What floats: Sunday, Sept. 21

Refrigerators float. Mattresses float. Walls and windows and staircases and roofs float. Boats float, of course, and so do life jackets, coolers and bottles of vegetable oil.

Shoes float; so do plastic toys. Surprisingly, televisions float. Stuffed animals, dressers, hats and mardi gras beads float. Collanders float, cows float, and armadillos and marsh rabbits and horses and snakes float.

The theory is that people will, too, and that’s why we spent the day searching a massive debris field in southern Chambers County.

Apparently no one really knows how many Bolivar residents are still missing a week after Ike. We do know that much of what was Gilchrest and a good chunk of Crystal Beach is now a splintered jumble against a treeline about 5 miles inland of East Bay’s northern shoreline.

That’s where we took the cadaver dogs today. Five teams spread out across Chambers County – some traveling by all-terrain vehicle, some by airboat, some by swamp buggy. We searched shorelines and ranches and refuge marsh.

No one has yet found a body.

Everyone agrees that doesn’t mean one or more isn’t out there; it’s just that there’s so damned much debris on the ground, and so much death stink in the air, it’s awful hard to know for sure.

But Chambers Co. Sheriff Joe LaRive – and the game wardens and deputies and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employees and dog handlers – all the good people out there today, feel a certain duty to be as sure as they can possibly be.

For Bobby Anderson, who says his friend Sandy was swept out of the rafters of a Crystal Beach building at the height of the storm. For the people Game Warden Hector Gonzalez talked to who, one moment, saw a dozen people on the roof of the house next to theirs; the next moment, nothing.

This low country has a habit of keeping its secrets on a schedule all its own. Like the story I heard this morning about a skull that washed into a duck blind a couple of seasons back; turned out to be the noggin of a fellow who had disappeared a decade before.

Not finding bodies a week after the hurricane ... is that good news or is it bad news? It's awful hard to know for sure.

Don't Like Ike

Before Ike, before I went to Anahuac and the Bolivar Peninsula, I wrote that I actually like tropical storms. Not so much, now. The devastation I have witnessed and so many have lived in Southeast Texas is sobering.

There's nothing malicious about a hurricane: it just is. And if we did not choose to build and live and work and play at the edge of the sea, hurricanes would be benign or even beneficial events.

But, of course we do. My grandparents did. My parents did. So did I, for a time. And with good reason: in Texas, the scape where water and land and sky come together is truly magical.

I'll be posting more blog entries from Ike's aftermath as I have time. Just wanted to get that out there.

For more Ike photos and news coverage, visit http:hurricaneikebolivar.shutterfly.com.

During the Storm

It’s two in the morning and I can’t sleep. The wind outside the Chambers County Sheriff’s Office is a ravening beast. Rainwater is blowing beneath the door at the end of the hall, creeping across the carpet. Leaves, too.

Ike has arrived. The eye is crossing Galveston Island now, and soon we may have a few moments of calm here. Then, the storm surge will come.

We lost our T-1 Internet connection several hours ago, when the electricity went. Here, the generator kicked-on immediately. The generator across the parking lot at the courthouse – also the emergency operations center – flickered to life briefly, then died.

My wireless modem works intermittently.

Earlier, game warden Jon Feist and I stopped to see what was up with the massive truck parked at the end of the runway at the small county airport here.

Turns out a team of scientists from the University of Alabama at Huntsville picked Anahuac as a good place to observe the approaching storm with their X-Band, dual-polarized radar. Not really sure what that is, but it can see a long way and tells them quite a lot.

One of the things it told the researchers this afternoon is that the eye of this storm had shrunk from 80 miles in diameter to a mere 60 miles, and that the eastern eye wall would likely pass directly over us.

"It's looking a lot better," one of the researchers said.

"For us, you mean?" I asked.

"Oh, no," he replied sheepishly. "I mean the storm is looking more organized. That's not better for us."

Outside, leaves and branches and debris are rocketing through the air. The trees in front of the courthouse are whipping through an arc of about 45 degrees; surely they’ll snap.

I’m surprised we haven’t had more rain. There’s some, and it’s pretty much horizontal, but not the torrential downpour I was expecting to see.

Talk about the “fog of war …” I wrote earlier that 12 people were trapped on a roof over near Sabine Pass. Some still swear that was the case. Someone else said it was a couple of oilfield workers trapped in their truck on the road.

That ship 60 miles offshore? Maybe it was 100 miles offshore. Or 120. And the Coast Guard did attempt a rescue, to no avail. Or, at least that’s what I heard.

The folks here in Chambers County have been unfailingly kind and hospitable, especially notable in a time as stressful as this. It’s beautiful country around here – at least it was, Friday. I was surprised to discover how many ranches dot this marshy prairie. There are thousands and thousands of cows in this county. Or, there were.

Now? That’s anyone’s guess.

And now, Ike

At the Chevron Food Mart on Interstate Highway 10 East in Anahuac, four game wardens, 11 DPS troopers and a Texas Ranger converge for lunch. The manager of the Blimpie’s sandwich shop here is family, and it’s a popular mid-day stop for law enforcement officers.

Overhead, gray clouds scud by, occasionally spitting rain into a freshening breeze. The weather at this moment is unremarkable; it could be any day of the year. It is, quite literally, the calm before the storm.

On Galveston Island, waves are topping the seawall. At Sabine Pass about two hours ago, a dozen residents in a mandatory evacuation area called from a rooftop. Game wardens responded, but were blocked by high water. Winds gusting to 40mph ruled-out an airboat rescue. There may be absolutely nothing rescuers can do for those folks who waited to long to get out.

God help them.

About 60 miles offshore, a heavily-laden tanker lies helpless in the storm’s path. A Coast Guard representative said this morning it’s not certain the crew will be rescued.

The Coast Guard is evacuating residents of Bolivar Peninsula by helicopter today. Most of the people who did not evacuate yesterday or the day before woke up this morning and (wisely) second-guessed their earlier decision. The road out through High Island is impassable, and the Bolivar ferries are no longer running.

Hurricane Ike is still 165 miles southeast of Galveston, moving west-northwest at 12mph. It’s a huge storm, with hurricane-force winds extending well over 100 miles from the center and tropical storm force winds forecast for more than half the Texas coast.

With such a huge wind field, a major concern is the storm surge. Wind pushes water into a big hump that travels ahead of the storm across the ocean. Low pressure allows that water to rise higher. A waxing moon, nearly full, pulls tides higher still.

The National Weather Service is predicting all of Galveston Island will be under water by late tonight. In Port Arthur, on Sabine Lake, bay waters will overtop the seawall and cover the city to depths of three to six feet.

South of Houston, water is creeping up over the access roads on Interstate Highway 45, the Gulf Freeway. My friend Brandon, in Fort Worth, has friends in Clearlake who declined to leave even though they are in a mandatory evacuation zone. If they leave right now, they may yet make it out.

Earlier today, U.S. Rep. John Culverson said in a KTRH radio interview (listen online to the non-stop storm coverage) that the Department of Homeland Security chief of staff told him that anyone remaining on Galveston Island this evening faces “certain death.”

That’s strong language, and probably overblown, but certainly indicates the seriousness with which authorities are viewing this hurricane.

Listening-in to the twice-daily emergency management conference calls, I can tell you that I feel better knowing that Jack Colley is coordinating this effort for the State of Texas. It appears to me, now, that across-the-board, state and local agencies have prepared thoroughly and thoughtfully for this storm.

On IH-10 heading east this morning, we passed long convoys of more than 20 ambulances speeding to safety with critically ill hospital patients. It’s an effort that has been underway for several days now.

The focus – at Colley’s direction – has been on evacuating people who, for whatever reason, cannot evacuate themselves.

I’ll spend tonight at the Chambers County Sheriff’s Office in Anahuac. My guess is that there are more people in this area who should have left but did not. My guess is that the game wardens with whom I am embedded will be called to help them. My guess is they’ll go, because that’s what they do. It’s what they’ve always done, since 1895.

[TPWD photo by Earl Nottingham; Game wardens near Sabine Pass, Sept. 10, 2008]