Still Shaking in Sugar Land

Carey Giudici, trip@careygiudici.com

There’s plenty of good and bad news for the Houston area, and many of its far-flung communities, as we move on to life after Hurricane Ike.

Sugar Land, a southeastern Houston suburb with a vitality and growth pattern that belies its rather whimsical name, is only about 40 minutes northwest of Galveston. If Ike had charged straight at us from the sea we might have been toast. But from the beginning the eye was always projected to turn north and move up the east side of the city soon after landfall. And because there was much more wind than rain in this “colossus,” my neighbors and I escaped the worst by just staying put in newer homes or apartments.

Sugarlanders mostly had to cope with a few structural shakes as the wind did its muscular thing, along with a widespread power outage. By 8 p.m. on Friday, the city was pretty much dark (we got our power back, at least intermittently, about 15 hours later). But being new to the major-hurricane experience, we comforted ourselves as the dawn broke with the notion that the worst was over, and life would return to normal pretty much as soon as the wind died down.

Our neighborhood’s damage did seem largely limited to blown-down trees; by the end of the weekend we could shop at our local supermarket and buy gas (after a one-hour wait, fending off all the would-be line crashers). On Monday my wife and I even tried to take our customary walk in Oyster Creek Park just down Highway 6, but  fallen trees and a rain-swollen creek had made its little walking path impassable. The smell of sewage over one section, by the horizontal foliage hanging like a green fog over the creek, reminded us that infrastructure repairs would have to wait.

One of the most poignant quotes coming from Galveston survivors was from a woman who said that the storm was almost a minor problem compared with the horrors of living without basic necessities once Ike had passed. The help she got was too little too late. Local officials have obviously learned a lot from the Greek tragedy of Katrina: but like CNN coverage, as soon as Ike’s winds died down they returned to business as usual.

DAP has already mentioned local radio programs that offered residents and businesses practical information. But the sporadic and random way they were broadcast forced everyone to sit through a fluff or irrelevant tips in hopes of eventually getting news we could really use.

Houston’s extreme size will make most suggestions about where to find ice, gas, restaurants or groceries useless–drive an hour across town for a grocery store or open gas station that someone had called in about? Such round the clock “good-neighbor” programs were really extended call in shows. Too many citizens got on the air for three minutes of fame without offering many answers to the pressing questions being asked by people in other parts of town; many of whom are still waiting for power.

We could have used more information on a regular basis–updates on key services and infrastructure repairs broadcast every 15 minutes, for example.

Presumably this is a lesson being learned by officials and the media; but it’s reaching them too late to help all locals deal with the confusion and pain of Ike’s aftermath. DAP should be commended for driving such lessons home, so they don’t become lost in bureaucratic inertia while we’re waiting for the next “learning experience.”

Onward and upward!