Students fear Ike’s destruction

The tropical cyclone made landfall early Saturday morning on the island of Galveston as a Category 2 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson scale. Gulf Coast residents, including those in the heavily populated Houston area, were left with potentially contaminated water, downed cell-phone towers and no power.

Many Galveston residents who evacuated still don’t know the condition of their homes.

Stephen Segura ’11, whose family evacuated from Galveston to Dallas right after the mandatory evacuation, does not yet know what has happened to his house. Segura said he spoke to a friend at the University of Houston whose house “is totally washed away.”

Oscar Ortiz ’11, whose family is currently staying in Austin after evacuating its home in Galveston “at the last minute,” said that he has no idea what they will be returning to.

“The real problem for us is whether the house is ok,” he said. “I’ve talked to many friends who know they don’t have a house anymore.”

One of the biggest difficulties in coping with the aftermath of the storm, Ortiz explained, is that 40 percent of residents did not leave Galveston and other coastal areas despite mandatory evacuations.

Getting in touch with friends and neighbors who remained behind has been tough, Ortiz said. He has been “watching the local news for the last two days because everything’s out. There’s no water, there’s no power, there’s no way to get in touch with people because even cell phones don’t work because the towers are down.”

“It is the worst way to start off this year,” Ortiz said. “I’m not there with my family, and they really don’t want me to go back or even be worried about it here, but it’s hard not to be worried ... It’s hard knowing that you’re so far away and that you can’t do anything about it.”

But, he added, “my family’s ok; we can rebuild.”

Segura, too, remained optimistic despite the damage to his hometown. “If the house is destroyed ... [we] can just rebuild ... It definitely is unfortunate, I’m unhappy about it, but it happened.”

Ashley Alexander ’09, whose mother is a chief of staff at a major hospital in Houston, expressed concern over the impending health situation in the Gulf. Alexander is also a member of the video staff at The Daily Princetonian. “A lot of the water pipes broke,” she said. “They don’t have any water pressure, [and] there’s a huge fear of contamination.”

“It’s been very stressful because I left a week ago [and] my mom ... has had to worry about [our home] by herself [as well as] the huge medical crisis,” she explained.

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“I wish I were there to help out,” she added.

Alexander’s family home in Houston has endured some flooding but no major structural damage. Most of her neighborhood’s 100-year-old trees are now “just lying in the street,” she said. She does not, however, have any news yet about her family’s beach house in Galveston.

The full effects of the storm have yet to be seen, especially since so many Galveston residents did not evacuate.

Segura, Ortiz and Alexander all agreed that people were skeptical of evacuating because of their experience with Hurricane Rita in 2005.

“A lot of people on the west end of Galveston” didn’t evacuate because the evacuation before Hurricane Rita was “so poorly coordinated,” Alexander said.

Ortiz said he sympathized with those who stayed. “I understand them because of what they went through with Hurricane Rita ... People got stuck on the highways, I got stuck on the highways.” A trip to Austin that would have normally taken three hours took Ortiz 40 hours in 2005.

“I think many people were traumatized by ... ‘the exodus’ ... because there was a failure in government, especially in the Houston area, because they didn’t really have a plan,” Ortiz said, pointing out that many cars broke down on the “four or five highways” that he said they could use to evacuate as a result of insufficient gasoline supplies along the route.

Princeton Texans who were not from Galveston fared better in the storm but will have to cope with the widespread loss of power throughout the affected area.

Stephanie Anderson ’10 said her family left its home in Houston because it lost power and all the surrounding stores are closed.

“It’s really weird being here and just hearing about it all. I feel so detached ... and then I got a text message from AT&T since my area code was affected by Ike — they were passing along a message from the CDC about generator safety and only drinking bottled water. I got the text during ORF class and it was just really weird,” Anderson said in an e-mail.

Zoe Goldman ’11, also from Houston, said her family and friends were not directly hit by the storm, but like so many others, they have no power.

Andres Perez ’10 has heard similar news. “Everyone that I know here from [Houston] that I have talked to is pretty much ok ... but without power,” he said in an e-mail.

“It could take weeks, maybe a month until power is restored,” Ortiz said.