Getting the Brush

I might have been premature yesterday when I typed kudos to FEMA.
The agency announced late in the day that it would not extend the deadline for reimbursing Jefferson County for 100 percent of debris-cleanup costs. That means cleanup will be stalled until the county signs a contract with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The signing is expected today, with the Corps expected to be in action within 48 hours.
In its flush letter to the county, FEMA stated: "Based on our review of all the information available, it has been determined that the impacts associated with Hurricane Rita are not much of such severity and magnitude as to warrant further extension of the 100 percent federal funding for debris removal and emergency protective measures ... "
According to recent FEMA estimated given to me in a telephone conference call Oct. 11, Rita left behind 5 million cubic yards of debris. That's enough to build a two-lane road from Los Angeles to London. The Hoover Dam, by comparison, contains only 3.3 million cubic yards of concrete.
Not severe and of great magnitude?
Too bad the Texas A&M bonfire near Thanksgiving is no more, because an impressive pyrotechnic display could be had, perhaps one inspiring enough to motivate the Aggies into beating the Longhorns this year.
County Judge Carl Griffith pointed out that the Corps might take longer to clean up the debris, and it will cost the federal goverment an additional $18 million, because the county-hired contractors were paid less. The contractors were making $11.28 to $14 per cubic yards, compared with the $20 to $21 the Corps pays, he said.
The feds are still going to pay, but it's going to cost them more. The good part, I suppose, is that despite the fact that the U.S. taxpayers will foot the bill, the Corps from what I'm told will hire locally, meaning that some folks are going to get a nice raise.
Meanwhile, Louisiana got a 30-day extension for the 100 percent reimbursement for Rita debris. While that side of the state border got walloped, there is a far greater population here in Jefferson County, home to the large cities of Beaumont and Port Arthur and a whole lot of people in between.
Regarding federal cleanup help, the county had two choices: Hire private contracts and get FEMA reimbursement or bring in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to do the work.
The former lasts 34 days before slipping from 100 percent reimbursement to 75 percent. The county estimated that it would pay $10 million to make up the other 25 percent.
So now they're scrambling to sign a contract with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which already is at work in 11 surrounding Southeast Texas counties. More than a month after the storm, only one-third of the Jefferson County debris has been removed, and the volume picked up so far is slightly higher than the amount of debris the Corps has removed from the 11 other counties combined, Griffith said.
Life here will take a huge step toward normalcy with the removal of all the rotting crap, from moldy refrigerators and heaping piles of building debris to small mountains of hacked-up timber.
We've all been pretty patient so far, but it's only a matter of time before debris rage sets in throughout the land.

Fangs for FEMA

They're already yipping in Florida about emergency response to Hurricane Wilma, which hit three days ago.
Of course, the Federal Emergency Management Agency again is in the storm's eye. People want water, gas, ice, food and electricity. Who wouldn't?
Sure, FEMA has had problems. The federal government deserved everything it got and more for the pitiful lethargic response to the post-Hurricane Katrina humanitarian crisis in New Orleans, where poor local government preparedness got bushwhacked and exposed. FEMA got more than it was supposed to handle in that catastrophe. But the slow reaction still was inexcusable.
Enter Hurricane Rita.
As much as the skeptical, critical and investigative journalist in me would like to gut FEMA from belly button to eyeball with a dull deer antler, I have to admit that I think the agency did - and continues to do - a pretty good job here. Cash is flowing. Blue roof tarps are flapping in the breeze everywhere.
As their counterparts are doing in Florida, local leaders here were barking about FEMA two days after the storm. They wanted generators. They wanted food and water for their people.
In the days following a shocking catastrophe, something that most people never see in their lives, the stress machine is running all out, cranking out pain, tension, confusion and fear like a newspaper-spitting press. FEMA all the while remains calm and methodical. It has seen this all before.
As I've written before in this blog, there is a misunderstanding about how FEMA works. During the height of the criticism here, a FEMA official sat down with me and explained how his agency works. It waits until all local resources are exhausted. Yes, there are 50 idle generators just sitting out there at the federal staging area, but FEMA isn't going to react to the local panic by mindlessly sending them out to whoever cries for one. It has to prioritize. It has to ensure that the generator is the right fit for a particular building.
Three days after Hurricane Rita, I filled out the online application for FEMA aid. The next day, a FEMA inspector called me to make an appointment to see my house. The next morning, he showed up on time for the appointment. Days later, I was approved to receive $2,000.
An error I made on my FEMA application has since held up the money, but I'm confident I will get it. Sure, there was a long line at the FEMA help booth set up for problem applicants such as myself. Sure, it was impossible to get through via telephone to FEMA until last week, a month after the storm.
But those guys have a lot on their hands, and it just takes some patience, persistence and maybe a little endurance dealing with all this.
So that brings us back to Florida, where the same FEMA-related complaints are ringing loudly in the media.
However, while Wilma was stomping the Yucatan, Florida residents had plenty of time to stock up on food, water and supplies. In fact, the storm roared in two or three days later than initially projected. Florida Gov. Jeb Bush pointed out yesterday that "it isn't that hard to get 72 hours of food and water, to just do the simple things we ask people to do."
You'd think Florida residents by now would be storm savvy. Four hurricanes hammered them last year, and in Andrew in 1992 they had biggest brute of them all.
By comparison, a huge percentage of the Southeast Texas population skedaddled prior to Rita, so the post-storm need for necessities was minimized, and emergency response leaders could focus on needs such as debris removal, water and sewer, and other issues.
No matter how prepared a community is for catastrophe, there is always enough chaos and confusion to hamper emergency response and provide the general public with everything it needs, including minimal inconvenience.
Wilma victims have several things going for them. Gas stations seem to be open, albeit with long lines. Power was out for 6 million residents, but about a fifth of them have power today. (It took five days for the energy company here to get its own headquarters off generator power.) Also, the Florida weather is nice: sunny, with highs in the high 60s and lows in the high 40s. (It was hot and humid here, with highs in the high 90s.)
Even the flooding, at least in Key West, was nicer. I saw pictures yesterday of people wading through emerald green water in the streets, as opposed to the black, disease-carrying toxic soup that New Orleans residents dealt with. There was one Key West photo of a little girl on a swing set, smiling and skimming back and forth over that gorgeous green water.
I'm not trying to minimize the Wilma catastrophe. There appears to be a lot of damage there.
But I suppose it's human nature to look at one disaster and feel a sense a pride from having weathered something that perhaps was worse.
Perhaps I've become a storm snob.

Neighbors and Fences

I've never been much of a Robert Frost fan. In fact, I have little use for poetry. I'd rather read the sports section.

But Frost's work, "Mending Wall," has been on my mind ever since Hurricane Rita drop-kicked and bludgeoned Southeast Texas fences about a month ago. I didn't know the name of the poem and was unsure of its author until I typed "Good fences make good neighbors" into the Google search engine.

Here's a snippet:

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down!" I could say "Elves" to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there,
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

The work is about New England farmers who built stone walls separating their properties. In the winter, the frozen soil would push up the stones. In the spring, the farmers got out there and stacked the stones into a wall between them. Had there not been a wall, perhaps the farmers would have gotten into a rake fight over something silly.

I suppose the poem underscores the human need for walls or boundaries.

I need a fence to keep my young kids from wandering out of the back yard. It also provides a burglar barrier. There is security in knowing that in that split second when you're not looking, a curious toddler will not venture out and do things that can become a parent's worst nightmare. Or that a burglar can't get into the back yard without making himself noticeable by scaling a fence.

Ever since Rita's winds sent a neighbor's pine trees crashing into my house and fence, my wife and I have felt a sense of vulnerability and insecurity. I'm not going to fix the fence until the building contractors repair the house. If nothing else, the breached fence allows them easy access to the back yard.

Despite it being my neighbor's tree, we are responsible for the damage, according the insurance company, which calls it an "Act of God." The insurance company will pay for the home damage - minus the deductible - but not the fence. Other insurance companies do cover fences. I wish I had known that earlier.

The same thing has played out throughout the storm-smashed region. Everyone I know who has a smashed fence says it was a neighbor's tree that did the job.

This introduces an interesting dynamic to neighborly relations.

One co-worker told me yesterday that a neighbor whose tree obliterated his fence is harassing him, demanding immediate fence repair and not offering a penny to help pay for it.

In my case, I'm not getting harassed, but the neighbor hasn't offered to help pay for fence repairs. She might believe that my insurance covers the damage. I haven't approached her yet. Like everyone else, she probably has buffet line of problems.

The tree dudes who got the pine off my house cut the tree right to the property line, so the neighbor had to take care of what was left on her land, including a massive stump that required a crane for removal. That cost hundreds of dollars.

Other than the neighbor's heartfelt apology the day she came home and discovered the tree on my house, we haven't spoken. I know she felt bad, because she stood there in the street looking like the frightened figure in that portrait "The Scream."

< : - O

Meanwhile, the back neighbor offered to help pay for the damaged fence section between us, even though it was pine owner's branch that inflicted the damage. So I made a new friend, one with whom I had never spoken until I recently poked my head through the gap and said "Hello there!" while he and his wife were toiling in their back yard.

It raises interesting questions about how to be a good neighbor. The neighbor with the pummeling pines has no liability for the damage to our house, yard and fence. But what would you do if you were her?

Had it been our tree on the neighbor's house, I'd probably help clean the mess, from hauling away logs and debris to rebuilding fences and Herculean raking. I would have offered to split the material costs for the fence and erected the sucker myself. My wife would have made a pie.

But I wouldn't have offered to pay for her insurance deductible.

Maybe the neighbor doesn't have the means to fix my fence, be it physical, emotional or financial. Maybe she's mad at me for some reason. Maybe she's scared to talk to me. Maybe she has troubles beyond my imagination and just can't handle a new hassle right now. Maybe she's waiting for me to talk to her. Maybe she just doesn't care.

Either way, there will be an invisible, unspoken wall between as long as the partition of non-communication remains in place.

Swings and Misses

The source of post-Hurricane Rita frustration no longer centers on the long lines at the grocery store, the sluglike traffic and the mountain of logs in the front yard.
It has nothing to do with playing middle man between insurance company and building contractor. Nor does it have to do with long hours at the office. Or FEMA. Or the wait at the gas station. Or those terrible gas prices. Or the fractured fence. Or the holes in the house. Or money flying out of my bank account like roof tiles during Hurricane Rita. Or the kids' stuffy noses. Or the mindless array of loose ends.
No, the primary stress machine for me now is my inability to find a dadblammed Houston Astros hat.
I've been on the hunt for about a week now. The search became a fevered, desperate quest over the weekend, when I and my family scoured grocery, drug and convenience stores, sports specialty shops, Wal Mart and Academy. Twice.
No luck. Sold out. Astros fever has gripped the land.
The only Astros hat I found was an unadjustable one big enough to serve as a shrimp boat net. You'd have to have some kind of melon to fit into that hat.
I've got a lot of hats, but I only wear a couple of them, usually only on weekends. I've got a Kansas City Chiefs hat I won in a bet, and then there's the Texas A&M hat that is unwearable at this time because it adorned my sweaty noggin during the post-Rita swampy days. I might need to put it on and walk through a car wash to knock the stench out of it.
But I need an Astros hat, one of those adjustable blue ones with the star with two sides missing. Someone probably spent $1 million on the design for that eight-sided star. Heck, I'd take one of those old gaudy orange Astros hats with an "H" on the front.
The Astros are down 0-2 to the Chicago White Sox in the World Series, so I need that hat, and the Astros need me to have that hat.
Anyone know where I can get one?

I Found the Lost Notepad!

The yellow notepad had become as important as a headlamp, water and whiskey during the dark, swampy days here following Hurricane Rita.
Connected to the outside world only by cell phone, I had essential telephone numbers and story idea information on that notepad, which I carried with me everywhere. It was a vital organ.
And then I lost it.
During the post-storm delirium, as we trudged around like drooling zombies in The Swamp, the nickname for our sweatshop, lots of things got misplaced: cell phones, headlamps, potato chips, water bottles, open beers, minds. Knowing this, I clutched that notepad as if it were a lifeline tossed to me in the turbulent ocean.
But then I lost it.
I had no idea when. I just suddenly realized that I had someone else's notepad, perhaps plucked out of the sea of notepads lying around. I was certain that it had occurred somewhere around the tables set up as a makeshift newsroom overlooking the main entrance.
But it wasn't there, and my desperate interrogations of those who had worked in that area came up empty. And whose notepad did I have? Was this person freaking out like me?
I searched every floor of the building and could not find the notepad. It was gone.
So, using the info stored in my cell phone, I spent a good hour piecing together whose number belonged to whom. I put them all in my new notepad, which had been someone else's notepad, and had a new vital organ to protect.
Subsequently, that notepad became even more important, for it contained phone numbers, FEMA account PIN and password numbers, a kazillion insurance-related numbers, and a jillion idea tidbits I later used for this very blog. I slept with the notepad for two weeks. I have it inches away from me right now. Touch my notepad, and I'll smack ya.
Like a jilted lover getting over a breakup, I accepted the fact that my old notepad was gone, although the mystery continued to tug at me.
Until yesterday.
While lurching around in my dusty, disjointed, plastic-wrapped, storm-battered office in search of computer stereo speakers and CDs needed to brighten the ambiance in our temporary first-floor workspace, a yellow object caught my eye in the nearby photo office. I could see in there because walls have been removed, leaving little more than metal support posts, looking like ribs. I stumbled through open walls, ducked into the photo office, grabbed the notepad and quickly recognized my horrid handwriting, which I call "slophand," a barbaric form of shorthand that no one but me can read. I resigned myself to poor handwriting long ago, during the Big Chief Notepad days.
I figured the long-lost yellow notepad landed here one of two ways:
1.) I left it sitting in another part of the photo office, near one of the only telephone landlines working in the building after the storm. I had used that line, as well as neighboring computers, several times. Someone picked up and moved the notepad into the photo editor's office for some reason.
or
2.) I set down the notepad right where I found it while searching for AA batteries in a nearby cabinet.
I'm thinking it was the latter, but who knows?
We were all tired and punch drunk back then.
There's nothing I really need in the notepad, but there is some comfort and relief from finding something whose mysterious loss drove me squirrelly.

FEMA Revisited

So I think I might, maybe, possibly, perhaps could have straightened out this FEMA money debacle, for which I have no one to blame but myself.

But first, let me recap:

1.) On Sept. 27, three days after Hurricane Rita galloped through town, I filled out the online FEMA form begging for money. Considering that there were hardly any people here due to the evacuation, and considering electricity and Internet access were scarce anyway, I was way ahead of the game.
2.) On Sept. 28, a FEMA representative contacted me and set up an appointment for the next morning to check out the damage.
3.) On Sept. 29, FEMA guy shows up right on time. I might have been the first Beaumont resident to see a FEMA field inspector, because he told me there was conflicting information about the ability to move around in Beaumont, so inspectors were hesitant to come. I clarified matters and became a valuable information resource for FEMA, or at least for this guy, if nothing else.
4.) Later that day, I realized with horror that I juxtaposed the bank routing and checking account number on the FEMA form. I can't access the online account to make the change, so I subsequently spent hours and hours on hold on the FEMA line, only to be cut off. Twice.
5.) I discovered the FEMA help center in the mall parking lot. I wait in a long line, use the phone and get the number problem fixed.
6.) A week later, I checked with the bank, but no FEMA money was deposited. It's only supposed to take 48 hours for direct deposit.
7.) On Oct. 11, I waited again in the long FEMA line, used the phone and was told the money was sent out Oct. 3. I said I hadn't received the money, so the FEMA agent said the money would be reissued.

That brings us to two days ago, when I checked the bank again and found no FEMA deposit.
So yesterday, I called that dreaded FEMA line again and - BINGO! - I got through after being on hold only 2 minutes. I explained the problem, and the FEMA person told me that the money issuance was on hold because the agency had received no indication from the bank that the money never went through.
Panic set in.
Hurricane Wilma is coming, and when she hits Florida, as she is predicted to do, FEMA once again will become a nasty quagmire of telephone calls, confusion and conflagration. It will take at least a month to get back to 2-minute-wait status on that FEMA line, and I've been spending money like crazy to get life back to some semblance of normal.
My problem must be solved before Wilma makes landfall.
So I scurried over to the bank and explained the state of affairs. A bank woman who overheard my plight came over and said she handled the same juxtaposition problem, and that the matter was turned over to the U.S. Treasury Department for review.

THE U.S. TREASURY DEPARTMENT!!!!!

< : - 0

Not wanting to add another bureaucracy into the mix, I begged the bank officer to call FEMA and see if we could take care of this right there, right then.
So she called and got through in under 7 minutes, and a FEMA supervisor on the other end got involved and told me that my money was stuck in some kind of departmental loop-de-loop. He assured me that FEMA realized the problem and that the money - after running its course through finance, the FEMA lounge and some guy named Clyde in the basement - it would be disbursed in about a week.
As my wife keeps saying about just about everything regarding outside help, I'll believe it when I see it.

Wilma. Whoa.

Those infrared hurricane images remind me of a staph infection I had on my thigh a couple of years ago: a red, angry center with outer bands of decreasing intensity.
Now that we Southeast Texans know what it's like to be in a hurricane's center, we know what's coming for those poor Florida folks supposedly in the track of that record-setting meteorological staph infection known as Hurricane Wilma, at this time a Category 5 monster and the most intense hurricane ever recorded.
It's a stomach-sickening site, the projected pathway and predictions of doom and destruction.
But Florida people in general are more experienced than we are. They know their state's neck sticks out into hurricane turf. They are used to these things, surviving four wind-blasting whoppers last year alone, punching both sides of the peninsula with brass-knuckle fists. Charley. Francis. Ivan. Jeanne.
Only three hurricanes have been Category 5 at U.S. landfall: an unnamed storm hitting the Florida Keys in 1935, Camille along the Gulf Coast in 1969 and that diabolical Andrew in Florida in 1992.
Here's a good link to powerful storms: http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/Landsea/deadly/Table4.htm
Rita, while out in the Gulf, became a Category 5 and history's third most intense storm, based on low barometric pressure. (I still don't fully understand all this intensity-barometer stuff.) Wilma in the past 24 hours knocked her down to No. 3.
Wilma is projected to be a Category 3 or 4 by landfall ... maybe. After pumping out 175 mph winds earlier today, she lost 10 mph by midday and could come ashore with only 110 mph, chopped down by various meteorological factors, according to various news reports.
However, all this predicting is rather unpredictable. Two days before Rita hit, the storm was still projected to strike halfway between Houston and Corpus Christi.
Rita reportedly came ashore with 120 mph winds and was still cranking around 110 mph when she reached Beaumont, although official numbers will take some time to compile. A lot of wind gauges blew away, so weather analyzers are conducting "forensic meteorology," looking at damage and whatnot, to put together the picture.
Although forecasts for now call for Wilma to be a bit wimpier than Rita at landfall, it's disheartening to know what's coming Saturday, probably around the Fort Myers, Fla., area.
People might die. People will lose homes and businesses. Power and water will go out. Trees and debris will litter the community for weeks. Gas will be scarce. Simple pleasures, such as cable TV and Egg McMuffins, will temporarily disappear. Hassles will pile atop hassles.
Hurricane season doesn't end until late November, so it might be only a matter of days or weeks before another menacing red blotch appears on the infrared.
The storm will leave another hole in another community, much in the way that nasty staph infection left a hole in my leg.
But most things heal with time.

The Lighter Side of Loss

We didn't lose much to Hurricane Rita. Money has been and will continue to be spent on things ranging from food replenishment to home repairs to new clothing.
However, Fishy McFish, a 5-year-old chunk of wedding cake and a 16-year-old bottle of South Texas white wine cannot be replaced.
Fishy McFish - one of those black, bug-eyed goldfish with a fin display that made him look like a Chinese junk ship - was a present to my son, Curt, on his second birthday last year. He was a frisky, friendly little fish with a personality. At feeding time, he'd come to the side of his bowl and wag enthusiastically, like a dog that's happy to see you. You could even poke a finger in the water and pet him.
While securing the house the morning before the storm struck, I thought about taking Fishy McFish with me, up to my temporary newspaper-office home. But he didn't look so good. He was turning from black to gold, and his signature wag was looking a little lethargic. Perhaps he knew what was coming and that the end was near.
So I sprinkled some food in his bowl and wished him good luck.
The next day, hours after Rita had subsided to breeze-and-drizzle status, I went home to check out the damage. Sure enough, Fishy McFish was belly-up in his bowl.
Poor little guy. I can't imagine the stress he went through during the howling winds, particularly when the 100-foot pine tree smashed into the roof above him.
He was a great little fish, and I wish I could have given him a proper funeral, but the toilets weren't working, so Fishy McFish's final resting place became the gutter in front of the house.
Now about that wedding cake.
Amy and I married in July 2000. The marriage of the millennium. On our first anniversary, we'd forgotten to pull that ceremonial wedding-cake chunk out of the freezer. The next year, we forgot again. Then it became a tradition to not eat it.
That elderly, freezer-burned piece of cake was one of the few items I salvaged when I got rid of the perishable food the morning of the storm. For two days, I kept it in a cooler tucked under a desk. When the ice ran low, I stuck it in a back deep freezer in the company kitchen.
The deep-freezer food managed to stay frozen for days and days following the storm. Periodically, I checked on the cake. Had it thawed, I was going to eat it, for symbolic reasons. The cake must be eaten.
But then tragedy struck. After power was restored, someone went into the kitchen and cleaned out the refrigerators, freezers and ice makers. The cake was gone. I made a half-hearted effort to dig through the trash, but it wasn't there, either. A tradition shattered.
OK, and now for the bottle of wine.
During the early 1990s, I worked as a reporter for the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. A fellow reporter came back from doing a story on a South Texas vineyard. She gave me a bottle of white wine. A haphazardly drawn label decorated the bottle. The wine, bottled in 1989, according to the label, had a lot of sediment in it. I assumed taste quality was minimal.
For some reason, I kept that wine all these years. It had no sentimental value attached to that period of my life. I don't even remember who gave it to me.
Nevertheless, I've been lugging that thing around for more than a decade, through three different jobs and four housing moves.
Since spring 2001, it had been sitting in the wine rack in our bar. Occasionally, I've wanted to pop it open and taste it, but then I decided to leave it alone, maybe for another 60 years. I'll drink it on my 100th birthday and then probably die.
Last night, however, I went into the bar to get some wine and noticed that the old wine bottle had made its own decision. The cork, looking like something found at the bottom of the Titanic, was pushed out, within a millimeter of popping.
So I grabbed the bottle and a wine glass and headed to the kitchen for the final uncorking. The contents didn't look like wine. It looked like Beaumont water three days after Rita. I assumed sitting in a swampy house without air conditioning for days had taken its toll.
I poured a glass and took a mouthful. It wasn't bad, really. And it was strong, too, more like whiskey than wine. I didn't want to ingest it, so I spit out the mouthful and poured the rest of the wine down the sink.
I got what I needed, though. Having lost the wedding cake, I sure as hell wasn't going to get screwed out of at least tasting that crappy old wine.

Owed, Owned, Onerous and Ornery

I call it The Struggle.
It doesn't matter where you drive. It's going to take awhile. No matter what you want, it's going to take determination and endurance to get it.
Some traffic is due to the thousands of powerline crews, insurance agents, roofers, builders and various jackleg opportunists, such as the "I Survived Rita" T-shirt sellers, crawling over the city like bagworms in an oak tree. But then there is driver stupidity, hypnotized rubberneckers slowly drifting between lanes and using cell phones to report a twisted sign, an interesting debris pile or a snapped tree. They should have seen the place the day after the storm.
Hassle and struggle are a way of life now. The victims feel like someone, anyone, owes them something. A week after the storm, a huge line of cars formed in the mall parking lot. People wanted free federal water, ice and a ham sandwich, and they waited for hours and burned a lot of gas to get it. Never mind that grocery stores were open.
I'm not looking for freebies, but I want what I'm entitled to. I'll have to walk across a mile-long strip of flypaper in lead boots to get it. I'll try to minimize the bellyaching.
Juggle, juggle, toil and struggle. Traffic. Trees. Debris. Insurance agents. Insurance adjusters. Long lines at the home-improvement stores. Long grocery lines. Big wait at banks. FEMA. Red Cross. Salvation Army. Garbage collectors. Packed restaurants. Three-day wait to get a haircut. Mosquitos. Impatient people. Can I please get a beer here?
Welcome to the University of Disaster. Tuition: $2,000 deductible.
Do you know how much it costs to fix a square foot of roof? I do, sort of, I think, but building materials are getting more expensive. Simple supply-and-demand economics, thanks to Rita and Katrina.
Do you know why they tell you to turn off power and water and empty your refrigerator prior to a storm? Power: Electricity returning to a home with damaged wiring could mean a fire. Water: Storm surge and flooding can send raw sewage into your homes via plumbing. Refrigerator: Eeewww.
Did you know that insurance pays for gutter damage but not fence repair? I'd rather have fence coverage. A neighbor's pine tree karate chopped my fence, along with gutters, roof, ceiling, bricks and Sheetrock. Yep, the fence-repair ball is in my court, but if you were my neighbor, what would you do to help? Would you send your yard crew over to rake up the blanket of grass-killing pine needles? Apple pie?
What would Jesus do? Insurance companies have an answer. Hurricane Rita: an "Act of God."
I guess when one dog-paddles in a honey pool for weeks during The Struggle, it's easy to poke a finger heavenward and blame the omnipotent. But then I look at our armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, soldiers suffering a far greater struggle and away from their families for a year or so. They have it worse than most of us could ever imagine. STRUGGLE: all caps and italicized.
I don't believe God stuck his index finger in the Atlantic and, as if stirring whipped cream into his latte, swizzled counterclockwise and created Hurricane Rita. Rita didn't park a car bomb outside a hospital. She didn't strap a bomb on her back and run into a restaurant.
Rita did what hurricanes do and have always done before recorded time, and I think we'll all be better off in the long run just having this experience.
Act of God, eh?
Well, if that were true, why were the liquor stores among the first businesses to open after the storm?

Routine, Sort Of

Routine breeds stability, I suppose.
Life, at least my life, has returned to some semblance of routine.
I got up around 7 a.m. today, as usual. Got the kids moving while the wife slept. Turned on the Disney channel. Fixed the kids some waffles. Ate cereal. Read the newspaper. Took care of the leftover dishes. Showered. Got my 3-year-old son, Curt, dressed. Took him to school. Engaged in the usual tactics to get him from Point A (car) to Point B (classroom). He insists on opening the door. Thirty-plus pounds of determined fury vs. a door a fifth-grader has trouble opening. He makes everyone down there laugh. He makes me laugh, too.
Drove to work. Parked in the usual spot. Got coffee. Tried to settle in at my temporary desk, where I've been since two or three days after Hurricane Rita struck Sept. 23-24.
Wait! Where is my hard drive? I've been moved! *%$#$#@!!!
So much for the comfy business-office confines, where some of us have coexisted for more than a week with the calculator-punching, stamp-slamming ladies of The Mezzanine. A nearby stamp slammer had a pretty good rhythm going the other day, so I accompanied her by singing "Purple Haze." We're a salty bunch, and they found us interesting and amusing, but I suppose it's time they got their desks back. Half of them have been here all week; the other half is expected back Monday. Our swift and decisive eviction, courtesy of our computer staff, apparently began early this morning.
I'm not too crazy about where they're sticking me. I'll be stacked alongside others like a chip in a sideways Pringles can, working elbow-to-elbow in a little room, a space that has gone largely unused in the past. I'll be out in the open. Exposed. They'll hear me talking on the telephone. They'll see my favorite Internet sites and e-mails. They'll see me blogging and wonder if I'm writing about them.
They're nosy by nature, but that's why we hire them.
Our third-floor newsroom will take weeks, perhaps months, to repair. It remains a bizarre landscape of plastic sheeting, shiny aluminum tubing, Sheetrock dust and sawed-off walls.
Our staff is scattered all over the building. News pockets. Editor Tim Kelly and a handful of others are in offices on the second floor. The copy desk is on the other end of the floor, working in what used to be composing before technology made it obsolete. A few reporters will be working in an unused room on The Mezzanine, this strange low-ceiling level between Floors 1 and 2. The photo staff is working out of a side room in the personnel office. Other reporters and editors are set up in the grand conference room. Business Editor Dan Wallach has it good. He's holed up in this bland, lonely little office in circulation. I'd almost kill for that office right now.
Despite the fractured nature of the news operation, we're returning to routine. Work schedules have been re-established. Reporters are back to playing an aggravating game of chicken with deadlines. Non-Rita news is climbing back onto Page 1A. I'm getting home in time to wrestle with my boys, eat dinner with my wife and watch our favorite mindless television shows. She made a killer chicken parmigiana last night, and I'm confident I'll soon gain back the 10 pounds I lost while slogging around during the powerless post-storm swampy days.
Sure, life is getting back to routine, at least what passed for routine before Rita.
So why can't I shake this sense that something is missing?

Homecoming

It didn't matter that an army of thousands of power line workers, debris cleaners, tree-removal specialists and building contractors had moved through Beaumont like the house-cleaning Cat in the Hat with a monstrous three-handled family whatchamahoozit.
It didn't matter that I'd spent hours and hours inside and outside our house, superscrubbing counters, power sweeping floors and humping a ton of debris from around the yard to the curb.
Even after more than two weeks of Hurricane Rita cleanup, my wife still fell into silent shock as she moved through the house last night after I fetched her and the kids from the Houston airport.
You want to check out the yard?
"No," she said. "I need to pace myself."
A certain sense of violation has set in, thanks to a 100-foot pine tree that decided to engage in a jousting match with our roof. The crash impact was so great that it left wall hangings askew all over the house.
I'm glad I wasn't here for that.
"It's much worse than I expected," my wife finally said. About a week ago, from Virginia, where she had fled to her parents' house, she looked at the photos below in this blog and commented that "it didn't look so bad."
But photos of destruction, debris piles and victims' dumbfounded looks don't do justice to the landscape.
My wife's sense of shock has been shared by thousands of others who fled the storm, saw the aftermath images in newspapers and on television, and felt that maybe it wasn't so bad.
And then they returned home.
Friends and loved ones outside the damage bubble have presented an interesting stress dynamic for those who have been here and working long hours in the days following Rita's onslaught Sept. 23-24.
The spouses of several of our reporters made it clear that evacuation was the only option. Two of them has yet to return to work, while others returned and got busy after convincing their significant others that they had a job to do.
With the deadline pot boiling over one day last week, one reporter, frantically trying to finish a story, got a long-distance call from his wife. I overheard an amusing piece of the conversation, which went something like this:
Reporter: Baby, I'm on deadline right now.
Wife: %$#@!@!!!
Reporter: I know, baby, but I've really got to finish this story right now.
Wife: $%$#@!! OIL CHANGE!!! %$#@!!!!
Reporter: Baby, I know you can do this. I know you can get an oil change for the car all by yourself. It's not that hard.
Wife: YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT I'M GOING THROUGH!! $#$#@!!!! Aaaaaaaaaah!!!!
Reporter: Look, baby, I love you. I've really got to go. I'll call you back in a little while. I love you, baby.
A day or two after the storm, I answered a ringing phone in our swampy makeshift newsroom, and on the other end was the wife of another staff member. Calling from a comfy hotel up north, she wanted to know how her husband was doing. She asked me to tell it too her straight. I lied and said he was doing great but taking a nap. She didn't want to disturb him, so she picked me for venting, and my ear sustained a Category 5 rant for 10 or 15 minutes. I've since put in a FEMA application for catastrophic ear repair.
I was glad I could be there to listen, although I can't recall anything she said. She sounded like a cross between Charlie Brown's teacher and a livestock auctioneer.
That same day, the husband of one of our more tireless reporters showed up in the newspaper lobby, stabbed the air with his index finger and said, "I'm holding you responsible for her. Do you understand me?"
I did, but I also knew this reporter was quite capable of taking car of herself. Days later, I practically had to call in the National Guard to force her to take a day off. I like this brand of journalist. Clock watchers and timecard punchers need not apply.
To some, a journalist's work in a disaster zone seems unnecessary compared with the duties that fall upon the shoulders of police, firefighters, medical personnel and other soldiers in a hurricane aftermath.
What they don't understand is that the media is the primary means for spreading information, whether it be where fresh water, ice, gasoline and food can be found to warning evacuees that coming home is a very bad idea. In regard to the latter, many did not listen. They came home, found the city uninhabitable and quickly left.
In addition, a true journalist wants to be nowhere else than in the middle of it all, a cog in the thermonuclear news machine humming away in the story of a lifetime. They did last year in Florida for their hurricane festival. They did it for Hurricane Katrina a few weeks ago. They've been doing it since Grog the caveman painted crude images on his cave wall in order to capture an impressive moment and pass on information to someone, anyone.
More than two weeks after the storm, that energy has subsided somewhat. It took four nights of hard sleep to knock the rest-deprived news animal out of me. Stories unrelated to Rita are appearing on Page 1A.
As I write this, my kids are bounding like playful kittens around the house. They're asking for juice and fresh batteries for their toys. "The Wiggles" is on television. The Casio keyboard is mindlessly playing some sample song the kids know how to call up. My wife, feeling frustrated in Virginia when she couldn't be here to help, is working on the little things I missed in my broad home cleanup. The circus is back in town.
My wife still hasn't gotten a good glimpse at the yard, which looks like a miniature Battle of Verdun. Soon, she will take our youngest to the doctor to check on an ear problem. She will get a daylight view of the damage, or what's left of it, and Rita's reality will clarify.
An interesting tidbit from FEMA yesterday: Rita left behind 5 million cubic yards of debris. According to a Hoover Dam web site, that structure contains 3.3 million cubic yards of concrete, enough to pave a two-lane road between Seattle and Miami. Rita debris would be enough for a two-lane road between Los Angeles and London, and if anyone could build a trans-oceanic highway out of splintered trees, building wreckage and moldy refrigerators, it's the tough, hardworking people of Southeast Texas.
During the whole hyperdriven ordeal, my wife never once questioned my reasons for staying. She didn't bug me with many of the trivial inconveniences of her life. She didn't pressure me for any more than what I was able to give her.
After all, she is a journalist, too, and she understands.

A Rumor of Rita

It started a full day before Hurricane Rita began digging her claws into Southeast Texas.
From Thursday, Sept. 22, the morning that weather forecasters moved the track of the storm - at that point a city-killer Category 5 - from South Texas to Southeast Texas, until afternoon the next day, I personally sent almost two dozen stories to the Associated Press state bureau in Dallas.
Yet, by midday Friday, with the storm's effects beginning to move ashore, nary a single story on the AP's state wire carried a Beaumont, Port Arthur or Orange dateline. Most of the Rita-related datelines were from Houston.
Unbelievable.
I called several times to bark at them and was told that an AP reporter was on his way. The way the AP works is that we pay for their service, and we send them stories for slicing, dicing and putting out on the state and national wires.
But what kind of storm-related news snobbery was this?
Meanwhile, a friend in Houston said the news folks there were acting like their city was directly in the cross hairs. Never mind the fact that just about every storm model put Rita into our back yard. My friend said that late Friday, he could hear the disappointment in the TV newscasters' voices as they finally acknowledged that the storm was coming to Beaumont.
In the storm's aftermath, the story quickly fell off front pages and the tops of TV newscasts. Media from around the country bugged out not long after President Bush made his visit. Texas Gov. Rick Perry called the storm a "glancing blow," an insulting, near-sighted assessment. One TV news personality was overheard describing the aftermath as mostly a power-shortage problem. A Houston Chronicle employee, chatting with one of our reporters stationed there at a makeshift news desk, made Rita sound like a spring shower. My wife, from her parents' house in Richmond, Va., said the story was nowhere to be found on TV or in the newspaper up there.
Living in the shadow of the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe, Hurricane Rita was the bastard at a family reunion.
Undoubtably, Katrina was a far worse storm, in terms of death, destruction and human drama. It deserves the coverage it has received. But make no mistake: When it's all tallied, Rita will be in the Top 10, perhaps Top 5, on the most-destructive storm list, with a rough early estimate putting the damages above $7 billion.
As of this writing, two-thirds of the electricity customers north of here remain without power, more than two weeks after the storm. Many of the neighborhoods in and around Beaumont have no electricity. Hundreds of homes in Port Arthur and Sabine Pass to the south have been deemed uninhabitable. Thousands of evacuees, whisked out of here on buses and taken to places such as San Antonio and Texarkana, remain gone, as does a portion of our population able to get away in their own vehicles.
Those who return often express shock at what they see. It is far worse than what the media elsewhere has made it out to be. A quick look at AP state wire today reveals only a handful of Rita-related stories over the past four days. Few people outside of our bubble of destruction know what's really going on here.
The lack of Red Cross presence in Southeast Texas has angered local leaders. No one is showering us in food, clothing and cash donations. Rock stars are not banding together for heart-tugging fund-raising concerts.
The media spotlight has remained bright on Katrina, and now there is the tragic Pakistan earthquake to contend with.
We're pretty much on our own.
On the flip side, the lack of state and national attention and the underplaying of this destructive event underscores how well the evacuation went, aside from the snarled roads and gas shortages, how many lives were saved and how quickly the area is righting its community ship. The leaders seem to be on top of things. Power crews from around the nation are in overdrive to restore electricity. An army of insurance adjusters is working its way through the region. Churches are holding services. Restaurants and grocery stores are open. The mall is open. Neighbors are helping neighbors, as evidenced by the symphony of chainsaws I heard over the weekend. There is no high-decibel cry for help.
We're helping ourselves. Maybe that's the way it should be.

Last Night in the Cubbyhole

The power at home has been on for three days, but I've kept sleeping here, partly because we've been working past curfew and partly because this has been my home and working family for the past two weeks. I've been quite comfy on the couch cushions set up in a cozy closet in the executive offices. I have a little shelf for my toiletries. There's even an air conditioner vent in there.
It can be a little loud in the morning when folks go into the kitchenette next door to get coffee, but I'm not complaining. If it weren't for them, I might sleep all day.
During the past few days, the number of people sleeping here has dropped precipitously as power crews from around the nation restore electricity, one house at a time in some neighborhoods, particularly the ones where the trees are lying like matches in a shaken box.
Last night, there were only five of us here: Publisher Aubrey Webb, Assistant Publisher Dave Pero, Assistant Managing Editor Pete Churton, reporter Beth Gallaspy (Churton's wife), and me. We stood outside the front entrance, drinking beer and feeling the effects of a cold front roll in.
I announced that it would be my last night to stay up here, and Webb whooped and said, "I win!!"
I didn't know this, but he, Pero and I were the last three people to have spent every night up here since Hurricane Rita started chewing into the coast Sept. 23. Pero and I had finally decided to bug out, so Webb was going to be the last. One more night.
How fitting. The captain, riding his ship from the storm's wake into calmer, more routine waters.
After a few more sips of beer, the outdoor gathering broke up. I wandered around to the back dock, where they seemed short-handed, so I started to help sling papers down the conveyor belt. The papers were loaded into trucks, vans and cars for delivery.
I slung and slung and slung, and those papers kept coming, thousands of them, coming down a corkscrew slide from a work room above.
My hands turned black from ink.
During a lull, I made my way back into the first-floor offices where we slept. No one was there, so I went up to the mail room, the place where newspapers are sorted, stuffed with inserts, bundled and sent down the corkscrew slide.
Webb, Pero and Churton had inky hands, too.
With the papers finally gone and the presses stopped, we regrouped outside the main entrance and had one more beer. I went to bed at 3 a.m.
At 9 a.m., I emerged from my closet to find more Enterprise employees returning to work. I packed up my stuff in the closet and put it in the car. I put the couch cushions back where they belonged.
After getting my coffee, I settled into my desk in the makeshift newsroom. Reporters and photographers got their marching orders. I checked my e-mail.
I checked my office phone messages and got this from a cranky old lady:

"Yes, I'm a subscriber to your newspaper. I'm wondering if you're out of business. You don't deliver anymore. If you don't, would you at least have the common courtesy to tell people that you no longer deliver a newspaper? Thank you."

Click.

You know business is returning to normal when the disgruntled subscribers circumnavigate the circulation department and start barking at the managers whose phone numbers are listed in the newspaper and online.
I like it that they're angry if they don't get their newspapers. It shows that they care, and almost no one wants them to get their newspaper more than I do.
Too bad the lady didn't leave her name and number, because I could have gotten her a newspaper, maybe even one with my thumbprint on it.

Hootenanny

I'm not sure what night it started. Every night, there has been some kind of a party. We stay up too late; get up too early. Someone makes a beer run. Steaks sizzle on the monster grill set up outside the parking garage where we watched Hurricane Rita drop-kick the community Sept. 23-24.
It was only a matter of time before the guitars came out.
Assistant Manager Pete Churton, who plays in a rock band, Buffalo Blonde, was the first, I think. The next day, those who had guitars went scurrying home to get them. Some of them started working on a Rita song. More than once, they stayed up past 5 a.m. working on that damn song.
One evening, despite the curfew, Churton and I went on an equipment roundup, starting at his house, moving on to my house and then over to Buffalo Blonde's practice shack. We grabbed amps, microphones, guitars, etc. I grabbed my trumpet from home.
That night, we set up shop in the third-floor newsroom, then a strange landscape of plastic-covered desks, humidity-reducing blowers, missing floor and ceiling tiles and shiny, futuristic-looking tubing running here and there.
After a shaky start, the group, performing under the working name The Paginators, kicked into some pretty good grooves, with Churton on guitar and vocals, Publisher Aubrey Webb on guitar and vocals, Assistant Publisher Dave Pero on bongos and vocals, Ad Director Jeff Noble on guitar and vocals, information technology wizard Russell Severson on guitar and vocals, and me on the trumpet, doing the best I could to punctuate the proceedings.
Hurricane Rita songwriters then got the recording itch, so Severson brought in his 16-track digital recorder. After another night of practice, we took a whack at recording. After a dozen or so takes, we gave up and went to bed. Severson took his recorder home yesterday.
I don't know what will become of "Rita Oh Rita." Some have talked of it being the soundtrack for a video of our odyssey of the past two weeks.
All I know is that I can't get the thing out my head.

More photos

Top to bottom, me (two weeks after Hurricane Rita), pile of wood removed from property, mall theater after the storm passed and a message to looters posted on my fence. My wife opened this blog and showed my photo to our 3-year-old son, Curt. He started crying.

Photos

Top to bottom, my temporary desk (where I slept two nights), our back yard, my third-floor office, our front yard and my latest sleeping quarters, where I continue to stay despite my home power being restored. I've been working past the curfew, which ran 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. but was changed yesterday to run from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. to accommodate people going to work, particularly at the refineries and chemical plants.
Notice the battery-powered lantern in the foreground of the bottom photo. Someone stole that latern but left behind a digital video camera and a $40 bottle of tequila brought to us by a Hearst Corporation employee from San Antonio.
Go figure.

Rollin'

We proceeded as usual yesterday, working under the plan we'd had since Saturday of printing the newspaper at the San Antonio Express-News.
Then came word that it would happen here. This took us another critical step closer to getting back to the normal business routine, albeit one following a career-altering experience.
The tents of the news circus in Houston, where our copy desk had been operating, was brought back and set up on the second floor, which remained largely undamaged. It was nice to see them back.
Normal Enterprise circulation is around 60,000, but only 30,000 copies were to be printed, because, according to our wild and random speculation, only about a quarter to half of our population had returned.
Around 10:45 p.m., most everyone had finished their work and gone home. As we did almost every night, the social gathering in the Enterprise lobby was under way. There was a half dozen of us who had been here all or most of the time, and a little nightly party broke out to celebrate the day's accomplishments and lament the shortcomings and failures.
Suddenly, a pressman appeared in the lobby with newspapers. We jumped up and scurried to the pressroom, where the skeletal crew was swarming over the screaming press like fire ants on a potato chip.
We stood there smiling while the stone-faced pressmen checked the colors and made adjustments to the scores of little knobs. Presswork is dangerous and requires focus. The first few hundred or so newspapers are tossed during the tweaking process. Check, tweak and toss. Check, tweak and toss.
Finally, it was good, and the papers were allowed to roll down the line to the mail room, where they would be bundled, sent the loading dock and onto the vehicles of the awaiting carriers for delivery. We grinned. Photographer Pete Churton snapped pictures. Publisher Aubrey Webb shed a tear.
Considering the building damage, many of us thought it would take longer to get the press rolling.
But there it was, roaring in the heart of our busted building, howling louder than Hurricane Rita at her zenith.

Power Trip

Three things needed to happen before my wife and children could come home:
1.) Huge pine tree off roof.
2.) Electrician to fix busted breaker box pole and inspect for wiring problems that could result in my house going up like the Fourth of July when the power returns.
3.) Power returns.

Step 1 was already under way. They came out today and got started early.
It's a scary thing, because lots of jackleg flim-flam tree people come and either do a bad job, sometimes inflicting further home damage, or take your money and disappear. Haphazardly spray-painted streetside signs with tree-cutter telephone numbers definitely raise red flags.
"TREEZ KUT
CALL BR549"
Tree-cutting is expensive. The quote for getting the pine tree off my roof was $2,450. That's pretty much the going rate, based on my research.
I'd contracted with an outfit out of Georgia to do the job. They'd already done a co-worker's house and did a great job, clearing up limbs and brush that they weren't even contracted to clean up.
The most important thing to do with tree cutters is making sure they are insured. If they are not, they can file a lawsuit and take your life savings in the event of an injury or death. It is also important to check online with the Better Business Bureau to see if any complaints are on file. It's easy: Just go to http://www.bbb.org/ and fill out the information.
Lastly, you pay when the job is done, not up front.
With proper insurance, no BBB complaints and a glowing reference, the Georgia group checked out.
The crew showed up and went to work early today. I went to check them out and was told the job would take about three hours to complete. The crew boss was barking at them to do this and that. I liked this. The man was getting the job done right.
Three hours later, I returned, and an unforeseen scramble began.
Powerline workers finally had arrived in my neighborhood, but the first thing they do is disconnect homes from the main line if there are problems between the main line and the breaker box. The homeowner is responsible for the line from main pole to box and beyond. They were working the street behind us, and they'd already seen my busted box pole, come in over the downed backyard fence and cut the cord.
Panic set in.
If I didn't get an electrician out there immedietely, the powerline crew would pass me by when they came around the circle and in front of my house, and it could be weeks before the electric company would re-establish the pole-to-house connection. I was convinced that power crews weren't going to be diverted from their main mission to address one customer's needs in a place they'd already worked.
That meant it could be weeks before my wife and children could come home.
I started calling electricians in the phone book but was told the waiting list was two to three weeks long.
Oh my.
Then I remembered a contractor who left his business card in my door. He was a neighbor, and I'd bumped into him the day before while out on a jog and asked him to have a look at the house. He'd told me he had an electrician at his disposal.
Frantic, I called him and told him my predicament. Meanwhile, the power crews were now on my street and making their way past my house. The contractor said he'd make a phone call. Five minutes later, he called back and said electricians would be there in 20 minutes.
I called him an angel. I look forward to him repairing my house.
Fifteen minutes later, the electricians arrived. They walked to the back of the house, looked up, smiled and said, "We can fix that."
Feeling like a SCUBA diver left behind, I ran down the street to the power linesmen and excitedly told them that electricians had arrived and would fix my problem. They nodded and assured me they'd come back and re-establish the connection.
Soon, two supervisors for Florida Power and Light were assisting the electricians. Considering that the power crews as well as the tree people had been to hurricane-ravaged areas before, horror stories abounded about devastation elsewhere, at the hands of hurricanes Andrew, Katrina and Charley.
They said we were lucky.
I felt lucky all right. I was lucky that, in regard to what I had to do to get my family back, my bread this day hit the floor with the butter side up.

The Newspaper Rodeo

Sunday, Oct. 2, was an exciting day at The Beaumont Enterprise.
After more than a week of being solely an online newspaper, we got back into the publication business, thanks to the presses at the San Antonio Express-News. We were still on generator power, and our pressmen were scattered and unavailable.
The edition was a published compilation of all the PDF files (online page snapshots) of what we would have published had we not lost power about 1:30 a.m. Sept. 24. We'd gone nine agonizing days without our hard work put to paper.
We only had a handful of newspaper carriers around, so part of the delivery job fell to us, and we were giddy about the opportunity. Newsroom employees who were supposed to have their first day off in two weeks came in just to take part in the delivery rodeo.
The newspapers arrived from San Antonio at 6 a.m. Sunday. The carriers hit the streets, filling newspaper racks where businesses were open and tossing the Enterprise into the yards of homes where there appeared to be occupants, regardless of whether they were subscribers. We handed out the newspaper for free.
I went to the back dock about 8 a.m. and loaded up my Nissan Pathfinder with hundreds of papers. My first site was Parkdale Mall, where everyone from FEMA agents to insurance companies to the National Guard set up tents for assisting those with needs ranging from food and water to financial assistance.
The group of people waiting in line at the FEMA station snatched up a stack of papers like seagulls on bread crumbs. "Y'all share!" I hollered as I got back in my car and took off for nearby neighborhoods, where I handed newspapers to anyone I saw, including police, firefighters, random residents and even a local TV news anchorman. This was cool.
At one point, someone on radio station KLVI, an AM station broadcasting continuous storm and aftermath coverage, sometimes regardless of proper fact-checking, started taking pot shots at The Enterprise, again. The guy behind the mic said that he'd heard that we were printing but were trying to make big bucks off it. Never mind that we'd been virtually a non-profit news organization for two weeks. Then he questioned what we would possible have to print.
My tires squeeled as I made a U-turn and headed for the station, where I pounded on the door and demanded to be put on air. I had newspapers in my hand. Subsequently, I got some on-air time and poked in some station digs myself, saying that we were finally "an accurate news source" for a station that had become a "fountain of misinformation."
Kick ass.
After that, I returned to the Enterprise, loaded up and handed out another 200 or so newspapers. I drove counterflow down a long line of motorists who had come to the mall parking lot for assistance. I handed them newspapers through their windows. Drive-by delivery boy. People seemed grateful.
The top newspaper headline read: COMBACK TIME

Bed of Nails

I've been sleeping in a closet since Monday, six days ago. It is in the executive offices. It was nicer before they ripped up the carpet. It wasn't wet or hurt during the storm, but other executive office carpets got soaked, so they had to pull up the closet carpet so that it will match the carpets they install elsewhere. There are nails sticking up everywhere, but I've covered them with the couch cushions I sleep on.
Electricity is still out at home, although places surrounding my neighborhood are getting power.
However, even after power comes to my street, I still can't turn on my master switch, because the pine tree gouged into places where there are wires and bent in half the pole that pokes out from the switch box. The homeowner is responsible for everthing that leaves the main power lines.
Power flowing into the home could start a fire involving a fireworks stand of dead tree limbs. An Elks Club lodge here burned to the ground today for that very reason.
I can't get the house lines inspected until the tree comes off and an electrician gets in to check out things. The tree dudes are coming Tuesday, but getting an electrician in a target-rich environment such as this one might prove highly difficult.
The prolonged Southeast Texas heat and humidity could create a mold problem. I learned this today when the AC quit working again for every area of the newspaper building except the executive offices, and they scrambled to position humidity-lowering fans all over the place. So now we're back to a sticky, sweltering newsroom.
And the three-ring post-storm hassle circus goes 'round and 'round, with the main body of those who fled the storm yet to arrive.

FEMA Follies

The head start I had on the competition for federal funds to help offset the cost of insurance deductible, evacuation expenses, etc., was astounding.
As soon as a generator gave us power to fire up computers and gain Internet access to computers in our makeshift newsroom (I didn't want to hog a laptop reporters were using for writing stories), I logged into www.fema.gov and filled out the application in 10 minutes. Considering I was among only a handful of residents who could see their properties and relay the necessary damage information to FEMA, I was far out front.
The next day, a Houston-based FEMA representative contacted me to set up an appointment for the next day. He called me back later in the day, because he'd heard conflicting reports about damage and road accessibility here. He'd heard that roads were impassable, that the city was underwater, that no one was allowed on the streets. All of that was untrue, because I'd already been to my house several times, and the roads were just fine and access easy, although military personnel manning freeway exits did stop motorists, demand identification and ask what you were doing.
I told the inspector that I doubted the military would deny access to a FEMA representative, and if it did, I'd have a great story: MILITARY THWARTS FEMA RESPONSE.
Following Hurricane Katrina, the last thing FEMA needs is more bad publicity.
Anyway, the inspector suddenly found in me an accurate information resource, so I might have been THE FIRST property owner in Beaumont to get the inspection ball rolling this far.
Despite having to drive over from Houston, the inspector showed up exactly on time at 8:30 a.m. They can't tell you what kind of money might be coming. They just make a report, take a few damage pictures and shake your hand.
I had confidence that money soon would get tranferred directly into my checking account, as I requested in my FEMA application.
However, I soon realized a terrible error: When filling out the direct-deposit information, I put the checking account number in the slot for bank routing, and vice versa.
When I tried to go online to correct the application, it asked me for a PIN number.
What PIN number?
Then I realized another error: I had put my work e-mail as the place for this PIN number to be sent, but technical difficulties and computer problems at the newspaper prevented me from getting into my work e-mail. I finally gained access, only to find that the PIN number had expired. I got a new one, only to find that FEMA only allows online review and change of mailing addresses and telephone contact information. Oh no!
By this time, countless other people had flooded FEMA with financial aid applications, sending me nearly back to the bureaucratic Stone Age. How could I change the bank information on the application form? What would happen if and when they transferred the money?
The subsequent attempts to answer those questions became a maddening exercise in navigating goverment bureaucracy. I called the FEMA aid application line - which I'll refer to as Number No. 1 - and was told to call another number. I called that number - which I'll refer to as Number No. 2 - and it told me it was too busy and to call back some other time. Then it hung up.
On Friday, Sept. 30, a week after Hurricane Rita began lashing the coast, I got up early and called the Internet technical help line, where I waited literally two hours - listening to bad Musak versions of Hall and Oates tunes and mindless canned announcements telling me to keep waiting - before someone answered. I explained my problem, and he put me on hold, came back a few minutes later and said he had picked a specific person for me to talk to. He assured me that this person could help. Subsequently, I got transferred to Number No. 2 and disconnected.
I called Number No. 1, the application number, and got through easily again. I explained my problem, and the assistant told me to call Number No. 2 sometime after 10 p.m. So at 10 p.m., long after we'd shut down the daily news harvest, I called Number No. 2 and got booted again. I hadn't experienced this much rejection since I farmed for prom dates my freshman year in high school.
So I decide to give Technical Assistance another shot. After two hours of sweaty-ear waiting - listening to bad Musak version of Hall and Oates and mindless canned announcements - I got through again. In addition to explaining my predicament, I told the voice on the other line about how my subsequent attempt had gone awry. Again, I was told a specific person would help me, and again, I got transferred to Number No. 2 and kicked out.
The next day, I was at the computer and getting reporters and photographers deployed when I received an e-mail noting that a FEMA field office had been set up in the mall parking lot.
Being among the first recipients of this e-mail, I had an opportunity to get ahead of the game again. I could find a live person who had no means of sending me to dreaded Number No. 2.
So I forwarded the information to our online folks for publication, got in my car and sped over to the mall, where the line was only two people. Subsequently, it took 20 minutes apiece for those two people to get their problems corrected, and by that time, the line of people behind me was 40 yards long.
Once it was your turn, two options awaited: A live person sitting at a computer and a telephone that led to a live voice out there somewhere. I got the live person. She said she could correct my bank number dumbassery, but then she had problems getting into my account. She tried several times, and as a last resort, she decided to change my account access information. Same account but different password. Then she asked me for my e-mail account information so she could get into the e-mail containing the PIN number that had just been sent.

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My PIN number was at work, and I had no access out there in the parking lot. She told me to go get it, but then I saw that the line of people who needed help had almost doubled. I looked at her with the saddest expression I could muster.
"Can I do the phone thing?" I asked. She said "WHY YES!" and the person who was on the phone just happened to get up at that moment.
Once on the phone, I was told the money - $2,000 - had been sent. I asked how that could be, because you couldn't deposit money into a bank routing number. She said it somehow would all get straightened out, if it hadn't been already.
I scurried over to the bank to check it out, but the line there was out the door.
As of this writing, I still don't know what's going on, and the main body of bureaucracy-taxing, FEMA-assistance-needing evacuees has yet to return.
Maybe something magic happened, like the FEMA money sender saw the mixup and fixed it, or maybe the bank saw it and fixed it.
I doubt it, but one can dream.

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Generator Madness

I didn't know anything about generators. I knew they run on gas. I knew they make electricity. I knew they can make life easier.
That's about it. I'd be scared to try to hook up one.
But generators quickly become a vital organ in an electricity-castrating disaster, although they are dangerous on myriad fronts.
The storm's greatest tragedy in Southeast Texas was generator-related. A Beaumont family moved an outside generator into their apartment, to keep thieves from stealing it. Two adults and four children subsequently died of carbon monoxide poisoning. As of this writing, one adult remained hospitalized in critical condition. There have been other poisonings since then, none fatal so far.
Local emergency officials groused about FEMA not releasing 50 generators parked out at Ford Park just west of Beaumont. A highly agitated County Judge Carl Griffith told me during an interview that he called FEMA and gave the federal agency three hours to start freeing up generators, or he was going to send police to seize them.
Generators are needed to power hospitals, police and fire stations, water and sewage treatment plants, etc. Those places get top priority.
At the criticism's peak, I sat down with a FEMA official who explained in detail how the federal process works. He called it "controlled pandemonium" but assured that the federal response was proceeding exactly as planned.
FEMA only jumps in when local and state resources are exhausted. It's a last resort.
Deploying generators, the FEMA official said, is not as easy as it looks.
Once all the generators brought in by state and local resources are in use, FEMA steps in to pick up slack. I've heard crazy stories about the generator rodeo out there this past week, and that doesn't include all the generators bought at home-improvement outlets. Cheap generators cost hundreds; the big ones cost thousands.
A FEMA generator won't be deployed without an assessment.
Once FEMA has a list of generator needs, an assessment then prioritizes the needs. After that, there is an assessment of generator compatibility. I'm certain there will be a FEMA assessment of assessments down the line.
The Beaumont Enterprise learned the hard way about generator importance. Someone sent a massive generator to power our building. However, it was suited to power an entire massive Houston skyscraper, not a four-story building such as the Enterprise. Had that generator been fired up here, it could have fried everything in the building that was plugged into an electrical outlet, including the presses. That generator went to the Houston Chronicle before anyone knew exactly where Rita would hit.
Before the storm, the company had reserved a generator at a local provider. The provider had evacuated but given us permission to cut a lock and get the machine. The police were notified, but one officer didn't get the message and accosted an Enterprise employee during the alleged generator looting. It took calls to the publisher to keep the employee from a ride down to the pokey.
Power here was lost about 1:30 a.m. Saturday, Sept. 24. A sweltering, primitive existence ensued at the Beaumont Enterprise until about midday Monday, when we finally got the proper generator and power to all floors and even air conditioning to the executive offices.
It was then that I moved my bedding from under the desk in the dank mezzanine to a cozy closet in the exeuctive offices. The closet has its own AC vent and a little shelf where I put my toiletries. I'm still sleeping there, but they tour up the carpet today.
Our generator became a significant morale booster, moving us away from the stone-age low points of Saturday, Sunday and part of Monday. About the same time, we got spotty water service, thanks to generators at treatment plants, and could flush some cares away.
Generators kick ass.

Dog and Pony Politics

A parade of politician appearances follows every domestic disaster. In the post-apocalypse chaos, it is one of the few things that runs close to clockwork.
The governor comes. The president comes. The U.S. secretary of this and that comes. The U.S. senators and House members come. The state legislators come. Various state office holders come. Some come to provide serious help and find ways to cut through various forms of red tape. Others come for a photo opportunity and to get some press. They have to come, because not coming speaks louder than a superficial visit.
Their schedule usually goes as follows:
* Politician's public relations officers pepper the media with e-mails, faxes, phone calls, Morse code, smoke signals, carrier pigeons, etc., announcing their guy or gal's arrival.
* Politician dramatically comes in via helicopter, airplane or Air Force 1.
* Politician meets with local officials to discuss the situation behind closed doors.
* Politician gets a tour of the area, via helicopter, airplane or car.
* Politician grimly addresses the media.
* Politician dramatically leaves via helicopter, airplane or Air Force 1.
* Politicians' public relations officers pepper the media with e-mails, faxes, phone calls, Morse code, smoke signals, carrier pigeons, etc., regarding what their guy or gal did in the disaster area, what emotional statements they made about the damage and what kind of bold call they made for help.
The plan apparently broke down for U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, whom I happened to bump into while trudging around in the command center and looking for a story. Like a tree that fell in the forest, he was there without anyone to hear him. His press agent saw me with a notepad and media credentials and hustled me over to the senator. Hooking up with a rather flamboyant TV cameraman from Austin, we formed an odd little news team and did our an intimate news conference. Cornyn seems like a real nice guy, and I was glad I got to talk to him. During the interview, my cell phone erupted. I answered it, and it was my sister, asking what I was doing. "Well, I'm interviewing U.S. Senator John Cornyn. I'll have to call you back." We all chuckled.
With me standing there in a sweaty T-shirt, looking like a scruffy Grateful Dead concert refugee with a 1,000-yard stare, all forms of the usual professionalism were gone. But Cornyn understands. They all understand, because the media is in dogged overdrive in these situations. Let the TV people remain beautiful. We're from the newspaper.
Plus, they need us. Otherwise, their constituents wouldn't know they were there. Bad media means fewer votes.
President Bush, of course, got the Lexus of media coverage, with the governor, among the first to visit, getting second billing, like the opening act at a rock 'n' roll show. The other guys and gals were lucky to get more than three or four graphs buried in the heart of the main story.
Cue the next disaster.

Fountains of Misinformation

In a hypercharged post-hurricane situation, whirlwinds of inaccurate information swirl over a community.
One of the more humorous pieces hit us Friday night, the night the storm began, when someone from "CBS News" called co-Managing Editor Ron Franscell to verify that a Beaumont Enterprise editor was going to ride out the storm in a bank vault.
Uh, no.
Then there was a news conference in which Texas Gov. Rick Perry called Rita a "glancing blow." Maybe he considers the atomic bomb drop on Hiroshima to be a glancing blow as well.
A local radio station became the king of inaccuracies. On Saturday, after Rita's winds and rains had subsided, talk show host Jack Piper, who was at the live news helm, said that every media entity in town, including the Beaumont Enterprise, had fled before the storm.
We had to straighten that out.
Unable to get through on the phone, I drove over to the station, and they put me on the air for 10 minutes, giving me a brief chance to plug our web site, boast about our coverage and assure listeners that we weren't a bunch of nervous, carpet-wetting poodles abandoning our news posts and cowering under a couch somewhere far away.
A day later, I ran into Piper at the command center of the emergency response teams, and he said he was about to go on the air to say we were charging people to view our hurricane photos online.
I knew this was not true, because we were having technical difficulties and had published only four photos, all of which were on the web site's front page. And we had no intention of making people pay for the photos in the first place. At this point in the coverage, we were practically a non-profit organization, serving only as an information resource. We had no advertising-rich hard-copy product.
A FEMA official told me earlier in the day of a radio report that the Ford Park arena on the west side of Beaumont had been converted into the same kind of shelter it was for thousands of Hurricane Katrina victims.
The inaccurate information, the FEMA official said, resulted in a sudden logistical nightmare of refugees for the federal emergency responders gathered at Ford Park, a staging area for the disaster assistance, from deploying generators to providing security.
FEMA's response was to call in 40 or so charter buses to ship evacuees to shelters in San Antonio and elsewhere.
Geysers of inaccurate information abound in a disaster zone, from overblown reports of crime and death to untrue simple things such as a gas station opening. Storm-shocked folks blame the federal government for not providing what they need right then. They blame local authorities. Blame. Blame. Blame.
People say the craziest dadblammed things in these situations.

Working in a Coal Mine. Whoop!

A primitive existence set in at the Beaumont Enterprise in the two days following Hurricane Rita. Heat, humidity, rotting food, sweat, undeodorized armpits and ceiling drippings pooling in blood-red ponds throughout the building turned our work home into a swealtering urban swamp.
Without power, flashlights and headlamps became essentials. The darkened building was a different place under these conditions, an unfamiliar cave that became confusing to navigate in places. People wanting to go to one floor found themselves stumbling around in another, sometimes due to fatigue and stress infecting the mind with forgetfulness and lack of purpose. Where was I trying to go? A once-simple trip to the rest room became a creepy odyssey of slogging through ankle-deep water in the darkened pressroom bowels to get to the stolen portable toilets.
A makeshift newsroom was set up on a balcony in the odd, low-ceiling level known as the mezzanine, sandwiched between the first and second floors.
Reporter-photographer teams were set up to travel together and save gas. Gas was gold. They worked by lamp and flashlight over battery-operated computers. Stories were transmitted by a rogue working phone line.
In this kind of news environment, there are more stories than even the world's largest newspaper staff can handle, so we prioritized, doing big-pictures stories mixed with punches of color features that helped paint a picture of Rita's aftermath. Then there were particle-board informational pieces full of critical help lines and how-to stuff.
Stories poured in from reporting outposts set up not only in our multi-county region but in places such as Tyler, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio, where we planted flags to cover stories ranging from evacuee life to business and industry.
There was no newspaper publication here, because there were no pressmen to print it and no delivery people to distribute it. A paper could have been printed elsewhere, but who would be here to read it?
Subsequently, we became a live news organization, much like CNN and radio. It took time to shift the mindset, but we soon got into the groove of just relaxing and relaying information to our Houston-based online staff as quickly as possible.
Local emergency officials complained about the federal response to the disaster. Texas Gov. Rick Perry, during a visit here, ignorantly called Rita a "glancing blow" to the area, despite the storm scoring a direct hit, albeit one that put us on the relatively milder west side - or dry side - of the hurricane. The towns and city just over the Louisiana border took the nasty east-side blow, reducing at least one community to sand.
In the darkness, the news machine kept rolling, operating on fumes, adrenaline and a supercharged quest to feed readers - wherever they were out there - every informational crumb possible. We had no idea who was reading us.
Well after 10 p.m., we stopped, broke out our private alcohol stashes and tried to remember details of what the hell we did all day.
Too often, we just couldn't. That's why I started this haywire blog.

Rita Wreckage

I didn't mean to sleep until 10:45 a.m. on Saturday, Sept. 24, hours after Hurricane Rita's peak might had passed. The plan when I crawled under a desk at 5 a.m. was to sleep a couple of hours and return to the news machine.
I awoke to a pitch-black room and no noise. I poked the Indiglo on my running watch and was alarmed to see that it was mid-morning. Thankfully, by the time I got involved, other editors had picked up my slack and had the photographers and reporters moving. This kind of stepping up for each other when someone needs sleep continued over the course of the next week. One falls back, and another steps forward. Teamwork. Unspoken.
With most reporters and photographers out of the building and working, I essentially had nothing to do, so my burning journalistic desire was to get in my car and go damage hunting. So I grabbed my digital camera and reporter Kevin Dwyer and set out.
Rita hit the community like a bowling ball, only instead of pins falling, it was trees, thousands of them, lying everywhere, on roads and rooftops. Pine trees seemed the hardest hit. They were everywhere, lying like so many matchsticks pointed in every direction. The hardwood oaks unleashed the heavier blows, with many slicing through roofs and all the way to the foundation.
The first person we interviewed carried an expression that we later found common among those who rode Rita like an all-night mechanical bull. The middle age man with graying hair stood in the street, his mind clearly replaying the horror of 100 mph-plus winds and spectacular rain that put his home in an insane spin cycle for hours. In a breaking, nervous voice, the man assured us that he was out of his short-lived storm-riding hobby. People say they've ridden out storms, but in most cases, they weren't as close to those as they were Rita.
Dwyer and I moved on, traversing nearly impassable streets. More than once, he saved us from a collision by barking about a downed line, pole or random debris that my tired mind hadn't registered. A whole new law of the road - one of controlled anarchy - awaits those traveling in a hurricane-ravaged community.
We checked out the mall and numerous other businesses. Some were unscathed, while others suffered shocking, mind-boggling, hard-to-grasp damage. In the mall parking lot, a shady, dangerous-looking character began walking rapidly toward us. Looking angry, he began yelling things I couldn't understand. We got the hell out of there, knowing the savage, criminal desperation that Hurricane Katrina victims in New Orleans displayed.
We were close to my house, so we drove by to look. Although numerous homes in the neighborhood suffered little or no damage, my home took a big hit, thanks to a neighbor's gigantic pine tree. Like a mighty claw hand from the heavens, tree limbs punctured the roof in at least five places and took out a fence chunk. The rest of the yard, back and front, looked like a disorganized limb graveyard. A quick survey inside the house revealed limbs biting through the ceiling in two places, the master bedroom and the master bedroom closet, the latter of which resulted in water soaking my wife's shoes and clothing.
I couldn't leave the house like this, so using a ladder, garbage bags and concrete blocks, I covered the holes as best I could. Overall, though, the house survived. We fared far better than Hurricane Katrina victims.
We left and made our way through another part of town, taking notes on the damage and interviewing random people along the way. A highly articulate homeless woman told us that living on the streets among crooks, crackheads and crazies for the past 11 years taught her now to survive just about anything and that the Good Lord was watching out for her.
Knowing that gasoline would soon be gold, we headed back to the newspaper to begin filing information via cell phone to our news desk set up at the Houston Chronicle.
Our newroom was uninhabitable, due to the rain soaking through roof insulation and creating this stinking blood-colored soup that reached 2 inches in depth in places, including my office. Soaked ceiling tiles, pink insulation and air conditioner venting had fallen everywhere.
Also, it was getting hot and humid, a factor that would come more into play in the dank, sweat-soaked working days to come.