After Ike: Monday, Sept.15

It’s Monday, and we’re back on State Highway 124, this time with eight air boats and 17 game wardens. Medics and volunteer firefighters from Gilchrist and Crystal Beach also are on hand.

We’ve inched a bit closer to High Island as the storm surge recedes, but the bridge is still miles away.

Yesterday, Game Wardens Hector Gonzalez and Shane Detwiler rescued a man from the remains of a house on the peninsula; his skin was covered in chemical burns from the pollutants in the water, they said. They whisked him by air boat to an ambulance waiting at our staging area.

Bolivar Peninsula actually is part of Galveston County, and several Galveston County deputies have arrived with trailer loads of bottled water and meals-ready-to-eat. They help game wardens load the supplies onto air boats.

Thanks to several local reporters who camped out at the staging area the day before, the story of Bolivar’s annihilation has gotten out, and representatives from the Associated Press, USA Today, the New York Times, the San Antonio Express-News, CNN, the German Press Agency, the Beaumont Enterprise and more are arriving hourly.

Game Warden Bobby Jobes asks me if I’ll be riding with him again; I decline, thinking I will be more useful at the staging area. What I don’t say is that I feel uncomfortably bloated with destruction. Sadly, it’s a familiar feeling … from Bosnia, and from Mitch and Allison and Charley.

Embedlam

The Governor’s Press Office Saturday issued an edict that media would not be allowed to take seats on any state-operated boats, though they could accompany rescuers in other vehicles. If this stands, reporters will largely miss the entire unfolding story here.

I call back to TPWD’s Austin headquarters, and make the case for allowing reporters to embed with game wardens when operationally feasible. TPWD’s communications division director makes a gutsy call: subject to the on-site commander’s approval, go for it.

“Operationally feasible” means only if there is room and the journalists’ presence won’t negatively impact the mission. In addition to actively searching for survivors who need a way off Bolivar, game wardens are delivering food and water and ferrying medics and linemen and engineers who need to survey the damage to infrastructure.

Practically speaking, this means I have many more journalists to put on airboats than I have airboats to put them on. I begin a list: it will be first-come, first-served. The New York Times arrives on-scene after the San Antonio Express-News.

The Express-News gets a seat first. The Associated Press (eventually I’ll have five journalists -- print and broadcast -- from the AP on-hand) arrives after almost everyone else, an oversight at the bureau, one reporter tells me.

So, the AP, with perhaps the largest audience of anyone, gets tacked-on near the bottom of the list. It’s not an easy decision. I reason that, first, it’s a fair way to do things. Second, a great many residents of Bolivar and the surrounding area who are displaced are getting their news from local television and news media.

I am happily surprised when I get some help from the reporters themselves. Robert Crowe, from the San Antonio Express-News, gives up his seat for a Beaumont Enterprise reporter.

“This is their back yard,” he says. “My photographer is already out there … I can wait.”

In fact, all of the journalists are a good deal more patient and flexible than I would have expected. And let me tell you, I appreciate it.

It doesn’t occur to me that “embedded media’ might not mean the same thing to everyone on the scene. The first boat out, with KFDM-TV journalists Jennifer Heathcock and Jack Fitch, doesn’t return for hours.

I had suggested to the game wardens that they simply do their jobs, not to take detours or come back early for the reporters. They did just that, at one point dropping the reporters in Gilchrist while they continued house-to-house searches farther down the island.

“We’ll look for you on the way back,” one of the game wardens told Jack. “Better be there.”

The other reporters who get airboat rides are taken on roughly hour-long tours, which certainly gives some access they otherwise wouldn’t have had, but might not have been the best use of a game warden or an airboat.

It’s not what I intended, which was for one or two reporters to accompany each boat as it refuels and goes back out – if there is room. I mentally kick myself for not carefully explaining this scenario to the game wardens in charge and getting their buy-in at the beginning of the day.

I have two, seemingly contradictory jobs here: first, to try to keep the media from interfering with the work the game wardens and other emergency responders are doing. I'm here to answer questions, take heat, run interference.

TPWD game wardens are perfectly free to arrange their own ride-alongs with reporters and talk about just about any topic within their competence, any time. They are professionals, and sometimes make my job back at headquarters seem superfluous. On the other hand, they're very busy, stressed-out professionals with a lot of other things on their minds just now.

The second job is to help the reporters get their stories. Not just because it will place the agency I work for and the people I work with in a favorable light, but because there are thousands of people out there who are depending on these journalists for information about their homes and loved ones.

And, for better or worse, often it is true that the squeaky wheel gets the grease. This is true even, or maybe especially, for large-scale calamities like hurricanes. Policy makers and the people who allocate assets don't necessarily have an inside line to heavily impacted areas ... sometimes they get their information the same way everyone else does -- from the media.

As a former newspaper reporter, I think I understand what the journalists here need and I want to help them do their jobs. Several of the reporters tell me throughout the day that I've been helpful to them. Several game wardens tell me the same. I hope it's true.

Mid-afternoon I get a text message from Austin (oddly, even when cellular voice communications are down, sometimes text messages get through … cell service is non-existent, then spotty but improving by Monday). I’ve been spotted talking about the airboat operation on News8Austin, our 24-hour Time-Warner news channel. I walk over to reporter Russell Wilde: “Man, you guys are fast!”

They Own the Road

CNN also is transmitting by satellite, and when a Department of Public Safety sergeant bulldogs his way down the staging area, telling reporters they have to move their vehicles, I tell the CNN crew to wait; they’re about 15 minutes into a 45-minute transmission.

I pull one of our game warden captains aside: “Don’t you outrank that guy? Isn’t this our operation?”

“Well, yeah,” he replies. “But it’s their road.”

State troopers – more than 100 descended on Chambers County after the storm – are either very, very helpful or oddly obstructionist. Some allow reporters through barricades as soon as they see media credentials. Others insist I come and escort a photographer through. Early in the day Sunday, on the way to the staging area, two young troopers refuse to allow a game warden truck (towing an airboat) through a barricade.

When that incident makes its way across the airwaves, Chambers County Sheriff Joe LaRive wastes no time at all making his feelings known. By the time we get to the roadblock a few minutes later, in an identical truck towing a similar airboat, the troopers move the barricade aside with alacrity. I think I saw one click his heels and salute.

A Diversion

Media Relations Field Operations Rule #31: If you can’t get the media to the story, make up a different story.

Just kidding. I didn’t make-up anything. But, talk about a way to pass the time: more than a dozen cowboys ride through our staging area and through flooded pastures (in some places actually swimming their horses) to round-up cows that have taken shelter atop a levee.

The cows are not at all inclined to get back in the putrid, salty water they have so recently escaped, but the ranch hands clearly know what they are doing and soon we have a cattle drive funneling up Highway 124 between the emergency vehicles.

TPWD Chief Photographer Earl Nottingham’s photo of the event will make the New York Times, the Austin American-Statesman and his hometown paper, the Temple Daily Telegram, among others.

Finally, an airboat returns with more people aboard than it had when it left. Hector and Shane have done it again, rescuing a couple – and six of their pets – who had taken shelter in an attic crawlspace to avoid rising floodwaters. For two days they signaled in vain to passing helicopters. The couple’s gratitude is evident in their tears, and in the hug the woman gives Shane after she steps onto the highway.

“We’re ‘top boat,’” says Gonzalez, with a grin as he throws his arm over Detwiler's shoulder and poses for a photo. It’s part good-natured jibe, part pride and part cheerful challenge to his colleagues.

At the end of the day, almost all the boats are back and the fuel trailer is nearly empty. I still have nearly 10 reporters who have not made it out to the peninsula, and I’m feeling guilty as hell.

Somehow, I think, I should have been smarter about this.

The $6 Million Question

Sometime during the afternoon a Texas Army National Guard UH-60L Blackhawk helicopter circles and then lands on the highway behind us. A few days more than seven years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, local law enforcement and emergency responders and the military still can't talk to each other over their radios.

A crew chief jogs down the road, finds a ranking game warden and asks: "Do you have a mission for us? We're flying around and we have no idea what we're supposed to be doing. Do you maybe have some grid coordinates we could search?"

Detwiler, an Army veteran who served an active duty stint in Iraq, grabs a GPS and begins reeling-off 10-digit grids for the crew chief.

Another Blackhawk comes in and hovers over the flooded pasture. The crew chief runs back to his aircraft and both helicopter take off for the peninsula.

Each UH-60L costs taxpayers about $6 million, and -- last time I checked -- more than $3,000 an hour (including flight and maintenance crew costs) to operate.

Every Guard member I met in the aftermath of Hurricane Ike showed the same initiative; they were eager to help, desperate for missions. That these highly capable soldiers were put in the air in such expensive, sophisticated machines without a clear objective is mind-boggling.

For certain at least one Blackhawk provides a vital service today. A call came in overnight requesting that game wardens check on two elderly women who had stayed through the storm with their pets on Crystal Beach.

Armed with a neighbor's address, Bobby Jobes, John Feist and Rod Ousley set-out to find them. Not only do they find them, Ousley talks them out of their wrecked home.

Then, Earl (he was a Boy Scout, it turns out) signals a passing helicopter with a cracked car sideview mirror. The women, too frail for an airboat ride back across the bay, are airlifted (with their pets) to safety.

Nicely done, gentlemen, I think to myself. Very nicely done indeed.

Gilchrist

A couple of the game warden supervisors have driven their trucks through floorboard-deep water to High Island. Even though it's late, I decide to take the remaining reporters -- the ones who didn't make it onto our airboats -- over there by truck. The alligators on the road and in the water are a hit, especially with the New York-based journalists. We make it to High Island, and after talking to a local resident there who has driven as far as the Rollover Pass bridge, decide we may be able to drive as far as Gilchrist.

Even for the reporters who have seen images of the peninsula from the air, the devastation at ground level is shocking.

We stay there, near what had been the intersection of State Highway 87 and Paisley Road, as the sun sets over Galveston Bay. Print reporters wander among the Stonehenge-like ruins of stilt homes, taking notes, and TV reporters put together quick standups to send back with their packages.

One picks up a license plate and muses that it would make a nice souvenir.

“I’d really rather we didn’t pick up anything here,” I say. “Eventually people are going to come back to what were their homes, and any little scrap that is left might be important to them.”

Driving Out

In the distance, a pair of headlights wink through the darkness. We await the approaching vehicle, knowing it must be a resident of one of the devastated towns further west. As the battered, black truck pulls up next to us, I recognize Bobby Anderson.

Immediately he is bathed, through the driver’s window, in the harsh glare of camera-mounted lights. He looks exhausted, and explains that he had rebuilt the starter on the truck – cleaning out sand and shells – and that he is hungry and thirsty. I pass three plastic cups of mandarin oranges trough the reporters, and a case of water.

Bobby tries to refuse the water, saying he doesn’t need that much. He finally takes it, saying he’ll give the extra to someone else if it’s needed.

He declines to repeat for the reporters the story he’d told me the day before in Crystal Beach, the story of his friend Sandy being swept out of the rafters of the Rancho Caribe golf shop.

Bobby does complain bitterly about a civilian search and rescue team from California that threatened to commandeer his truck, and who – he says – he witnessed breaking into sheds and utility rooms taking tools “for the rescue effort.”

“They might have started by bringing a little food and water,” he observes.

I silently wonder why I don’t have a case of MREs in the back of the truck right now.

The pillaging California rescue crew is a story I’ll hear at least three more times from different residents of the peninsula in widely scattered locations. I still don’t know if it really happened, but it seems like a profoundly bad way to conduct business. As far as I know, no one there that night – nor any other news organization – has followed-up on that story.

We pick our way through the debris under a nearly-full moon, and I am relieved to find that the water across Hwy. 124 is no higher than when we came in. Maybe a little lower, even.

After dropping the reporters at their vehicles, I follow them out through the roadblock. In Winnie, I keep going to the Interstate, thinking I’ll find an open gas station. I turn West. I’m looking for the lighted sign at J.J.’s Chevron, but of course it – like every other gas station in Chambers County – is dark at 11 p.m.

For the first time in five days, I switch the radio from KTRH-AM to a country music station, and just drive. I drive all the way to Baytown, nearly all the way to Beltway 8 in Houston, before I find an open gas station that actually has fuel. I get in line.

The store shelves inside the Texaco are stripped nearly bare, but I find a couple of packs of cigarettes – Bobby Jobes had given me one of his last packs earlier in the day – some bottled iced tea and a package of cookies.

Along the way, I call district supervisor Capt. Rod Ousley and the incoming strike team supervisor to find-out the plan for the next day (an Army Chinook helicopter, ATVs and house-to-house searches on the peninsula). I make more calls, letting the day’s media contingent know what we’ll be doing and when and where to meet.

Mostly, I just drive. I’m tired. It’s now been five days since I left Austin, and in that time I’ve managed maybe 16 hours of sleep. It’s good to know the highway is open and I can just leave if I want to.

I want to, actually, but I don’t. Not yet.

[Photos 1, 3, 5, 7 and 8 courtesy Earl Nottingham/TPWD]