Hurricane Ike Sos


by Ernie Fitzpatrick - Date: 2008-09-28 - Word Count: 376 Share This!

Most of the people in Houston have their power back. Hard hit areas in the suburbs and surrounding rural areas where many trees and poles are down are next. And then there's Galveston Island. What can one say about the destuction and catastrophic hit that it and Bolivar Peninsula took. It's not power that's missing on the coast but some 400 people who are not accounted for two weeks later. 

Gail Ettenger is not one of those 400 missing persons.

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.

The some 400 people that remain missing are 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. 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.

Missing power for a few days or wo weeks is nothing compared to having a loved one missing for more than two weeks now. That's a real SOS!


Related Tags: bolivar peninsula, hurricane ike sos, galveston 400 missing persons, gail ettenger, laura recovery center

As a spiritual-futurist, I interpret current events in light of possible macro-universal forces at play leading up to 2012, but not limited to it.

Your Article Search Directory : Find in Articles

© The article above is copyrighted by it's author. You're allowed to distribute this work according to the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs license.
 

Recent articles in this category:



Most viewed articles in this category: