula, stripped bare by the storm surge that felled beach houses like a bomb. More than 200 were listed as missing on Galveston Island itself, according to a city-by-city analysis of the data conducted for the Houston Chronicle by Bob Walcutt, executive director of the recovery center in Friendswood.
Hot line and rescue workers hope that many people, especially on Galveston Island, will be reunited with family and friends as hurricane recovery efforts continue. More than 145 already have been located through blogs, media Web sites, Red Cross shelter lists, endless phone calls, welfare checks and sometimes dramatic rescues led by the Galveston County Sheriff's Office and other agencies.
Yet disturbing tales told by survivors from Bolivar communities like Gilchrist, Crystal Beach and Port Bolivar suggest some may never return.
"There's still lots of people who are not accounted for," said Capt. Rod Ousley, of the State Parks & Wildlife Service, which is helping to search for survivors or bodies in remote corners of several coastal counties. "We don't know if they got washed out to sea, or buried in the sand or in debris piles. We just keep looking until they come up ... we're just going to keep trying."
Too late for rescue
Still missing is the grandmother of 16-year-old Jerrith Baird. Baird told the Chronicle that Jennifer Mclemore, 58, refused to abandon her beach house in the village of Gilchrist, despite his pleas that she retreat to High Island, where he lives. Mclemore believed her home, battered and rebuilt after Hurricane Rita, could survive a Category 2 storm.
When the first waves of seawater started to flood Gilchrist early on Sept. 12, Baird called the Coast Guard, begging for her rescue. "They said they were doing the best they could," he said. "But by the time they got around to it, the wind was too high. They couldn't fly."
Flights were suspended after about 100 people were rescued from the peninsula, leaving at least 150 still stranded, according to a Sept. 13 Coast Guard press release.
Mclemore holed up at home with her pit bull Hoodoo. At 8 p.m., her cell phone went dead, her worried grandson on the other end.
The next morning, Baird set out to find her the only way he could: he kayaked with a friend about eight miles through the marshes and debris along the ravaged coastline.
"There's really nothing left of Gilchrist. We were kayaking over our friends' cars that were out there that got washed away. It wasn't fun. I was just in total shock," he said.
Hours later, Baird reached the spot where his grandmother's house had stood. Nothing remained except a few snapped pilings, he said.
The search for survivors is an arduous one, stymied by the size and scope of the storm, which propelled wrecked boats as far south as Padre Island.
A handful of volunteer fire department members have led the search on the peninsula itself. Meanwhile, dozens of sheriff's deputies, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and Texas State Parks & Wildlife Department wardens are patrolling vast marshlands and other remote areas, including roadless sections of Chambers County where storm debris fields stretch for miles.
Airboats, four-wheelers, search dogs and helicopters are being used to scour areas where the water and wind blew cars, homes and animals, creating seemingly insurmountable piles of wreckage and waste.
"Some of these debris piles are real, real tall and real real wild areas with nothing but boards and nails and snakes and alligators and mosquitoes," Ousley said. "This is some of the hardest recovery efforts we've ever faced with the storm surge and what all it moved and the debris that moved with it."
Washed off road?
Searchers confirm they've also spotted countless cars in the floodwaters and marshes. It's impossible to tell which were once occupied, though so far no bodies have been reported recovered from vehicles sticking out above water. Submerged vehicles are not being searched.
Raul "Roy" Arrambide last heard from his mother, sister and nephew as the three prepared to evacuate by car from Port Bolivar.
Just after 6 a.m. Sept. 12, his sister, Magdalena Strickland, 51, called from the house to say they were leaving. The family's 2000 white Ford Taurus and 1993 maroon Ford pickup were loaded and idling in the driveway. It was a quick call, since Strickland was eager to go.
His mother, Marion Violet Arrambide, 79, along with Strickland and Arrambide's nephew, Shane Williams, 33, had planned to evacuate to Arrambide's house near Dallas. They had two vehicles but no cell phone. They never arrived.
Roy Arrambide fears they were washed off the road.
After the storm, he hired an airboat to visit the area, where he saw dozens of submerged cars in the floodwaters and marshes along the peninsula's lone low-lying highway. But neither he nor anyone else has found his relatives or their vehicles. The house they left behind was damaged but intact.
Eight people, mostly from the Crystal Beach Volunteer Fire Department, have formed the core of continuing search efforts on the peninsula, though the members of Texas Task Force 2 came to conduct rescues, house-to-house reviews and provide other assistance.
"We have not gotten enough help, we're worn out," said Shawn Hall, a member of the High Island Volunteer Fire Department who said he joined the VFD search team for 12 days straight. "We have not had the resources to do the proper searches that need to done." He said they have relied on airboats provided by out-of-state volunteers.
So far, Galveston County Sheriff's Office officials, busy with searches themselves, have not allowed volunteers from Texas' EquuSearch, a nonprofit that specializes in searches, to respond to requests from families of 18 missing people on the peninsula, according to Tim Miller, its executive director.
Also unaccounted for are several transient beach residents who lived in travel trailers on the waterfront in places like Rollover Pass and San Leon.
'She needed to count'
Relatives and friends of the missing said they will keep pushing authorities to expand searches and to establish reliable and complete lists of missing persons.
"I didn't want the same thing in Galveston as in New Orleans, where they had all these unclaimed people after Hurricane Katrina," said JoAnnBurks, who was Gail Ettenger's neighbor and close friend. "I didn't want that for Gail. She needed to count."
Ettenger, a contract chemist who worked for ExxonMobil in Beaumont, loved living at the beach. She rose before dawn each day to walk with Reba, an aging black and white spotted Great Dane who looked like a Holstein calf.
Outside, Ettenger grew towering birds of paradise. Inside, she filled her bungalow with mementos: a wolfskin from New Mexico, a collection of nautical antiques and endless snapshots of Reba and beach sunsets.
All is lost now. Even Reba.

Multimedia message

This is what your pool looks like two weeks after a hurricane with no power.

Multimedia message

Susie has an MRE.

jcgreen@yahoo.com sent you a link to the following content:

jcgreen@yahoo.com sent you a link to the following content:

It ain't over til the fat lady gets power
http://houstonist.com/2008/09/22/it_aint_over_til_the_fat_lady_gets_1.php

Question raised by Ike: How do I get my catamaran out of that tree?

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Back of Lindsay's Apartments

Back of Lindsay's apartment after Ike. Her unit is okay, though.

A few days after a big hurricane - a week with no power now - you notice that everyone looks like shit. Like the downstairs carpet. A week with no power has a great democratizing effect on people.

Gilchrist, Texas after Hurricane Ike.

Gilchrist, Texas after Hurricane Ike.

Crystal Beach man rode out Ike on log

It's a story of survival that's hard to believe. A man rode out Hurricane Ike floating on debris and anything else he could grab.

He spoke exclusively to Eyewitness News about how he survived after his home was submerged in flood waters on Crystal Beach.

The scrapes and cuts don't even begin to tell the story of Mark Davidson.

"I went and got my dog dags and put them on in case I would die that night because it was getting that bad," said Davidson.

Davidson decided to ride the storm out in his home in Crystal Beach on Avenue D. It was a mistake the retired Coast Guard Chief Petty Officer would soon regret.

"And about that time I felt the back of the house, come up just like the stern of the ship and came down on the pilings pretty hard," said Davidson.

Around 1am Saturday morning, his house started taking in water and slowing drifting. By 2am, Davidson decided to get out. The former U.S. Navy diver would be tested to the limit.

"I swam out and as soon as I surfaced, I was level with the roof," he said. "The water was level with the roof."

For the next 14 hours, Davidson would do whatever it took to survive.

"When I was on the telephone pole, then I started looking around and see what was going on that's when I saw houses floating just like bumper boats, just crushing and ripping in half."

The telephone pole he was clinging to soon went under and Davidson knew he had to swim away from all the debris on Crystal Beach.

"Because that was going to crush and kill me," he said.

He began his journey through town using pieces of plywood to maneuver his way around. But it was a patio table he used as a boogie board that he says saved his life.

"I would not let that thing go for nothing," said Davidson.

For the next several hours, Davidson was drifting toward East Bay.

"It was like being dumped under water and then come up for a breath dumped under water, dumped under water and it was like that the entire evening," said Davidson.

But he endured the storm even after an encounter with an alligator and in the end found safety when he finally came ashore at Smith Point. Where the National Guard help rescue him.

"The one thing I was thinking is that I wanted to see my wife, my dog, my brothers and I have a lot of things to finish in this life," said Davidson. "I am not done yet."

Davidson says he is done living on the coast.

Keep your family safe this hurricane season. Check our complete tropical weather preparation guide

All material © 2008 ABC Inc., KTRK-TV Inc. & 2004-2008 LSN, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Story posted 2008.09.20 at 09:10 PM CDT

Houston residents get what they need to stay or go

 

 

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Houston residents get what they need to stay or go

via chron.com Chronicle on 9/11/08

Residents across the Houston region scurried and scrounged Thursday stocking up on essentials from gasoline and batteries to water and peanut butter, everything needed to endure Hurricane Ike's arrival — or flee its path.

 

 

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Call Mid-Week for a More Believable "Sick Day" [Work]

 

 

Sent to you by James via Google Reader:

 

 

Call Mid-Week for a More Believable "Sick Day" [Work]

via Lifehacker by Kevin Purdy on 9/8/08

The Asylum blog compiles some solid advice on how to call in sick, even if you don't meet the traditional definition of "sick"—take that how you will. One of the best bits of advice involves the timing of your sick day, as noted by the editor of the Save the Assistants blog:

Pick a random Tuesday or Wednesday for your fake illness. At a lot of companies, there are mysterious sick waves on the day after a long weekend or on a really beautiful day in the summer. You can get away with that once in a while, but if you only come down with the flu on really beautiful Friday afternoons in the summer, everyone will be on to you. Taking off a day in the middle of the week will also make it less likely that you have 400 emails to sort through all at once when you come back from your elongated holiday.

Valid point, and the others are worth keeping in mind also. For more call-in tips, check out Keith's post on hacking your actual call. Photo by Perfecto Insecto.

How to Take a Sick Day When You're Not Sick [via Geeks Are Sexy]

 

 

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