Hurricane Ike, Two Months Later

On Friday night, September 12, 2008, Hurricane Ike roared through the Galveston/Houston area. It left devastation in its wake and tens of thousands of people without homes, power, or basic living requirements like water, food, and power. Cleanup has been going on for two months, and things are looking better, but in many areas, there are still signs that remind us of the ferocity of this deadly storm. I saw this firsthand last weekend when my wife and I took a day trip to Galveston.

In many neighborhoods, trash is piled up in front of homes five and six feet high, and goes on for blocks. Large trees are snapped in half like twigs, and some are uprooted completely, smashed through roofs that have yet to be covered, let alone repaired. Plants that are usually green all year long are brown and dying from all the salt water that flooded the area. Homes are missing walls, rooms, roofs, garages. Many beachfront homes are built on cement "stilts" that allow for some flooding without damaging the home. One that we saw had nothing left but the cement stilts; the home itself was several hundred yards away, knocked completely off its foundation. Boats sit overturned in yards, along streets, even in the median of highways. And they're not all little rowboats, either: One shrimp boat that was a good 150 feet long had been picked up from its moorings and hurled through a warehouse, still sitting there in the parking lot with its bow through the side of the building. A makeshift landfill was being run just a few hundred yards off the Seawall, with mountains of trash being crushed and loaded into cargo containers for transport.

Still, with everything that has happened, you can see improvements. Plywood is covering broken windows; carpenters and painters are working all over town to rebuild, repaint, and restore homes and businesses; and most encouraging of all, plants are beginning to show new growth, even in November (for those of you up north, remember, this IS the South!).

If you want to see two short videos that I shot while we were there, I've posted them on YouTube. You can click here and here to see them both. In the meantime, continue to pray for all who were affected by Hurricane Ike. And by the way, applaud them for their determination in rebuilding their communities by helping each other and not waiting for the government to do it for them. That's definitely the Texas spirit!