In 2008, Hurricane Ike swept the sea into Galveston Bay, submerging 75 percent of Galveston, shredding entire buildings to splinters and turning rich and poor alike into unwilling expatriates of the island home they loved.
Photo courtesy of Jennifer Reynolds, The Galveston County Daily News
Award-winning Galveston County Daily News reporters Leigh Jones and Rhiannon Meyers, flooded out of their own homes, share an insider’s view of a disaster largely forgotten amid America’s deepening economic meltdown.
On the very eve of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the first major financial institution to fall in the recession, Ike erased an entire city on the Bolivar Peninsula and brought Texas’ largest medical school — Galveston’s only general hospital and its largest employer — to its knees.
Little more than a century had passed since a nameless storm destroyed the bustling port town, killing more than 6,000 and catapulting Houston toward economic boom. The survivors of the 1900 Storm resurrected the island, raising it by 17 feet behind an impenetrable seawall. But the city’s bay side remained an unprotected, open path for Ike.
From their harrowing rides beside rescuers on dark and deluged streets, through scores of private interviews that expose the politics of recovery, the destitution of loss, and the revelry of rebirth, Jones and Meyers deliver the story of one of America’s largest hurricanes through the voices of those who lived it: grief-stricken families, heroic helicopter pilots, exhausted leaders, beleaguered public housing residents, courageous survivors, doomed disbelievers.
Some drowned, some were plucked by helicopter from raging water, some left and never returned. Those who did come back waded not only through mounds of toxic debris, but also through dense and seemingly endless bureaucracy that threatened to stifle recovery before it even began.
Like a phantom reincarnation of its 1900 ancestor, Hurricane Ike became an Infinite Monster that would forever cloud the future of the Texas coast.