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Surveying the Damage Sunday, October 2, 2005 | 10:00AM

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As you might expect, this post will be a bit long. I’ll detail pretty much my entire trip to Southeast Texas to survey the damage caused by Hurricane Rita. Oh, you don’t remember that one? I guess it’s because it didn’t affect people in New Orleans as directly and people were resourceful enough not to die. Anyway…

Wednesday: I left Cedar Park on Wednesday morning around 10am. My mom had asked me to come pick her up in Dallas at her sister’s house and take her to get her vehicle in Orange so she could take it to the beach house; not that the beach house had any of the luxuries Orange lacked, but the neighbors had a generator and extra room. It took me the usual 3 hours to get up there, and for the first few hours of the 5 hour drive to Orange, we stopped occasionally to look for 5 gallon gas containers. There were none. None even in the Dallas area.

As we drove through Jasper, it was evident the power was completely out and we began seeing the massive damage to homes. We got to my great-grandmother’s house in Mauriceville just after curfew, so the only damage we could see were the piles and piles of debris lining the road. And when I say lining, I mean we were dodging huge 25 inch tree trunks jutting out that had previously blocked the entire one-lane drive. It was already foreboding in the dark, to say the least. Fortunately they had a generator at the house, and we slept with a window AC unit and several fans cooling the living room off. My great-grandmother (Mammaw), Great Uncle John Roy, Uncle Lance (who drove down from Chicago), brother Ryan (who I will refer to only by his first name from here on out), my mom and I all in that one room. But by the morning it had cooled off pretty significantly and the humidity had died down quite a bit as well.

Thursday: Since sunset pretty much brings bedtime with it, sunrise tends to bring the opposite. It was actually one of the nice things about this trip: plenty of sleep. So Ryan, my mom and I headed to Orange to see her house as Uncle Lance continued work on Mammaw’s yard. It wasn’t eerie until we actually turned into the neighborhood. When people say it looks like a war zone, they’re not exaggerating. That’s the first thing my step dad Bob told me when I talked to him on the phone the morning after the storm. Trees are lopped off about 20-30 feet up, if not just completely uprooted. They’re fallen on houses, across yards and roads, in pools, across driveways. And it’s the trees that made the difference in this storm.

My theory is that because the tall trees were there, they kept the wind from really dipping down to the houses. This is probably why the wind damage on the ground level was truly minimal. If a tree didn’t hit your house, it saw mainly cosmetic damage. On the other hand, in the areas that were wide open with no trees, I saw extensive damage directly by the wind and by debris flying through the air. So if a tree (or several) didn’t slice through your house like a hot knife through butter, you were probably glad to have had so many in your yard.

Ryan insisted on getting back to work on cleaning up, as it was a monumental task and no one else was around to do it. Bob had been working on getting DuPont back up and operational since before the storm, without a single day off. We took lots of pictures and walked pretty much where we could, but trees were down all over the back yard. We were fortunate in that only one tree hit the house, and it just banged up the back corner of the garage. They’ll need some new brick work and roof work, but overall it was fine. The amazing thing is all the trees that missed our house by inches (and I mean that literally) or just by falling at an odd angle. As a matter of fact, the one tree that did hit the garage fell off the top of a neighbor’s tree, probably 40 feet up. So while it wasn’t a whole tree, it was the height of the fall that I think made the impact so defined.

I had planned Thursday to be the day of surveying the house, Orange and any outlying areas I could access. Ryan Mo had headed over to our house (several miles from his) on his bike to save gas, so he left it our garage and we headed into town. I must say, the initial shock of seeing some buildings strewn down a parking lot or road makes you want to say “that building was obliterated”, but I think many accounts were exaggerated in much the same way messages are altered when playing that “phone” game. For instance, one person probably saw that Sprad’s Boat Town was heavily damaged and said it was ripped up. So the next person said it was torn to shreds, and the next said it was destroyed. Yeah, Sprad’s was bad, but it was still standing. One I couldn’t figure out was this store called Goody’s, in the old Wal-Mart building. It looked fine to me. Like, untouched. Strange.

It was mostly metal structures that were truly obliterated. And the talk is, if they were tightly sealed, they might’ve just exploded, whereas buildings with plenty of holes were able to let the storm breathe through them. I guess that makes sense.

Ryan Mo and I drove all the way through town, out to Bridge City where we stopped to see his aunt and uncle. Then we headed to the Rainbow Bridge where we were turned around because only infrastructure and officials were allowed into the county. We ended up taking Hwy 62 out to IH-10 and going to Beaumont.

Beaumont seemed to be under marshall law, as the National Guard were posted at every exit, and even residents weren’t allowed in. We were really just in search of a mystical Waffle House we had heard was open. It turned out to be closed, so the radio lied to us. We exited IH-10 at the Tinseltown movie theater area to u-turn, and found that we could just turn onto Walden Rd. (which took us to Fannett Rd.) and head into town.

We got back to downtown Beaumont and drove around the area only days before we had seen stupid cable news reporters standing in hurricane force winds. It was surreal because there were very few people around, and those that were there were working on power or demolition. It was nearly like a ghost town. We spoke to a business owner on Crockett Street (where Ryan Mo works) that said powere was supposed to be back up by the next morning in that area.

So next we headed to Justin and Jennifer Walters’ place to check out the damage. They only had a tree down in the back yard and the tree in the front was leaning slightly, but their house was unharmed. Driving through the (what seemed to be the only) heavily wooded area in Beaumont, we could see some major destruction, which was odd because Beaumont just hadn’t seemed to be hit in the same way Orange had.

On our drive back down Calder, we saw a gas station that was open. I know this seems insignificant, but the only gas stations we had seen up to this point had many hours of waiting in lines. I mean, a hundred cars or so at each of the few stations. So to find this, what we considered an oasis with only about 2 or 3 other cars, was amazing. We filled up without even paying attention to the $2.99/gallon price. It didn’t matter. Ryan Mo and I got cold Gatorade and snacks, and headed back to Orange.

On the way back, on IH-10, we stopped at Old First Orange Baptist Church which was founded in 1852, I think. It was one of the worst hit in the entire area. It turned out a tornado had actually hit the sanctuary. Ryan Mo and I went inside and took pictures. It was odd standing where the choir would normally sing, seeing the blue sky and hearing the traffic on IH-10 roll by. Eventually some plain clothed troopers showed up to make sure we weren’t looting. They told us to check out the field behind the church, because the tornado had apparently thrown the steeple and one of the sanctuary’s support beams, along with a bunch of other debris, back there. They were right. The beam had been flung into the ground like a javelin.

We headed over to Ryan Mo’s parent’s house for dinner, but stopped by our friend Cliff’s house to see him. We invited him over to Ryan Mo’s for a dip in their pool and a warm meal with the neighbors. I need to get in the pool because I had insulation all over my legs and arms from the church. So we swam for a bit, ate, and I spent the night at the Morris’ house. I actually got to sleep on a matress, in the air conditioning (they, too, had a generator, window AC unit and fans) again.

Friday: We woke up early again and I helped Ryan Mo clean up their yard a bit. We also moved a 55 gallon drum of gasoline out of their truck after heading into Orange to get a hand pump from R&R Auto, one of the few businesses open in town. This was also when we discovered that Domino’s was selling $9 pizzas.

So I left Mo’s to go back to my mom’s house, where my brother was already back at work on the yard. We worked for awhile until my Uncle Lance showed up. He wanted to drive around Orange and see the damage, as it’s where he grew up as well. While we were out, we picked up one of those $9 pizzas, and it was great. The rest of the afternoon, Ryan and I cut up trees with the chainsaw and made a few new piles. We got quite a bit done… so much so, you can actually see grass now. I ate dinner with the Morris’ again but spent the night in Mauriceville again.

Saturday: This is pretty much to finish the story. I drove to Orange and picked up Ryan Mo, to take him back to Austin with me. We drove to Sugar Land, to see my dad (since Friday was his birthday) and then headed home. I’m sure you’re tired of reading this, as I’m tired of writing it.

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Casey | Sunday, October 2, 2005 | 9:22PM

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Walker | Wednesday, October 5, 2005 | 6:42PM

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