6 Months Ago Today

Today is the 6th month anniversary of Hurricane Ike.

Still haven't seen a dime from insurance.
Still live in a 35' motorhome in our neighbor's driveway.
Still have to do laundry in my neighbor's garage.
Still have the carcass of our home on our lot in it's exact same state.
Still thinking we'll have to file a lawsuit to get any insurance money.
Still think insurance companies are criminal.
Still haven't replaced even a fraction of our personal property lost.
Still don't have heat or ac at work.
Still sharing offices/officing in the hallways at work.


Still have a job.
Still have a wonderful family and great friends.

FEMA trailer park goes in at recreation field

This trailer park is right across the street from one of Jackson's baseball team practice fields. I'll attach some photos to this article this evening when we return from practice. The site used to be the practice field for the island's youth football team. They've even poured asphalt roads and everything!



By Leigh Jones
The Daily News
Published February 22, 2009

GALVESTON — Crews working for the Federal Emergency Management Agency have about three weeks to finish installing 55 mobile homes at the island’s first temporary trailer park.

Despite delays caused by recent rains and the ensuing mud, the park should open on time, agency spokesman Dan Martinez said.

The park, at 83rd Street and Stewart Road, will be home to about 200 people, depending on how many are in each family that moves into a mobile home, he said.

But hundreds more are still looking for somewhere to live.

The agency’s mobile home waiting list includes 180 families, and while officials think that number is likely to go down, some people will still not have a place to stay when the park at Schreiber Field is full, Martinez said.

The rest may be able to move to several smaller, scattered sites. The agency has not picked those sites.

Unless the agency extends the hotel voucher program again, about 1,200 families staying in hotels will have to find somewhere else to stay March 13.

The agency originally planned to install about 150 mobile homes on two island sites, but officials decided last month that only Schreiber Field would be necessary.

The former soccer field belongs to the school district, although it was used mostly as a community league practice site.

The federal government is not paying the district for the land, compensating it instead with the improvements made to the site.

To raise the field to meet federal regulations for mobile home sites, crews trucked in fill and have been working to pack it down to avoid drainage problems. Crews are running compaction tests to measure the stability of the soil, agency Spokesman Bill Lehman said.

Before each trailer can be set in place, the pad site must pass three of the tests, he said. About 20 trailers have been installed, with construction crews now working to build stairs and decking outside the doors.

The 9-acre site also will be surrounded with a privacy fence before families are allowed to move in.

Unless the city extends the deadline, the agency must remove the trailers by April 2010.

Before & After

This is something I've been wanting to do since Sept 13th. A Before & After photo comparison.

Let's start with my garden, since that's what's on my mind this time of year:


Big J, The Princess & our friend's daughter help me plant the initial goods


With the addition of the sign given to me by Bart's Dad, the garden is beautiful!!


I love the look of the blue birdbath in the midst of all those flowers


This shot is my favorite....MAN i loved that garden!


And here it is today, March 1, 2009


This is a cute shot of Big J, but what I want you to notice is our neighbor's beautiful front yard.


Here's that same shot today...no more mailbox or palm tree, etc


Our backyard, looking up from the dock, the summer of 2006 when we moved in


Same shot today. Be sure and notice the downstairs of the house and the lack of stairs outside!


This was part of our downstairs playroom when we first moved in...


Same view today


Edge of the office area and door to the upstairs then...


and today


Piano with Beethoven & credenza with printer then


and now


The downstairs bathroom then


same view today


View of the office area from a different angle


Same angle today...and for those of you who've had the tour, you may notice the kayak is gone...we found the owner!


The downstairs close that had Big L's clothes, the freezer & the extra fridge..


Hard to recognize today


Our beautifully landscaped street before...


Not exactly beautiful now

I hope you found this little comparison as interesting as I did. Especially now, almost 6 months out, I get used to how things are now and I can hardly even remember how they were before. Makes me remember why I fell in love with our wonderful little piece of heaven in the first place.

So it's been about 5 1/2 months now since Hurricane Ike. While the island IS making amazing progress towards recovery, I'm constantly reminded of just what a sloooow process that is. As for us personally.....nothing. We are now waiting on insurance to respond to our demand. As I posted previously, they *finally* sent an adjuster out to look at the house, and we've been promised his numbers every day since. Now their latest tactic is to question whether or not our house was eligible to be insured on the ground floor. For those of you who don't have to worry about that stuff, what that means is simply whether or not the house was built before 1973 when the new codes limited building on the ground floor. Because ours was build in the late '60's, it was "Grandfathered" meaning it could be insured on the ground floor. The only way to prove that fact, however, is to go down to the County Courthouse and have them pull the property tax records. They simply go backwards until they find the first year that didn't list an improvement on the property. Then they certify it as the year your house was built. Well, wouldn't you know, that's just not good enough for this insurance company. They want something else proving that it was THIS house that was on the lot in 1973. As you can imagine, no such records exist. As far as I'm concerned, it's just another delay tactic in a long line of acts that border on criminal. Do I get 6 months to pay my premiums? I think not. In the meantime, we're submitting the paperwork fo our mortgage financing and permitting will be in place the minute we are free to demo the carcass. It's hard to believe it will ever actually happen.

So here's a look at how some people are coping (or not) with Ike and their homes:


you see lots of this...For Sale by Owner/As Is. Notice it's still boarded up from the storm. It appears that nothing has been done to it since, and due to its location on Broadway, it most definitely took on water.


These folks opted for demolition. Don't know if they took the buyout, which would mean the lot can never be built on again, or if they have enough insurance to rebuild on the same lot.


I love this....the Raising Up. This costs around $30k For a small house like this is not covered by insurance. I wonder if FEMA contributed?


This place looks totally abandoned....much like ours! I assume they, too, are waiting to hear from insurance so they can decide what to do. I wonder where they live right now?




And here are a couple of infamous FEMA trailers. I didn't do a good job of capturing how they really look....just stuck in your front yard, with your old house in the background. FEMA installs them with the steps & porch, and the connection to utilities, which consists of a very visible sewer pipe running across your yard and connecting to the cleanout. Definitely not meant to be pleasing to the eye...just a down-to-basic place to lay your head. These people have been living in hotels for 5 months while waiting on the trailers, which first appeared a couple of weeks ago.


After being in Houston last weekend, I've finally faced reality. Spring has sprung here on the Gulf Coast and any trees that still look like this (which is 95% of the trees on the island, excluding palms) have a very unsure future. Live Oaks are supposed to be covered in bright green leaves this time of year, already providing shade. Our friends in NOLA say it takes 3 years before you know for sure their fate...they *may* come back, but not until then. I just wonder how many of them will be here once June 1st rolls around. Hurricane season makes people very nervous about possibly dead trees. And I can't imagine the whole island looking like winter for 3 years!!

STORM-TATTERED SAILS

Galveston's Elissa vessel undergoing repairs after Ike
By HARVEY RICE Copyright 2009 Houston Chronicle
Feb. 7, 2009, 5:34PM

San Diego sailmaker Jim Brink has worked on outfitting vessels for such movies as Master and Commander and Pirates of the Caribbean.


REFITTING ELISSA
The fore lower topsail on the 1877 sailing ship Elissa was shredded by Hurricane Ike. Jim Brink, one of the few traditional sailmakers in the country, is crafting a new sail for the official tall ship of Texas.

• Sail area : 630 square feet

• Top width: 47 feet

• Bottom width: 52 feet

• Height: 14 feet

Source: Sailmaker Jim Brink
The iron-hulled vessel, the pride of the Galveston Historical Foundation and the official tall ship of Texas, came through with relatively minor damage considering the forces it encountered, but the fierce winds shredded one of its most important sails.

Only about a half-dozen traditional sailmakers exist in the country with the skill to make a replacement for the Elissa’s fore lower topsail, and Jim Brink is one of them.

Brink, 54, will use the experience gained over 30 years of sailmaking to craft a new 630-square-foot fore lower topsail, also known as a storm sail and the last of the Elissa’s 19 sails to be furled in a storm.

Brink began the task a week ago by spreading panels of sailcloth over a pattern taped to the floor of the ballroom at the 1859 Ashton Villa, one of the historic homes maintained by the foundation.

The 33 sections cut from the patterns will be sewn together at the Texas Seaport Museum at Pier 21 in Galveston Harbor, where the Elissa is moored.

The entire process of making the sail takes about three weeks, Brink said.

He is doing the job at a cut-rate price of about $5,000, which was raised from donations by the Elissa’s volunteer crew.

“I’ve worked for other ships, but this has always been my favorite,” said Brink, who rates the Elissa as the best-maintained traditional sailing ship in the country.

From lark to profession
Brink stumbled into his line of work in 1974 when he was a 19-year-old freshman at Kalamazoo College in Michigan.

On a lark, he took an off-campus course that involved working on the Romance, a brigantine built in the 1930s based in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Capt. Arthur Kimberly put Brink to work on his first sail, an unfinished square sail begun by someone else.

“He said, ‘You better finish this, or it will never get done,’” Brink recalled. It took a month, but he finished it.

He had been on the Romance for 18 months when the captain offered him a berth as sailmaker on an around-the-world cruise.

“I was young, looking for adventure,” he said. Brink accepted and in doing so stepped into a profession that preserves a skill that has all but died out in the U.S.

He spent three years on the Romance, then worked on a Danish merchant training sloop before working in Great Britain for a spell.

Tradition alive in Europe
Few traditional sailmakers remain in the U.S., he said, but Europe continues to foster the skill. Unlike the U.S., the Europeans still bestow the title of master sailmaker, he said.

Modern sailmaking lofts use computer-designed sails cut with lasers.

Brink, now based in San Diego, worked for the sail loft in Maine that crafted the first set of sails for the restored Elissa about 20 years ago and has worked on her sails ever since.

The sail work needs to be completed in time for the Elissa to make its first scheduled outing for a day trip into the Gulf with a volunteer crew on March 20.

Big plans for museum
Although the damage to the Elissa was relatively light, the storm severely damaged the workshop needed to keep it in repair and wrecked the pier so badly that it must be replaced, foundation executive director Dwayne Jones said.

The museum was filled with 4 feet of water, damaging the exhibits.

Jones said the foundation wants to build a better museum as it repairs the damage.

Repairs and enhancements will cost from $2.5 million to $3 million, he estimated.

The foundation still is waiting to hear from its insurance companies and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which may or may not lend financial assistance, Jones said.

The museum won’t reopen for at least a year, he said, but when it does, it will feature a redesign by student architects at the University of Houston who donated their time.

A donor, whom Jones declined to name, has commissioned a work of public art by the Mary Miss Studio in New York to commemorate the immigrants who entered the U.S. through the port of Galveston.

The artwork, which is still being designed, will be based at the Seaport Museum but could have pieces in other parts of the island, he said.

harvey.rice@chron.com

Debris from Hurricane Ike fills Galveston Bay

Texas has a record $39 million to spend on the cleanup that could start this week
By MATTHEW TRESAUGUE
Copyright 2009 Houston Chronicle
Feb. 8, 2009, 10:14PM

Underwater Ike debris Follow rebuilding efforts as Galveston recovers from Ike Hurricane Ike littered Galveston Bay with easy chairs, mattresses, refrigerators, motorcycles and sunken shrimp boats. They’re easy to miss from above, but the scope of the cleanup ahead is coming into focus.

The Texas General Land Office, which is responsible for protecting the coast, has pinpointed nearly 600 large pieces of underwater debris after surveying about one-fifth of the bay.

The sonar scans will continue through February, but the cleanup could begin as soon as this week, with the goal of finishing before the next hurricane season begins, on June 1.

Texas has set aside $39 million for the cleanup, the largest of its kind in the state’s history. Officials said they expect reimbursement from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“On the plus side, the bay will be cleaner than before,” said Jim Suydam, spokesman for the General Land Office.

For years, hundreds of abandoned barges, shrimp boats and recreational vessels have cluttered the bayous, bays and shores of the Gulf of Mexico.

Ike’s surge deposited even more debris into the shallow waters of Galveston Bay, one of the nation’s largest and most productive estuaries.

The debris is a hazard to navigation and a potential problem for the environment. For example, the storm-tossed debris has helped destroy half of the bay’s oyster reefs, officials say.

Areas hit hardest
Surveys show that most of the debris is along the Texas City Dike and in the East Bay behind the Bolivar Peninsula, which took the brunt of the September storm.

“We’re finding a little bit of everything,” said Dan Rackard, marine operations manager for CrowderGulf, the Alabama company surveying the bay for the Texas land office.

The company is using a side-scan sonar to map the garbage in the water.

It’s methodical work, requiring specially equipped boats to trawl the bay in straight lines, as if mowing a 660-square-mile lawn.

Although the surveys will take a few more weeks to complete, there is enough information to start the cleanup, Suydam said.

Legislative action
Until recently, the Texas land office, which is responsible for draining sunken and abandoned vessels of their hazardous contents, had no authority to remove them from waterways.

The Legislature in 2005 passed a law enabling the state to help clean up the maritime trash and making it a misdemeanor to dump a boat in Texas waters. But the land office had only a couple hundred thousand dollars to start, enough to make a small dent in the problem.

The state loaned the land office the money for the Ike-related cleanup, expecting to be reimbursed by the federal government.

The intent is to clean the bay before hurricane season. Louisiana hadn’t cleaned up the marine debris from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 before Gustav added to the mess last year.

“Everyone is fighting June 1,” Rackard said. “We would like to get it all cleaned up before then, because we’ve had problems in Louisiana. We’re cleaning up Katrina, and now we’re cleaning up Gustav, too.”

Colliding with debris
Boaters and fishermen also want the underwater debris cleared before higher temperatures draw more people to the bay.

Bob Stokes, president of the Galveston Bay Foundation, an environmental advocacy group, said he has received reports of boats colliding with unseen debris from Ike. “I don’t think the bay is pockmarked,” he said, “but I think it’s enough to be a problem.”

matthew.tresaugue@chron.com

The Day I Thought Would Never Come

I still can't believe how long it took, but yes it finally happened. The adjusters for our agent's E&O policy *finally* came to look at our house today! Just 112 days after the storm, no biggie. Now we get to wait and see how bad they try to whittle down or Professional Estimator's estimate. Yee ha.

I know I've been very lax about posting and updating after all my big promises. But like I said earlier, if I'm not posting it's because I've lost my sense of humor and am really struggling. December and January were rough. Really rough.

Conditions at work have not improved. We still have no heat or A/C, are still crammed into the 2nd floor of our building, with cords taped all over the floor and sharing offices. My "office", which I share, is really a reception area outside the director's office, so it's basically Grand Central Station all day long. Not conducive for accounting. I have no place to lock up confidential documents like payroll and my normal system is all amok. If you know accountants you know they cannot function outside their own system. It's chaos and I'm helpless to change it. Thanks to Big L for keeping me focused on the big picture...that I'm helping keep an organization afloat that is crucial to the rebirth of the island. Without that I'd probably have quit months ago and just stay curled in the fetal position at the back of the RV!!

School has also been a huge stresser. Before Ike we absolutely loved our school and I had a great working relationship with our fab Principal. Since the storm, however, another elementary school (Burnet) has been combined with ours. Their whole faculty, including their Principal are now at our school. Their front staff is mixed with our front staff. All "specials" like Music and Art have 2 teachers now. Our cheer team got absorbed by their drill team, etc. And everyone knows that they are now competing for the same jobs because Burnet is closed indefinitely. We've already been told that next school year will look like this one as far as which schools are open and where students are located. That means that the Parker/Burnet faculty are in competition for one set of teaching positions and there will only be one Principal that makes the cut. This is very scary news, considering I've had my only issues with faculty members in the last couple of months, and they both happen to be Burnet faculty.

I'm going to resist the temptation to post those stories. I'd love to get some feedback on them, but now I have some friends that work at the school that read this blog so I'd better refrain.

So...until we hear the final verdict as to who is staying on at Parker and who is not, we are keeping our options for the next school year wide open. Looks like I have some visits to some other schools in my future....the kind you have to pay for. *sigh* I surely hope it doesn't come to that. I'm such a huge proponent of public education that it would be a very sad day for us for sure. But, nothing has been decided yet and there is still hope. What would we do without hope??

With that, I'm also going to start taking more photos of the island, like I did in the beginning, so you can see the progress. For those of you who don't live on the coast...have you ever seen a real live FEMA trailer? Do you know what they look like in the yard of a house? It's interesting and totally different that what I expected. Now that people are finally getting them, I'll post some pics for ya tomorrow or so.

Another blow for the Island....*sigh*

Shriners suspends repair of hospital, e-mail says

By Laura Elder
The Daily News
Published January 20, 2009

GALVESTON — Repairs of hurricane damage at Shriners Hospital for Children in Galveston have been halted, leaving in question the future of a world-renowned pediatric burn center and more than 300 jobs.

Although officials with the local hospital’s parent organization, Shriners Hospitals for Children, denied Monday they had announced mass layoffs and a possible permanent closure, employees and an e-mail obtained by The Daily News said otherwise.

In an e-mail to some University of Texas Medical Branch employees who might be affected by closure of Shriners, Dr. David N. Herndon, director of research for the Galveston hospital, said the Shriners board of trustees decided to suspend repair of the hospital damaged by Hurricane Ike and to stop operations except for maintenance work on March 31.

Herndon wrote he would this week meet with all interested parties about Shriners’ future.

The hospital faced difficulties after being damaged by Hurricane Ike on Sept. 13, but no layoffs had been announced to staff members, corporate spokeswoman Marlena Lagina-Kleine said Monday.

“The Shriners Hospital for Children suffered significant damage during Hurricane Ike that has yet to be fully remedied,” Lagina-Kleine said. “We are still investigating and assessing the damage of the hospital. Patients will continue to be treated at Shriners hospitals in other locations as appropriate.”

The island hospital has been closed since the storm.

Shriners officials have said as recently as November that the island hospital, ranked among the best pediatric burn treatment centers in the world, would reopen as soon as possible.

But four Galveston employees — some tearful — told The Daily News they were informed Monday the hospital likely would close for good and they would continue to receive pay until March 31. Those employees declined to give their names.

Officials told employees there was only a slight possibility the hospital could reopen, they said.

Should Shriners close its island hospital, which before the storm employed 325 people, it would be another blow to health care workers in the county and end a 50-year relationship between Galveston and the philanthropic group known for members who wear red fez hats.

Although the University of Texas Medical Branch does not operate the Shriners hospital, it works in concert with the facility at 815 Market St. Shriners hospital contracts with the medical branch for doctors and other medical services.

Shriners operates 22 hospitals specializing in pediatric care.

About 5,000 children from across the nation were treated each year at the Market Street hospital, which opened in 1996 and boasts an intensive care unit with 15 beds, a reconstruction and plastic surgery unit with 15 beds, three operating rooms, a multi-bed recovery room, clinics and a large outpatient population.

But Shriners’ island relationship goes back to November 1963, when the Tampa, Fla.-based philanthropic organization opened a seven-bed ward in the John Sealy Hospital to treat children with severe burns.

At the same time, Shriners began building the 30-bed pediatric burn hospital, which opened in 1966. The organization has treated about 18,000 children in Galveston since its inception.

Shriners Hospital for Children’s operating budget of about $34 million comes from an endowment.

Earlier this month, Shriners made news when it received a $120,000 donation from Devon Energy to repair storm damage.

Officials said the hospital would reopen when renovations and repairs were complete.

In November, administrators were working to get out a message that the island hospital would return and that rumors of its demise were wrong.

“The message we want to put out is that we were hurt badly, but we are not going away,” John Swartwout Jr., administrator for the hospital, told The Daily News.

At the time, its board of trustees had extended hazard pay to hospital employees until Jan. 1.

Employees have been out of work or displaced since the hurricane sent a surge of more than 2 feet into the hospital’s first floor. The hospital sustained major damage.

Hurricane Ike’s hit to health care on the island has been staggering. Storm surge flooded 750,000 square-feet in buildings on the medical branch campus, which is yards from Galveston Bay.

With hurricane expenses and lost revenues of about $710 million, the medical branch, home to research facilities, the state’s oldest medical school and John Sealy Hospital, in November began laying off 3,000 people.

After making storm repairs, John Sealy Hospital opened 200 beds to the general public in a sharply downsized facility.

John Sealy Hospital’s emergency room, however, still is operating on a treat-and-transfer or treat-and-release basis.

Mainland editor T.J. Aulds contributed to this report.

Galveston Officials Paint Bleak Picture to Lawmakers After Ike

Galveston officials paint bleak picture to lawmakers after Ike

12:20 AM CST on Thursday, January 8, 2009

Associated Press

GALVESTON, Texas -- Galveston officials pleaded with state lawmakers on Wednesday to help them rescue their island city from the dire financial straits it finds itself in nearly four months after Hurricane Ike caused devastating damage.


Galveston officials paint bleak picture after Ike
January 7, 2009 View larger E-mail Clip More Video Mayor Lyda Ann Thomas and City Manager Steve LeBlanc painted a bleak economic picture of their city for members of a legislative committee meeting on the island.

They told lawmakers that despite a hiring freeze and a 3 percent pay cut for all employees, layoffs are imminent and that property tax revenues will be down by up to 40 percent.

About 75 percent of the homes in Galveston, about 50 miles southeast of Houston, sustained some damage from Ike’s 110-mph winds, rain and 12-foot storm surge when the storm came ashore near the city on Sept. 13.

“We’re getting to the point of being desperate for help,” LeBlanc said. “If there is no help from the state, we might have to cut back on city services severely.”

Galveston, which has an annual budget of about $80 million, also needs help to pay for the $178 million in damage Ike caused to buildings, roads and other infrastructure, LeBlanc said.

Thomas and LeBlanc asked lawmakers for financial help, including letting the city temporarily keep most or all of the sales tax revenue it usually gives to the state and apply for long-term, low cost emergency loans.

“By rebating the sales tax for a set time for areas devastated by Ike you would be enabling us in the Gulf Coast to rebuild our homes and mitigate against future disasters,” Thomas told members of the House Select Committee on Hurricane Ike. Audience members applauded.

LeBlanc said the city applied for help from the Disaster Contingency Fund, created by the Legislature in 2007 to provide money and other help for local governments after a natural disaster.

But the city was turned down because lawmakers never appropriated money for the fund.

LeBlanc also implored the committee to help the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston—the area’s largest employer and a major provider of indigent care in Southeast Texas—recover from the damage it suffered during Ike.

UTMB officials originally estimated the state’s oldest medical school sustained about $710 million in damages from Ike.

On Wednesday, UTMB leaders told lawmakers damages are now estimated to be more than $1 billion. Only about $100 million of that was covered by insurance.

The massive damage at UTMB prompted the UT System Board of Regents to lay off 3,000 employees and reduce the number of beds at the medical facility’s public hospital from 550 to 200.

The downsizing has prompted some, including Thomas, to question whether UTMB and the UT regents are committed to restoring the facility.

Both UTMB President Dr. David Callender and UT System Regents Chairman H. Scott Caven Jr. told the committee they remain focused on restoring the facility.

“We want to bring UTMB back to the level of excellence it had before Ike,” Callender said.

Callender said UTMB plans to ask the Legislature during its session this year for an emergency appropriation of about $335 million to help pay for business losses as well as damaged equipment and buildings.

Callender said UTMB could eventually be a 500-bed facility but not all of these beds might be located on the island’s hospital.

Wednesday’s hearing was the final one for the committee, which plans later this month to submit its report about how local governments as well as the state responded to Ike.