Two weeks after Ike hit Texas, we are still only beginning to see the scope of the disaster. Some people are only now getting their first look at their old homes, the family and friends of the missing are asking questions about their loved ones, and FEMA appears to be returning to its awe-inspiring, post-Katrina level of incompetence.
Today is the first day former residents of the Bolivar Peninsula are being allowed to come in for look-and-leave visits. (Just clearing the roads and conducting basic searches kept things closed until now.) I say "former residents" because there are almost no residences there — not any more.
Cars are still buried in the sand. Only one lane is passable on the Rollover Pass Bridge.
But most noticeably, almost every house in sight has been picked up, pulverized or carried away.
Meanwhile, the search for the missing is becoming clearer. The hotline for the Galveston area has around 400 reports of missing people, and they’ve set up a "have you seen these people?" website, hoping to discover that the missing are simply out of touch. Working from the other direction, the Red Cross has its own "Safe and Well" website for the evacuees to let everyone know they are safe.
But FEMA, despite the progress they’ve made since their catastrophic meltdown post-Katrina, still can’t quite grasp the concept of disaster recovery.
FEMA says since Hurricane Ike, they have received more than 589,000 applications for aid here in Texas. While 250,000 applications are still pending, just under 11,400 have been approved. An overwhelming 154,000, have been denied.
"That’s disturbing," said Kathy Guillory with Congressman Nick Lampson’s office.
Guillory toured The Landings condos in El Lago where 80% of the residents here have been denied FEMA aid. Residents Kristen and Nick Stratos say they were turned down because the inspector considered the property livable, even though the city ruled it non-livable.
Read that again: city inspectors say the property is uninhabitable, yet FEMA expects people to live there. (So much for FEMA working with local authorities.)
FEMA claims that their mission is all about "preparedness, protection, response, recovery, and mitigation" when it comes to disasters. I see nothing there about "creating, sustaining, prolonging, and intensifying" disasters, but then what do I know? I’m just a pastor. Any minute now, I’m sure Bush will clear this up for me: "You folks at FEMA are doing a heckuva job. Really."
If Chertoff or Lieberman need a place to stay for a week or so in the Houston area, to check up on how things are going on the ground, perhaps the Stratos family could let them stay at their place.
I hear it’s quite something.
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oy vay
hey, got a question for McCain? Send it to Snuffy…he’s the Sunday guest on ABC This Week.
Thanks so much for covering this Peterr! My nephew (TX army nat guard) has been in the gulf all but two days since before Gustav. Houston is in better shape than Galveston, but a lot of the coastal towns are a mess.
Bottomline is that they need the money to rescue the financial markets; wonder if this situation gets brought up in tonight’s ‘debate’. Which is excluding people who would comment on it.
Just time for a quick comment, but I’ll be back later. I’m in Houston and at my house we just got power back yesterday. This is a really complicated situation, FEMA sucks, the local govts are doing a pretty decent job, but somebody is hiding the death toll.
I used to do contract work for FEMA over 10 years ago. I marvel at how the Bushies took a reasonably functional agency and turned it into a steaming pile of s**t.
I would say “my pleasure,” but it’s no pleasure at all.
Do you hear details from your nephew, or just get the general sense of it being a mess?
FEMA, the DOD, the DOJ, the SEC, the EPA, . . . once upon a time, these all worked reasonably well.
Then Bush came to town.
Digg
the disaster they worked so hard for us NOT to see. It is disgraceful just like KAtrina
This should shake things up in Texas our way.
Not a lot of details. Mostly general. And they’re under orders not to email or text message pix.
The count of the missing just went down by one as another victim was identified, and the search for more victims has a long, long way to go in Chambers County:
This will be a long drawn out process.
Then again they could buy more trailers from their buddies and poison everyone
So incredibly OT you could plotz — Oh dear God, the Gift, she Just Keeps On Giving.
I have a question for McNutJob…. When is Rick Davis going to stop taking money from Fannie and Freddy?
Sorry for going OT but HuffPo reporting:
Ku Klux Klan members are planning on appearing at tonight’s debate, according to the University of Mississippi newspaper.
posted without comment
And just a little while ago, a fire broke out in Crystal Beach, destroying two homes that had managed to survive Ike.
Yo, Peter. It’s 3 years after Katrina, and we’re still fighting with our insurance company over shoring and leveling our house. The city code says one thing, FEMA says another…and, of course, the insurance company takes the side that doesn’t require them to pay for the shoring and leveling.
bride’s side or groom’s side?
But look how fast they run to rescue the missing money. Appalling.
Imagine that.
can we just put FEMA into receivorship and start all over? Shrubco so gutted it that I fear it may be unsavable.
Thanks for this report, Peterr. I just finished the chapter on the tsunami in The Shock Doctrine. I really shudder to think what might be in store for the property owners in the areas wiped clean. Prime oceanfront area like this that has been cleared is the disaster capitalist’s dream. In Sri Lanka, they put forward the idea of a safe “buffer zone” on the beaches, but then exempted luxury hotels. The result was the displacement of the locals who subsisted on fishing from their beach-front huts to inland areas where they had no means of supporting themselves. Then, to add further insult, they allocated most of the funds raised for relief toward building the hotels.
Disallowing such a high percentage of the FEMA claims smacks of an attempt to get these people to just give up and move away so that the land can be seized as “abandoned”.
Makes you wonder if the Texan connections to the White House made a call to them and said, “Now would be the time”, meaning, start a sell off on Wall Street so these same companies don’t have to bailout Galveston and other areas after Ike? Could be. Wouldn’t surprise me in the least. These assholes would be happy if every American had a stuffed moose on the wall fall on our heads.
Yeah, think how nice a shiny new refinery would look right about there.
I think you may be onto something there. Oh boy.
Thanks. I hadn’t had any tea go out my nose today until then. 707.
That chapter has occurred to me more than once, Jim.
But I am stunned at the amount of development that was allowed on the west end of Galveston Island — the part that was completely unprotected by their seawall. If there is any place in the US that ought to understand the dangers of a hurricane, it’s Galveston. They’ve even got a monument on the seawall to the 1900 storm that killed more people than any other North American storm.
And yet they let people build on the west end of the island, outside the protection of the wall. Go figure.
Hey, Lindy.
OT ABC News is trying to sell the line that the bailout is not a bailout. IOW don’t believe your lying eyes. Idiots.
There are terminally stupid people
Now ABC News is saying that almost no one (except apparently nearly everyone in the blogosphere) foresaw the failure of Washington Mutual. Also saying it was the best possible outcome. Yes, if you are JP Morgan.
You see there are some points of stability. ABC will continue to shill for the Republicans and corporations even in the face of economic collapse.
New Swopa
Property owners, builders, city zoning officials, and bankers who lent the money for the projects.
Yep, there’s a lot to go around. And some of the folks paid more than a financial price.
Uhm, wouldn’t that be a bit problematic and costly to industry when the next hurricane strikes there?
“Returning to”? I don’t think they ever left.
My partner just got power back today. There was a police barricade on the road to his condo (just north of Rice University, in the middle of Houston) last night, presumably because they were worried about looters, and he had a note on his bulletin board about a possible break-in attempt in the complex.
I agree with William above that they’re doing their damndest to keep the death-toll down. I’m guessing it’ll be several hundred.
They need to get rid of all the no ones that work there and get some one
Almost nobody except the depositors.
sorta related, from democracy now! this morning:
my links added.
The key to selling a con is keep the mark from thinking things through. In Galveston, developers were selling a dream, a beautiful life by a beautiful sea that could come in and wash them away.
Yes, I’m not opposed in principal to building bans in areas that truly shouldn’t be inhabited. The way to go, of course, is to assist anyone who needs to be relocated because of that and not allow a single person or corporation to profit from the establishment of the buffer zone. Hand in hand with that goes the prevention of development in unprotected areas such as you describe.
assuming you’re referring to Fema and its rethug masters, terminally indifferent may fit as well
And we will probably buying the mortgages.
also group think: everyone else is doing it, so it can’t be all that dangerous.
From the reports I’m seeing, it’s not so much an intentional “let’s keep the death toll down” as it is having to root through debris piles and swamps and sand dunes out in the middle of nowhere, for people that may have been swept away by the storm. Some may have been blow inland, and others swept into the Gulf.
Finding them is going to be a long, slow process, as I said last week.
Peterr !
How many days ’til the Mega Disaster known as the Bush Presidency is over ?
Petro!!
* * *
Too many.
This has been another edition of simple answers to simple questions.
Oh, sure…go all reality-based on me. Moment of levity, there.
Refineries are often located in probable hurricane paths. Seacoast seems to be their chosen habitat.
And things are certainly problematic and costly for the folks who once called this particular place home.
I see you here, looking like spalted maple
aHAHAHAHA
LOL … asked that to some friends of mine living near Houston and their answer was, “Not soon enough !”
Hey, Margot. I’m back in New Orleans.
((((( Lindy )))))
…and I see YOU here, so the oak’s on both of us.
Thanks, Peterr, for the updates on this forgotten story.
It may not seem important in light of the possiblity that so many people may have been killed by Ike, but for those residents of the Bolivar Peninsula who returned home only today; it is already too late to reclaim their rescued animals. All animals held in Beaumont will be adopted out tomorrow. All rescued animals were eligilble to be put up for adoption after ten days.
Too bad Bolivar Peninsula. See how your fellow Texans looked out for you? If you have questions, call the Houston SPCA Animal Disaster Hotline (713) 435-2990
Took me awhile to get back and I don’t know if anybody is still on this thread, but there’s a couple of things to remember. This part of the gulf coast went for a long time without a major hurricane. It was over 20 years between Alicia and Rita. Rita was mostly a non-event in the Houston-Galveston area; the evacuation was far worse than the storm. Unfortunately nobody remembers that until just a few hours before the storm hit, the storm’s path could’ve come in almost exactly where Ike hit.
Also, with Ike only being a Cat 2 storm, many people underestimated the huge storm surge which comes from the size of the storm and it’s angle to the coast. All that adds up to too many people ignoring evacuation orders.