Kuwait Times

Published Date: September 15, 2008
By Virginie Montet

Pleasure boats thrown out of the water and into the street as if they were toys, destroyed houses and flooded neighborhoods-Hurricane Ike that passed here Saturday night has devastated this resort community on the Texas Gulf coast.
The sky remains cloudy, but it no longer seems threatening. Gusts of wind sweep along the pier, where powerful waves coming from the Gulf of Mexico come to die.

Several hours after the passage of Hurricane Ike, downgraded to a tropical depression yesterday by the National Hurricane Center, the calm seems to have returned to this small seaside city. Relief teams get down to work as their helicopters crisscross the sky more and more often. In the streets, dazed residents walk, surveying the damage caused by the storm. The center of Ike made landfall as a Category Two hurricane early Saturday on Galveston Island, where the sea swelled up in fury, whipsawing the count
ry's fourth-largest city Houston and prompting thousands of 911 emergency calls across the impact zone, according to the Miami-based NHC.

Street after street was filled with water more than 12 hours after the storm passed. Windows were blown out of flooded homes, swamped furniture lay in the streets and tree branches littered roadways.

Thanks to an effective drainage system, the water level quickly subsided everywhere, except on the west side of the city. So far, authorities have not reported any casualties.

Nearly 20,000 of the city's 58,000 residents did not want, or were unable, to follow a mandatory evacuation order. At least 17 buildings were destroyed. The access road that leads to the coastal city is unrecognizable. Dozens of boats that had been moored at the marina were thrown onto the pavement, offering a surrealistic spectacle.

On the beachside boulevard, piles of debris include beams and frames of destroyed houses that block the roadway. Some restaurants have been completely destroyed. The victims of the storm include the "Balinese Ballroom," which has operated in this seaside resort since the 1920s. A lateral wall of a hotel has collapsed, leaving the rooms open to the wind.

An emergency shelter was set up at a local school, and some 200 people found refuge there Saturday. Inside, Ashia Turner, a young 18-year-old woman with two children, said she hoped to return quickly to her house.

It was my first hurricane, so I didn't take it seriously," she said. "My daughter was starting to scream so I decided to go to the shelter." John Calvington, 43, said he could not leave the island because his car malfunctioned. He said the night was tough and he was under the impression that it was never going to end. Galveston was last hit by a hurricane in 1900. That storm caused more than 8,000 deaths and is remembered as the most serious natural disaster in the history of the United States. - AFP