Hurricane Ike’s two-year anniversary is just a few days away and Galvestonians are once again eying a tropical storm forming off the West African coast. Hopefully Igor will follow Earl up the Eastern seaboard and give the Gulf Coast a break. But there’s always a chance this is the storm people will be talking about [...]
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Hurricane Ike taught me that the sum of the parts is not greater than the whole, contrary to what the old saying would have us believe. We like to think that if we take care of the parts (individuals) then the whole (community) will benefit. But more often than not the parts are sacrificed for [...] As we get closer to Huricane Ike’s second anniversary, I’ve been thinking about what I learned covering, living though and writing a book about the third costliest natural disaster in U.S. history. Over the next few weeks, I’ll share some of those lessons here, in no particular order. I spilled a lot of ink in The [...] Sometimes I forget Infinite Monster is about people. When someone asks me to describe the book, I say it’s about Hurricane Ike and Galveston. That’s true but only partly. Infinite Monster is really about the people who faced down a devastating, life-changing natural disaster and lived to tell about it. It’s about the stories of [...] The 1900 Storm shaped Galveston’s attitude toward storms, for better and for worse. Hurricane Ike only strengthened those responses. After surviving and eventually recovering from what is still the deadliest natural disaster in American history, Galvestonians felt a sort of invincibility to hurricanes. If the great, unnamed storm couldn’t destroy the island, nothing could. Islanders compared [...] On Thursday, Sept. 11, Rhiannon and I stayed with Daily News Photo Editor Jennifer Reynolds in her downtown loft. We planned to get up early on Friday to witness and report on the island’s final hours before Ike. We set our alarms for 7 a.m., but we never needed them. At 5:30 a.m., Jennifer got [...] As part of her research for the chapter in “Forgotten” that compares the 1900 Storm with Hurricane Ike, Rhiannon spent hours in the Rosenberg Library reading the firsthand accounts of people who survived that disastrous storm. We already knew about many of the connections between the two storms. But we had no idea about the [...] I don’t think anything played a bigger role in Galveston’s recovery from Hurricane Ike than the return of the University of Texas Medical Branch to full strength. The resuscitation of John Sealy Hospital is a symbol of what a community can do when it works together to pursue a goal as though its life depended [...] Writing Chapter 13, “Rebuilding,” was cathartic for me. It was a story I’ve been trying to write for the last year, which is why I decided not to wait any longer before diving in. As those of you who read my blog at the time may remember, my husband and I were convinced the city [...] |
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