Workers apply blue plastic, or a “blue roof,” to a Port Arthur, Texas, home a month after Hurricane Rita in 2005. Photo by Ed Edahl/FEMA
My electricity was restored only a few days after Hurricane Ike hit the Southeast Texas coast slightly more than a month ago. The aftermath provided minimal hassle — no dodging debris, waiting for debris trucks to pick up brush, not many intersections without power thus traffic lights were working, not too long before many businesses were once again open — for me at least. All of this, I have to point out, is relative to Hurricane Rita which I experienced almost exactly three years before.
Last weekend I traveled down to Sabine Pass, in my same county but on the Gulf, where those folks who had been hammered by Rita were hit hard as well by Ike mostly from the devastating storm surge. Sabine Pass looked almost as bad after being hit by Rita in some respects and worse in others.
Unlike Rita, this storm provided more of a human toll in damage. Some of the folks who decided to stay on beautiful Bolivar Peninsula or Galveston Island have yet to be found. Unlike Rita, when several thousand were still missing three months after the storm due to snafus in keeping track of evacuees, some but fortunately not a staggering number of people who went missing from Hurricane Ike in our area will not be found alive.
Ike damage, if anything, was much more hidden than Rita. I know that sounds strange but the reason is that unlike during Rita, it took a lot longer for people to get the characteristic “blue roofs” on their house.
The Blue Roof program was started in 1992 by the federal government in response to Hurricane Andrew. FEMA got the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to administer the program after Hurricane Katrina, which hit just a month before Rita.
It didn’t seem very long after Rita hit that every other house in town, here in Beaumont, Texas, where I live, had a blue roof. Perhaps that is exaggerating. A ballpark figure would be more like 1-in-3-to-4 roofs at least in my neighborhood. But the bright blue plastic roofs, which the federal agencies somehow want to make the point are “blue plastic roofs” and not “tarps” have just recently begun to show up on the top of area homes.
That has caused some controversy, that it has taken so long for the blue roofs to appear.
Homeowners whose roofs were bashed in like I noticed today, covered by blue roofs, weren’t the only ones who have been heavily affected by the wait in getting material or the program or whatever to Ike Land. Many contractors have traveled long miles to this area to put those blue roofs on and have not had the material, nor have they had the work to apply those plastic roofs.
I can’t, nor would I, place blame at this point on anyone for the delay. This is because, A) I don’t know all the reasons why it has taken so long for the blue roofs to get here and made available for contractors to put on roofs, and 2)There have been other hurricanes before Ike, mainly Gustav which was just an overcast day here but pretty nasty just a hair east of us.
Driving on Interstate 10 today on some of the elevated overpasses, I saw a lot more blue roofs. And I began to notice them more and more in neighborhoods. This was true even in my own neighborhood where I walk each day. Then, I saw one roof with a clear, plastic “roof” over its real roof.
Recalling that night when the wind was deafening and rain was blowing into my window, which I left open because the power went off early, I didn’t know Ike did as much damage as it did right here where I live. I kind of suspected it did. I wonder why Southeast Texas is becoming the new South Florida for hurricanes. And I hope folks can get this behind them and get their lives back to as normal as possible.
Beyond that, there isn’t much I can do for the moment except to sit back, try to put all the damage from both Ike and Rita (and Humberto and TS Eduardo) and say: “Wow.”
