Hanging out at the Museum before Gustav, we chatted with one old timer who kept referring to the hurricane as Faye – one that had missed us earlier. Jane gently corrected him each time, and finally he heard her. He thought for a moment, and said “Well, Gustav is a guy, and I’m not into guys, so maybe I will leave town”. We also had a wry comment from a member of the congregation who saw us ride up on our bikes on Sunday, when Gustav was supposed to hit that night. He commented, “These folks from Florida…cruising around so blasé…”. Locals had expected that this was our first hurricane, not knowing that we had gone through our own intense hurricane experiences, and more of them!
Even though Gustav didn’t affect us directly, it hit the surrounding areas really hard. Since Gueydan is a small town and doesn’t have everything, the residents are very involved in all the towns around here, and any damage to those towns is felt right away. Gustav blew through by Monday night, with some feeder bands still trailing through on Tuesday – wind and rain. Everything was still closed and boarded up because so many people evacuated and couldn’t get home quickly. Most everything that was boarded up stayed boarded up, with the threat of Ike looming.
Post hurricane traffic is pretty predictable – there are the returning evacuees; there’s an extraordinary number of tree trimming trucks and utilities trucks, and an unusual number of supply trucks, trying to get through to restock stores. We had all of that. So many evacuated that it was deathly quiet around here, except for the hurricane traffic.
Rosemary’s birthday
My birthday was Wednesday, and it was looking to be a pretty grim birthday. On Tuesday Max took us to lunch at Johnny’s, and Fred had treated us to a milkshake, and that all felt celebratory. Chelsea and I rode around town, but Wednesday was pretty dreary. We did splurge that night, on my birthday, with a simple shrimp salad at Johnny’s. Max wanted to send me flowers, but he couldn’t even do that, as the florist was closed and no other stores were open anywhere!
But, far be it from me to let an adventure go by – we stopped by and saw Heuetta and her husband at D&D Seafood, right on Main Street, and discovered it was the first day of alligator season. The season is only a month long, normally the whole month of September. Hunters get permits to trap and kill a certain number of alligators, and then they bring them to a location to get them skinned and to get the meat filleted. We stopped and watched for a while, and what an experience that was! I won’t say any more now, as I’ll write a separate blog on the skinning. Suffice it to say that it’s not for the fainthearted…but it certainly made for a memorable birthday…
On Thursday Max came by for us and took us up to Jennings for lunch and for shopping at Wal-Mart (yes, that’s a really big treat for us!). We had the buffet at an Asian restaurant – something totally different than we’ve had in ages. It was wonderful. Wal-Mart was an especial treat because we got to get all sorts of things we’d been out of, like great bread, Tabasco jelly, EmergenC, and Power Bars. Max had gotten Chelsea a movie or two and a headset for her birthday, so he told me to pick out some movies too. We had so much fun going through the racks and choosing! We finally settled on Wild Hogs with John Travolta, the last two Bourne movies with Matt Damon, and The Lake House with Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock. We have watched them numerous times already…
We got back home only to have the pastor, Doug, come over with flowers that had been delivered (from Max, though the card said Chelsea), and a small cash gift (we’re convinced it was Doug but he didn’t admit to it). 🙂 It was such a great birthday in the midst of the chaos!!
Ike
It was hard to believe that we would have yet another hurricane so close after the first one, and another near direct hit. It reminded us a little too much of the 4 major hurricanes we lived through in 2004 and 2005 in Delray Beach – Frances, Ivan, Jeanne and Wilma. In 2004 we were getting a direct hit every few weeks! We certainly got a lot of experience in being prepared, both physically and psychologically. Being here in Gueydan for Gustav and Ike was a bit of déjà vu.
We made the decision once again not to evacuate, for a number of reasons, not the least of which were the horror stories coming out from those who evacuated for Gustav. Nothing had changed for us – we ran through the list of reasons to stay and reasons to leave, and there was really no choice. We were staying, despite mandatory evacuations for our parish (county) south of Hwy 14 (right across the street from us).
We were in a bigger group of non-evacuees this time, as so many had had such bad experiences in Gustav. There were stories of having it take 15 hours to go what is normally a 3-4 hour drive, with no access to bathroom facilities when needed. Roads would be closed off just in front of where evacuees needed to go, so they’d need to go several hours and many miles out of the way to circle around.
Those in shelters were frequently horrified at the conditions. One woman told us of sleeping in her car, and staying in her car as much as she could during the days because the bathrooms were filthy and were full of women doing drugs, and never mind the crowded conditions and lack of privacy in the main areas. The evacuees were also not permitted to come back to their homes when they wanted to, even if there had been no damage. Many of them hit roadblocks and then simply backtracked, using back roads to get home.
Back on our front porch on Main St. we watched the usual evacuee traffic. We saw more cattle and horses being evacuated, although most of them were evacuated for Gustav. This time we saw convoys of soldiers heading towards Texas. Everyone was already ready from Gustav – houses were boarded up, and people started refreshing supplies early in the week, so there was no sense of panic. We did our usual riding around, and we decided to get some last minute things at Marceaux’s, one of the local supermarkets. We rounded the corner and were really taken aback by the number of people there! For a minute or two we thought that perhaps the parking lot had turned into an evacuation meeting area, but no, it was just an astonishing number of people buying supplies!
One thing I didn’t mention in the Gustav blog was the preparations the fire and police departments made. For quite awhile the night that Gustav was supposed to hit, we entertained ourselves by watching the guys get everything together. We watched all the cots come in, and watched the guys settle in for the duration. We called it the “big boys sleepover”. They had the metal porch roof tied down to steel bars that were embedded in the concrete in the walkway, and they had tied the carport roof to the water truck with ratcheting tie-downs. The water truck holds 10,000 gallons of water, so it darn well wasn’t going anywhere! There wasn’t all the preparation of the cots and so on for Ike, but they did the tie-downs again for the porch and carport roofs.
Chelsea and I walked around the church and house to make sure that things looked okay, and we decided to use our own bungie cords to tie down pieces of the church fence. They had been ripped off in Gustav, and hadn’t been repaired, and we didn’t want them to be flying objects coming right through our windows. (Footnote: they worked great, but we knew they would – we had used them in our series of major hurricanes in Florida.)
We did have more excitement from this one than the last – there was a lot more wind and we had a lot more rain. Chelsea and I opted to sleep in the bedroom instead of the hallway and we regretted our decision. The house is up on pillars, so we felt the wind howl through all night and it was pretty spooky. We have two sets of double windows in the bedroom, and that didn’t help either.
The big thing about this storm was going to be the storm surge. Though we weren’t supposed to be in the direct path, we were in the northeast quadrant which always the gets the brunt of the wind and rain. There’s frequently more severe damage in that section, and we were thankful the hurricane didn’t land any closer to us. As it was, the storm surge was devastating anyway. Up to that point, Hurricane Rita in 2005 had been the worst in ages, but Ike managed to beat that record in most areas around here. Picture an arm in a swimming pool, held out to the side and scooping water along its full length, and you’ll have an idea of how a storm surge works. The force of the winds acts as scoop on the water, pushing huge amount of saltwater ahead of it. You can imagine the devastation left behind when a 15-foot wall of water washes onshore, rolling many miles inland.
Houses are literally washed off their foundations, if not broken apart by the force of the water. Crops are ruined, cattle and horses are drowned, local animals and birds are drowned, and vegetation is ripped up and washed away. Areas along the coast that were destroyed in Rita have now been destroyed again, and many weren’t even quite completely rebuilt. Most areas were still down to bare bones after Rita, with many residents and shop owners not having the heart or the resources or the will to rebuild. Those who did rebuild are now wiped out again, only 3 years later.
Areas within a few miles of us were flooded, and up to a week later, water still covered the roads along parts of our bike rides, and the canals, swales, and irrigation ditches were full to overflowing. Everything has pretty much dried up now, not quite 6 weeks later, but much of the vegetation is dead because the saltwater killed it. I don’t think there was the wholesale death of cattle in either Gustav or Ike, because farmers learned from Rita three years ago, and moved the cattle ahead of the storm. Can you imagine the logistics of moving 60 to 800 head of cattle?
Hansford told us of several stories about cattle – he was called back offshore to the oilrigs within a day after Rita, to get operations going again, and as he pulled up in a boat to one of the areas, he was really startled to see a cow standing on the rig! It had apparently been swimming around and finally was able to climb up on something. He told of a photo that was taken not far from here – a photo of a house porch after Rita, with perhaps a dozen cows huddled on the porch, all settled in, with the house and the porch completely surrounded by water.
Hurricanes are a strange phenomenon. You know they are coming, so there’s time to prepare, but the preparation is quite a bit of work. There’s the deciding to leave or go, and if you leave, you’ve got to pack and decide where to go and then get there, usually under very difficult circumstances. There’s the preparing of your property, whatever it is – your house, apartment, car, animals. You will probably need to put up shutters over your doors and windows – a hot and dirty and heavy job. If you stay you’ll need a lot of easy-to-prepare-and-eat food and water; you’ll need a first aid kit and you’ll need to be prepared to do potentially heavy clean-up, never mind being ready and able to make urgent repairs immediately. You’ve got to be prepared to go without electricity and maybe water and phones for quite awhile, and you may not even be able to get gas for your generator, if you even have a generator. And when the storm is finally over, there’s the sometimes-massive cleanup, lack of resources, and general disruption of daily life. It’s a lot of time just putting away hurricane supplies and taking down shutters and cleaning the yard.
Before the hurricanes there’s a sense of “hurry up and wait”. Nothing is usual, but nothing has happened yet. It’s impossible to concentrate on anything. Boredom sets in, but it’s hard not to feel jittery. The only topic of conversation is hurricanes. It’s a great time to catch up on movies and books, because you’ll be too tired or distracted to do much else. It’s also a great opportunity to learn a tremendous amount about meteorology. Chelsea and I loved the bike rides around town, checking things out, talking to locals, and we loved sitting on the front porch just watching. Being right on Hwy 14 (Main St) we get to see everything.
The Ike damage was really severe, though we escaped completely unscathed here in Gueydan – again, we didn’t even lose power. Once again, things were all closed up, and all open stores were crowded and working with scarce resources. The local fast food place – Johnny’s – turned out to be the only place in 30 miles that was open, and they were absolutely swamped for 4 or 5 days, until other places got up and running.
More than two weeks later, we still hadn’t had anyone do any cleanup on our yard, so Chelsea and I decided to do it ourselves. We offered to clean the rain gutters for the church, so we did the gutters for “our” house – the old parsonage – and we cleaned the gutters for the pastor next door (a much bigger job!). There’s nothing like cleaning out mosquito larvae and stinky rotting leaves. We picked up all branches off the lawn and raked and bagged all the leaves. The pastor, Doug, saw us doing the cleanup and hired us to do his house as well, including cleaning out the flowerbeds. Nothing had been done after Gustav or Ike, so it was a big job (we loved the extra money). We then moved on and raked up the church yard as well, since it looked awful compared to ours and the pastor’s. We’ve got some before and after photos in our photo gallery, and some photos of the houses all boarded up.
One thing that Ike drastically changed for us was our route for leaving here. We kept hoping that we would still be able to go the coastal route, but a month later the news wasn’t good. Even if we were willing to ride down that route, there are no places to stay, no places for food, no shelter, and the roads are closed to all but residents. One report told of the hospital in Cameron delaying its opening until they had sufficient quantities on hand of anti-venom for snake bites. As the reporter was interviewing the staff, one alligator was curled up in the hospital emergency bay, one was walking across the parking lot, and a third was trying to crawl into a pickup truck. We’re all for adventure, but that’s outside our parameters!
As a result of the Ike damage, we have changed our route to go north of Houston, and not cut back to the coastline until Corpus Christi. We will head north out of Lake Arthur and cut over to Texas above the damage, and join the Adventure cycling route from Silsbee TX to Austin, where we will part ways from the Adventure cycling route and head down to the coast.