Hurricane Ike destroys some homes, leaves others unscathed

[DogPoundPup]

Source: LA Times

Hurricane Ike swallowed Dawn Demers' four-bedroom home so completely that she couldn't even see her rooftop as she stood marooned on a bridge, staring at brown floodwaters and trying not to weep.

Just down the highway, Ike somehow spared Gary Jenkins' ramshackle trailer, chewing up a few tree limbs but leaving Jenkins unharmed as he sat listening to radio bulletins in his pajama bottoms Saturday morning.

The worst hurricane to hit the Texas coast in recent memory was capricious, destroying some homes and lives while leaving others blessedly untouched. Here in bayou country on the sodden northwest rim of Galveston Bay, no one could explain how staying in a mandatory evacuation zone paid off for some but ruined others.

The storm that howled across Galveston Bay in the early Saturday blackness left J.J. Cuellar's home underwater in Freddiesville, yet barely touched his mother's home here in La Marque a few miles away. Ferocious winds and a biting storm surge pounded Richard Berg's three-bedroom frame house in San Leon but merely flipped a few shingles from the roof of Charles Ray's cozy white house in adjoining Texas City.

"Nobody knows why a hurricane acts the way it does," Jenkins said, marveling that his blue trailer held fast through Ike as he rode out the storm while "holding on to my rear end for dear life."


Read more: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-scene14-2008sep14,0,744014.story

[CatholicEdHead]

1. Isolated downbursts in the eyewall

http://www.treesearch.fs.fed.us/pubs/127

[timeoutofjoint]

2. it seems to only luck-that some houses stand and others go.