Hurricane PTSD- One Man's Journey To Hell And Back
If I live to 105 and never see anything like that again, I'll die a very happy man
Watching the news of Hurricane Ian having its way with Florida turned into something akin to a PTSD experience for me. After living on the Texas Gulf Coast for ten years, I’ve been through more tropical storms and hurricanes than I care to remember. You never get used to it because you can never know what to expect before a tropical storm or hurricane hits. It’s the aftermath that can be horrific.
My worst experience with one was in 2008, when Hurricane Ike devastated southeast Texas. I was still working for Progressive Insurance, though I’d transferred from Houston back to Portland a year before. I was a member of the company’s National Catastrophe Response Team. That meant that anytime a natural disaster struck anywhere in the country, I could be deployed there on 48 hours’ notice.
So when Ike hit Houston and the surrounding area, I was on a plane to Houston a couple of days later. Unfortunately, I landed in a city that had only barely begun to recover from the hurricane. At least half of Houston, probably more, was still without power. I’d find out over the next few days that getting around Houston, never easy or fun under the best of circumstances, would be something close to a nightmare.
The nation’s fourth-largest city had lost power to most stop lights, so many intersections were four-way stops. As a result, getting from my hotel near Hobby Airport to the Galleria area, which could be a 30-45 minute trip depending on traffic, became a mind-bending 90-120 minutes odyssey.
And that was getting around on the streets that hadn’t flooded. It wasn't easy to know which streets were open and which weren’t. If I was driving in a part of Houston I didn’t know well, which was most of the city (it’s quite large, after all), it was easy to get stuck on flooded streets.
Then there was the problem of how and where to find food. Since at least half of Houston was without power, many grocery stores and restaurants were closed. Outside of the city, it was even worse. There were entire cities without power. If you were lucky, there was a Waffle House running off a generator. You might be able to get a ham-and-cheese sandwich on white bread. That seemed heavenly considered what else was available, which wasn’t much.
The worst part of the experience- and there was no way to prepare- was the sheer volume and scope of damage. There was destruction and debris everywhere. I’ve lived and worked in a couple of war zones, so I thought I’d seen destruction, but nothing prepared me for what Hurricane Ike did to southeast Texas.
It took the Texas Highway Department four days to clear the sailboats off the traffic lanes of I-45 to make it possible to drive over the causeway onto Galveston Island. As I came off the causeway onto the island, it was impossible not to notice the putrid smell of rotting garbage. It was late September, but temperatures were still in the mid-90s, and the humidity was still in the 60-70% range. In addition, the storm surge reached 12-14 feet in some parts of the island and flooded almost every structure.
That flooding meant that every homeowner had to pull out salt-water-soaked carpet, furniture, and virtually everything they owned and pile it on the curb in their front yard, where it had been sitting for at least five days. Things were beginning to rot. The smell was awful, and it wasn’t about to get better.
As I drove around the east end of Galveston Island, there were sailboats strewn over fields, parking lots, and everywhere except the marinas they’d been moored at before the storm. Wrought iron railings on staircases leading from the seawall down to the beach had been bent at odd angles like frozen strands of spaghetti.
Then there were the gift shops that had been built on piers over Galveston Bay, some of which had been there for many years. Only the shell of one remained, the eerie skeletal remains of a structure that had seen generations pass through, including me while I’d lived in Seabrook, just a few miles north of Galveston.
That was almost more than I could process, but it wasn’t even the worst of what I would witness. The next day I traveled to the Bolivar Peninsula. In more normal times, a ferry traverses a two-mile channel from Galveston harbor to the village of Bolivar on the peninsula’s west end. Unfortunately, the hurricane had moved so much sand in the channel that the ferry couldn’t operate until the state dredged the channel, which would take weeks.
So, instead of a 30-mile trip down I-45 over the causeway onto Galveston Island and then a two-mile ferry ride, I drove close to 100 miles north and then east and south around Trinity Bay to Winnie. There I crossed a bridge onto the east end of the Bolivar Peninsula. The peninsula is about 30 miles long and about a mile wide at its widest point. There’s one road running east to west, which was intact except for one point where the hurricane washed it out save for half of one lane, which was passable if you were extremely careful. I had to traverse that half-lane coming in and going out- in a rental car.
Before Hurricane Ike arrived in ill humor, there were about 500 homes on the peninsula, almost all on concrete pads. As I slowly drove west, what unfolded on both sides of the road was worse than anything I could’ve imagined. Cars had been swept a half-mile inland and deposited into thick, heavy clay fields. Homes had been torn off their concrete pads and shredded. Only one home had survived. It was built on 12-foot stilts like many coastal homes and sustained substantial damage, but it was still standing. Every other home on the peninsula had been entirely or substantially destroyed.
It was far worse than any battlefield I’ve ever seen. Save for a few people on the far west end of the peninsula, there was no sign of life on the peninsula. A few people who’d refused to evacuate had been sucked out to sea with the storm surge, and their bodies were found floating in different areas of Trinity Bay. I tried to imagine how anyone could’ve thought they could ride out a hurricane in a house sitting on a concrete pad. How could anyone believe they’d survive a 12-14’ storm surge?
The Houston Chronicle had a story about one woman who lived on the peninsula and had decided to ride the storm out. She was on the phone with her daughter as the hurricane was coming ashore. As things began to get worse, she told her daughter, “I think I’ve made a terrible mistake.” Moments later, the phone went dead.
A couple of days later, they found her body floating face down in Trinity Bay.
If memory serves, Hurricane Ike killed something like 35 people. It tore up coastal communities in ways I’d never seen before. From the west end of Seawall Blvd. in Galveston (where the seawall ended) to the island's west end at San Luis Pass, the storm deposited sand drifts 10-12’ high. It took road graders to clear the road enough to make them passable. Water lines 12’-14’ above ground were visible on some of the houses. Everything at ground level had been submerged in salt water for hours.
It was beyond anything I’d ever experienced or could imagine.
In Seabrook, the small seaside town I’d lived in for ten years, Ike had deposited home appliances, automobiles, and watercraft onto Hwy. 146, the state highway that ran north and south through town. Todville Road, which ran along Galveston Bay and where I’d always wanted to buy a house, looked like a war zone. It looked as if the beach, about 50 yards away, had been dropped in the middle of the road. Enough sand had been graded off the roadway to make it passable, but getting through to anywhere was challenging.
I was in the Houston area for a month, and I saw stories like this every day. Of course, it was far worse if I was outside the Greater Houston area. But Houston had the resources to facilitate a speedy recovery, and by the time I left to come back to Portland, most of the city was back to something approaching normal.
It was a much different story in the more rural areas of southeast Texas. Money for recovery efforts was hard to come by, and after a few weeks, America had forgotten about Hurricane Ike and moved on to the next crisis.
My last day in Houston was Election Day 2008 when Barack Obama was elected President. I celebrated with the Harris County Democratic Party that night. It was my first taste of normalcy in a little more than a month. It felt good to relax and not think about death and destruction, but I could tell something had changed for me.
Perhaps it was being deployed to a part of the country where I’d lived and in which I had an emotional investment. In some cases, I dealt with people I’d known before transferring to Portland. In others, I saw cities and places, like Seabrook, damaged in ways far beyond anything I could have imagined.
On my flight back to Portland, I realized that the past month had impacted me in ways I hadn’t expected. Life felt much heavier, and I felt the burden of what I’d seen and experienced. I didn’t recognize it at the time, but it was mild PTSD. I’d lived and worked in a couple of war zones, but even those experiences couldn’t match what I’d seen over the previous month. And I knew I never wanted to see anything like it again.
I resigned from Progressive’s National Catastrophe Response Team when I returned to Portland. I hung on with the company for another year and a half, but it wasn’t the same, and I eventually left at the beginning of 2010. Something had changed, and I couldn’t get it back, no matter what or how hard I tried. My heart just wasn’t in it.
Whenever I watch coverage of hurricanes on television, it hits me hard from two angles. One is from my ten years living in southeast Texas and having experienced several tropical storms and hurricanes. The other is from being back there after Hurricane Ike. The combination of the two is a PTSD experience. It’s not anywhere near what a combat veteran might experience, but it comes from seeing things no human should have to over an extended period.
I’m grateful that I now live in the Pacific Northwest, where hurricanes and tropical storms aren’t an issue. If I live to be 105 and never again see what I saw in the aftermath of Hurricane Ike, I’ll die a very happy man.
It was tough to be with people whom I knew would be struggling to put their lives back together, and yet I’d eventually be heading home to my safe, dry, and intact existence in Portland.
And the quiet; that haunting, abnormal silence that told me, “Things are not normal here. Something awful happen not so very long ago.”
Indeed. Something very awful had happened. And it would take quite some time to recover from it.