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.
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.
posted by Brian Pearson at 12:57 PM
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