GILCHRIST, Texas -- More than seven months after Hurricane Ike wrecked this unincorporated town and the rest of Bolivar Peninsula, it's still in ruins. Before the storm, there were more than 300 buildings in Gilchrist; now there are fewer than a dozen. Debris is piled along roads and trapped in dying trees. The beachfront is lined with pilings on which homes once stood.... "Nothing's left. A lot of people are gone -- just gone," says Billy Flannigan, 40, a contractor whose four-bedroom home was swept away. "No one knows about us and our problems."
September 12, 2008 seems like a long time ago...unless you happen to live in a place like Gilchrist, TX. Not that Gilchrist actually exists in any conventional sense anymore. Hurricane Ike pretty much took care of that, wiping out virtually the entire Bolivar Peninsula and leaving behind something that would have to upgrade just to be considered a Third World country.
Four years after Hurricane Katrina, we still hear about New Orleans and it's struggle to rebuild and recover. Less than nine months after Hurricane Ike hit my former hometown on the Texas Gulf Coast...and it seems as if no one (&^%$#@ cares. OK, so most of the devastation dealt to southeast Texas was done to poor rural areas. The Houston area was hit pretty hard, but because of it's location and the resources available it was able to recover relatively quickly. Still, when you talk about places like Gilchrist, Oak Island, and other well-off-the-media-radar places, 9.12.08 could well have been the day before yesterday.
Hurricane season starts in just a few days, and places like the Bolivar Peninsula are still recovering. Given the billions of federal dollars that have been pumped into the New Orleans area, would it be too much to hope that some of this largesse could find it's way to southeast Texas? Apparently so.
