Hurricane Ike leaves people with lost or damaged homes, little help

by Leslie Scanlon
Outlook national reporter

Used with the permission by Presbyterian Outlook, Vol. 191, No. 13, April 13, 2009

Hurricane Ike was the third most destructive hurricane to make landfall in the United States. Photo by Jocelyn Augustino, FEMA.

Imagine having your home blasted by a wall of water — leaving behind muck, filth, damage, destruction. Imagine trying to figure out how to live if your home were uninhabitable.

Imagine what it would feel like if the world didn't seem to notice or care.

That, in a snapshot, is a little of what the last six months have been like for many of those in the coastal areas of Texas and Louisiana who were smacked by Hurricane Ike on Sept. 13, 2008.

In response to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, Presbyterians gave more than $24 million to Presbyterian Disaster Assistance, said Judy Fletcher, executive of Synod of the Sun. But so far, less than $1 million has come in for Hurri­cane Ike relief.

"We were bumped off the front page before we ever got on the front page — by the economic storm," Fletcher said. When Katrina hit New Orleans, "we watched that for days on end, with all the trauma there. But we didn't get that with Ike."

Cliff Cunningham, a 65-year-old volunteer from Clear Lake Church in Houston, is helping to lead the Ike re­covery effort for the Presbytery of New Covenant.

"We're calling Ike ... the forgotten storm" for Galveston and the Bolivar Peninsula, Cunningham said. "The contributions that came in during Kat­rina and Rita just aren't coming. The volunteers that massed into New Or-leans just aren't here. ... The presiden­tial election and then the economy tanking just kind of took over the head-lines. ... There's a very definite need for getting the word out."

The Bolivar Peninsula, on the east side of Galveston Bay, was "absolutely devastated — whole subdivisions wiped out," Cunningham said. "Even homes that were built to withstand storms were literally washed away."
Some areas from the Bolivar Penin­sula east into Louisiana, which had made significant progress in rebuilding after Rita, were hit again by Ike.
In one town near Port Neches, about 10 miles southeast of Beaumont, 95 percent of the homes are uninhabitable, Fletcher said. "They were hit with a 17-foot surge of water. It was like a small tsunami."

David Green is pastor of First Church in Galveston, a congregation still unable, six months after the storm, to worship in its own sanctuary. Several feet of storm water swept through the building.

Volunteers are urgently needed to help with rebuilding efforts in Texas. Photo by Jeff Milway.

Since Ike hit, some people are living in trailers and some have moved to the mainland — some as far from home as Houston, 65 miles away, Green said. Some sleep in tents pitched in their front yards. And "some folks just choose to be in their homes even when the government says you can't live there," Green said. "We returned to our home Dec. 5 because we wanted our kids to have Christmas at home," even though the government classified it as uninhabitable because there were no exterior doors.

They've made do, Green said, even though "the wind blows through card-board very quickly."

In the midst of the suffering, though, are also flashes of grace.
After the storm, St. Andrews Church in Houston formed a partnership with Emmanuel Church, a small mostly-Hispanic congregation in Galveston — providing money for reconstruction and also expertise in construction and engineering.

Some money for Ike relief has been given directly to New Covenant and to the Presbytery of South Louisiana.

Ike also hit not long after the synod sent presbytery leaders to a disaster preparedness workshop offered by Presbyterian Disaster Assistance. "We learned some really valuable lessons af­ter Katrina and Rita and put those les­sons to use," said Mike Cole, general presbyter of New Covenant Presbytery. "Our presbytery had literally just a matter of weeks before Ike hit to put into place a full scheme for telephone contacts" in an emergency. So "when the storm hit, we knew what to do and how to do it."

And volunteer crews are starting to come to two new "volunteer villages" in Texas, in Port Neches, and at Texas City in Galveston County.
In Galveston County, the recovery effort, under the direction of Galveston County Restoration and Rebuild, known as GCR, has involved probably 25 to 30 groups, including Christians, Jews, Muslims, Cunningham said. A retired project manager for a petrochem­ical company, he got involved when a friend from his Bible study at church, who'd been involved with disaster relief for the presbytery, walked up to him not long after the storm and asked: "What are you doing for the next year?"

What Cunningham is doing is help­ing to coordinate — in part, by linking up volunteers with the case-manage­ment system that identifies families needing help.

By mid-March, "we thought we were almost through with mucking out, go­ing in and cleaning the mud out, re-moving insulation, and sheet rock and flooring," Cunningham said. But an ad­vertising campaign, offering assistance, brought in several hundred new cases. "All of a sudden, they saw this on the news, and came running," he said. "There are people literally staying in their cars right now."

Cunningham says that when he talks to people affected by the storm, "they try to be real upbeat" at first. But if you stick around for a while, "the despair starts to show."

Some of the volunteers who have shown up for the Ike recovery work also came after Rita and Katrina. For some, "this is their third rodeo," Cun­ningham said. "They've seen the out-pouring of volunteers and money" pre­viously. "And they're not seeing it this time."