Red Mosquito

A memory of Ike...I went to Palacios on assignment for the Press. My story idea was to chronicle how Texas ports were full of abandoned shrimp boats, left there by their captains for complicated reasons having to do with globalism.

Anyway, headed down to Palacios, checked into the Luther hotel, and spent a couple of days on the docks in high summer 2008, interviewing what few shrimpers were still pulling in and out of port at that time.

Back at the Luther, a 118-year-old hotel on the waterfront that still has a library, I was spending my nights reading local lore. I came across a volume that riveted me: Hurricane Carla: A Tribute to the News Media. When I wasn't out talking to shrimpers, I was up in my window-unit cooled room reading about Dan Rather, whose coverage of Carla revolutionized storm coverage, for better or worse, and lesser mortals of the Texas media. And it was amazing that at that time, Texans seemed to love them for the service they provided.

One day out on the docks I ran into a Vietnamese shrimper and while we were talking he mentioned trouble coming our way. "Ikey" he called it. What was Ikey I asked? A big hurricane, he told me. He thought it was coming toward Texas.

First I heard of it. At the time it was still way out by the Turks & Caicos, but the captain was sure it was headed right for Texas.

(Oh, and meanwhile, I had just turned in another story to the Press about the gang problem in Bacliff, Texas, right there on Galveston Bay.)

Since I was a member of the media, one deeply interested in the coast, to boot -- I felt it was my right to keep that book about Carla -- it was a cheap paperback, more of a pamphlet than a book -- and I took it back to Houston with me.

And I finished my reporting on the shrimp boat situation there and on Dickinson Bayou, at Hillman's fish camp, and headed back to Houston, anticipating having not one but two stories of Gulf Coast life and culture hitting the racks.

And then came Ikey, the exact same day my Bacliff gang story hit the racks, all over the coast. Months later, I found pulped versions of it in salt-and-sea crusted racks in Galveston, when I was covering Ike's aftermath.

And my shrimp boat story was ruined too -- the captains saw the storm as an opportunity to rid themselves of liabilities, and unmoored them from the docks where they were rotting away. Most of them ended up miles inland as flotsam. It was kind of a happy ending -- better there than ending up sinking in place in the bays, but dangit, that was a good story and I was about done with it.

And if you were ever wondering why Houston got schnockered by Ike, it was all my fault. I never should have stolen that book from the Luther Hotel library, and not only did I undo generations of goodwill toward the media, but I also temporarily destroyed Houston.

washing machine wrote:Harvey just started dumping rain FAST around dusk yesterday and hasn't stopped. We've had one major flooding event for the last three years plus Allison in 2001, but this morning everything looks worse than all of that.

Hoping everyone stays safe. Orph, how you guys doing in Austin?

McParadigm wrote:

WaPo wrote:The total rainfall from the storm is likely to tally up to a widespread 15 to 30 inches, with a few localized spots picking up 50 inches or more. Many textbooks have the 60-inch mark as a once-in-a-million-year recurrence interval, meaning that if any spots had that amount of rainfall, they would essentially be dealing with a once-in-a-million-year event.