Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Bolivar Peninsula etc.

I spent a lot of my childhood in our family's beach cabin on Bolivar Peninsula, across the ferry from Galveston. Everyone knows Galveston. Hardly anyone knows Bolivar. It was the beach for the rest of us, little towns made up of summer visitors and year-long residents and renters and fishermen and shrimpers.

Here are some amazing pictures of the devastation. One town has two houses left out of over 250.

Meanwhile my own world is only slightly less comfortable than it was before. Grocery stores are crowded and have no frozen food or dairy, and they are closing early. Gas lines are two or three cars deep most times unless everyone else is trying to get gas at the same time. I paid $3.59 for gas last night. It takes a while to get through the drive-through lines - nobody wants to cook and I don't blame them. We had power back within 15 hours of losing it, and so we slept Saturday night in air conditioned comfort.

Houston proper, however, has a long way to go.

The Beaumont Enterprise, my hometown newspaper, has a series of interesting photos of the damage there. I have a relative on the paper who rode out the storm on one of the emergency staging ships loaded up with fire trucks and ambulances and everything. Apparently one of the graveyards there was washed up and caskets floated down the road. I don't know if there are pictures of that.

The president is coming today to Galveston and Houston, but Beaumont, Orange, and Bolivar aren't getting any attention at all. Nobody realizes that power is still out as far north as Huntsville in places.

1 Comments:

Blogger Pez said...

I saw photos of caskets that had floated up out of a cemetary on MSNBC.com. :(

Glad you are ok, MissFish.

10:15 PM  

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