September, 2008:

Julie talks about what life is like after Ike in her hometown of Seabrook, and tells of a little way in which we can help:

Kids are helping kids with Operation CRAYON. This is assistance for kids from pre-kindergarten through grade 12.

CONTACT INFORMATION:
Operation CRAYON
McWhirter Elementary
300 Pennsylvania Avenue
Webster, TX 77598

They will accept items and will hand them out to schools who are working directly with families, or to teachers to help specific children or to replace lost classroom items.

Wish need list is:

New (preferable) or gently, gently used clothing and shoes
New undergarments
Standardized dress attire
Backpacks
School supplies

They’ve set up portable units where the items are arranged “store style” and they let the children come in and “shop.”

If you prefer to deal with me I will email you a mail location and I will personally take the items to either specific families, the donation centers, or to the schools. Multiple schools are accepting items for children enrolled who are in need or were displaced.

If you prefer to send gift cards such as to Target, a grocery store, or a prepaid card, I assure you I will get these to appropriate people. In our area we have: Target, Wal*Mart, Kroger and HEB.

You can contact her for more information – send email to j pippert at g mail dot com. Thank you very much.

And if you’re in the helping mood, the Chronicle has another way to assist:

The Houston Arts Alliance has created an “artist recovery blog” to facilitate communication between the city’s estimated 500 arts organizations and 14,000 working artists in the wake of Hurricane Ike.

Jonathon Glus, the alliance’s CEO, announced the launch of haahelps.com Friday at a town hall meeting held to assess the storm’s impact on the arts community.

Glus and Jerome Vielman, assistant director of grants and services, presented early findings of a survey that requested information about facility and studio damage, program cancellations and postponements, suspension of fundraising activities and interruption of artists’ work.

Of the 92 arts organizations that had responded by Friday, nearly 60 percent reported wind, water or tree damage and “continued loss of power,” while 80 percent said they postponed or canceled events, and 42 percent reported lost ticket sales.

It may not seem like much, but Houston has a diverse and vibrant arts community, one that helps make Houston be what it is. Any help there is greatly appreciated.

Down in Galveston, they’re dealing with mold.

Residents and business owners who were finally allowed last week to inspect their properties may have been relieved to find that the structures survived floodwaters and high winds. But many discovered the damage done by various species of mold left to breed wildly in the nurturing environs of damp, hot buildings whose doors and windows were sealed for nearly two weeks.

At Maya’s Grocery and Food Products on Avenue L, the grown children of 80-year-old Enrique Ochoa and his wife, 78-year-old Alicia, donned respirator masks, rubber boots and gloves and plastic jumpsuits several days last week to combat the mold, mildew, flies and fumes that have overtaken the flooded Mexican food store their parents had operated for half a century.

“None of us have training what to do with mold,” said daughter Elizabeth Ochoa, a 52-year-old San Antonio nurse. “We just know it’s nasty and you need masks.”

I helped tear out moldy drywall in a couple of houses after Tropical Storm Allison in 2001. It wasn’t anywhere near as bad as what’s described in that story. I can’t even conceive what a horrible task this must be.

Power to the people update: As of Monday night, 114,000 CenterPoint customers were still in the dark. That’s 5 percent of their total. Unfortunately, some places that have had power restored have lost it again, as temporary fixes fail and more tree branches fall. Also, no further progress that I can see on traffic light outages – every light that was non-functioning last week is still non-functioning this week. The ones I’m used to are at some pretty busy intersections, like Greenbriar and Holcombe. They’ll get fixed eventually, I guess.

Among the many questions being asked post-Ike are those about whether CenterPoint met its requirements for maintaining trees near power lines.

Hugh Rice Kelly, a former chairman of Trees for Houston and former general counsel for CenterPoint’s predecessor, Houston Light & Power, has long criticized the company as overzealous in trimming along transmission and distribution lines. He said workers sometimes damage trees or remove ones that don’t threaten pole-top power lines.

But whether the utility cuts too much or too little doesn’t have much to do with the lingering outages, Kelly said.

“The trees that really damaged the lines were big trees that, for the most part, were well beyond the reach of CenterPoint tree trimmers,” said Kelly. “Unless you gave them the authority to cut things beyond that, there’s not much more they could have done.”

CenterPoint budgets about $21 million per year for tree trimming along power lines, with about $18 million set aside for distribution lines like those that run behind businesses or in backyards, said Terry Finley, CenterPoint’s vice president of distribution engineering and services.

The company sets a goal of trimming trees back from lines every four years for 12 kilovolt lines and every three years for 35 kilovolt lines, both of which can run through residential neighborhoods.

That means the company’s contract tree trimmers cover about 9,000 miles of distribution lines per year.

But those three- and four-year cycles are only goals and are not mandated by federal, state or local laws, according to industry officials.

There’s evidence that CenterPoint hasn’t done as much as it should have in this department. Having said that, I tend to agree with Kelly in saying that that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I don’t think that more trimming would have lessened the impact of Ike that much, but I do think it would have been less than optimal for the trees themselves. Having a lot of trees in Houston is generally a good thing. I don’t want them to be thought of as a nuisance.

CenterPoint tries to warn customers about trees on their property that appear to be potential threats to power lines, but Kelly said it’s difficult to identify which trees will go down in a storm.

“Many of those that came down in this storm were very healthy,” Kelly said.

And in a hurricane, a branch may fly at 100 mph into a power line hundreds of feet away.

“People just have to be realistic,” Kelly said. “We can’t have the kind of shade trees we want in Houston and still protect the power lines 100 percent. We’d become the Lubbock of the Gulf Coast if we took that approach.”

There is another option, and that’s to take steps like burying power lines to make them less vulnerable to trees in a hurricane. That would cost a bunch of money, so it’s not a general solution. But it probably does make sense in some areas outside downtown, and there may be some other places where residents would be willing to pay more to make this happen. As I’ve said before, we should at least have the conversation and see what’s feasible. If not now, then when?

And on the power restoration front, CenterPoint is down to 167,000 customers without power, or 7% of their total, down from 247,000 as of 7 AM Sunday and 449,000 on Friday. Big steps forward, though not much consolation if you’re in that seven percent.

Spokesman Floyd LeBlanc said CenterPoint missed its goal of completing all repairs to major lines, but expects to finish that work early this week and begin repairs to transformers and lines serving individual customers.

More here. No new target dates at this point.

We’ve heard of the possibility that thousands of people may be missing after Hurricane Ike, with some unknown number of them perhaps having been swept out to sea, never to be found. The good news is that far fewer people than that appear to be actually missing as of today. The bad news is that it doesn’t look like there’s much hope for those whose whereabouts are not now known.

Two weeks after Hurricane Ike swept through the Texas coast, 400 people remain missing, mostly from Galveston County, according to an analysis of calls logged to a hot line set up by the nonprofit Laura Recovery Center to assist local authorities.

[…]

About 60 of the missing lived on the Bolivar Peninsula, stripped bare by the storm surge that felled beach houses like a bomb. More than 200 were listed as missing on Galveston Island itself, according to a city-by-city analysis of the data conducted for the Houston Chronicle by Bob Walcutt, executive director of the recovery center in Friendswood.

Hot line and rescue workers hope that many people, especially on Galveston Island, will be reunited with family and friends as hurricane recovery efforts continue. More than 145 already have been located through blogs, media Web sites, Red Cross shelter lists, endless phone calls, welfare checks and sometimes dramatic rescues led by the Galveston County Sheriff’s Office and other agencies.

Yet disturbing tales told by survivors from Bolivar communities like Gilchrist, Crystal Beach and Port Bolivar suggest some may never return.

“There’s still lots of people who are not accounted for,” said Capt. Rod Ousley, of the State Parks & Wildlife Service, which is helping to search for survivors or bodies in remote corners of several coastal counties. “We don’t know if they got washed out to sea, or buried in the sand or in debris piles. We just keep looking until they come up … we’re just going to keep trying.”

I don’t even know what to say. I’m not sure how we went from speculating about thousands to 200, but the latter is certainly less horrible. It’s still an enormous tragedy, and reading some of the individual stories as told by the people who are looking for them doesn’t make it feel any less horrible. All you can do is hope, and celebrate any miracles that do occur.

Sunday is the new magic target date for those who still don’t have power. As long as you understand that it’s just a day, and setting it as a magic target date doesn’t actually mean anything.

CenterPoint finished work Friday in neighborhoods where most power is restored, and prepared to swarm harder-hit areas this weekend with the goal of bringing light to hundreds of thousands of customers by Sunday night.

Company officials have said they expect most customers will get power back when crews complete repairs to major lines — removing trees from wires, restringing wires on poles when necessary and energizing the lines.

“We expect to see a huge improvement in outage count by the end of the weekend,” CenterPoint spokesman Floyd LeBlanc said Friday when about 377,000 customers of 2.3 million still were without power because of Hurricane Ike.

Even if CenterPoint accomplishes this, it doesn’t mean every customer will have power. The company expects that transformer issues and problems with individual line drops to homes and businesses will linger for at least another week.

Call me crazy, but I’m thinking the folks who are in that 377,000 number are getting a little tired of hearing this refrain. I know CenterPoint can’t say when an individual customer will get power back, and they can’t say for sure when they’ll be done. But it just feels to me like they’ve done a poor job of managing expectations, in part precisely because they have pushed back the date of when they say they’ll be well and truly finished. I don’t think that ZIP code map helped all that much, either. It’s a nasty problem for them, and honestly I don’t know how they could have done much better, but I still think they needed to. The upcoming legislative review is going to be a minefield for them.

On a side note, business has been good for the restaurants that were able to overcome various Ike-related problems, like power outages of their own, staffers who couldn’t make it in, and a broken supply chain.

Hurricane-weary Houstonians — already known for frequently dining out — increasingly turned to area restaurants for hot meals in the days and weeks post-Ike. To feed the long lines of hungry and often powerless Houstonians, restaurateurs overcame obstacles of their own, such as displaced staff, inconsistent supplies, damage or loss of utilities.

Two weeks after Ike, restaurants are starting to return to normal, although some still can’t find ingredients and service still can be spotty.

But not as spotty as they were in the first days after Ike.

“As we would run out of things, I would come up with other things to serve,” said [Jack] Gregory, [whose restaurant The Daily Grind] operates out of a renovated 90-year-old general store. “It was chaotic. People had to wait a long time, but they were appreciative.”

After operating the restaurant in the wake of Hurricane Rita, Gregory knew what to expect. He stocked up on eggs, produce and disposable plates in the hours before the storm.

Although restaurateurs had to pay more for paper products or invest in a generator, those that could open reported an increase in business in the aftermath.

The atmosphere at Berryhill’s that first time we visited after returning to town was as festive as it was crowded. I think people were just happy to get out of the house and forget about everything else for awhile. Given how hard a storm like Ike can be on small businesses, I’m glad to hear so many of these places managed to do well despite it all.

CenterPoint is feeling the heat from the 449,000 customers who are still without power, nearly two weeks after Ike.

Tom Standish, CenterPoint Energy’s group president of regional operations, said in a conference call with Chronicle reporters that crews will be concentrated more tightly as the utility works to meet its goal of completing major repairs by the end of Sunday.

Even that will leave plenty of transformers and lines to individual customers for crews to fix next week.

Thursday evening, almost two weeks after Hurricane Ike knocked out power to millions of electric customers, 449,000 still were in the dark — 20 percent of CenterPoint’s customers.

Standish said that in recent days, workers have been dispersed from 200 neighborhood substations to sortie out for repairs. That system is being collapsed to 70 substations in the hardest-hit areas.

Most neighborhoods with persisting electric outages can expect a tripling of personnel in the coming days, Standish said.

Does that mean the areas in the worst shape were put at the back of the line? Not exactly.

Areas with huge problems also require more lengthy assessments, Standish said. Crews that could make repairs were deployed to fix easy problems that restore large groups of customers, while other personnel assessed damage in harder-hit areas.

“That’s the trade-off you make,” he said.

I don’t really know how to judge CenterPoint’s performance. I’m sure they’ll do an after-action review to see how they could have done better. And they won’t be the only ones.

Houston state Sen. John Whitmire said he has asked state leaders to let him lead a special legislative review of the recovery efforts in the wake of Hurricane Ike.

Whitmire said he has talked to Gov. Rick Perry and Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst about looking at how the state and private industry handled the restoration of Houston and surrounding areas when it came to electricity, food, water and fuel.

Whitmire, whose daughter Whitney, 26, works as a City Hall lobbyist for CenterPoint Energy, said he believes the discussion should include questions of whether to require CenterPoint to harden its electrical system against future storms.

Areas of the city with underground electrical lines weathered the storm the best, Whitmire said. But he said any such requirements would be at a cost to electrical customers.

“It’s about money. We do anything we want if we’re willing to pay for it. We can require it of CenterPoint if we as consumers are willing to pay for it,” Whitmire said.

And so far, a lot of people have expressed an opinion as to whether or not customers would be willing to pay for such measures, but as far as I can tell no one has really asked the customers for their opinion. Maybe some public hearings are in order. Let’s have the conversation and find out once and for all what people would prefer.

And finally, speaking of paying for things:

Hurricane Ike’s punishing winds and driving rains damaged numerous Houston and Harris County buildings, officials said Thursday, estimating it will cost $21 million just to repair facilities at Reliant Park.

Reliant Stadium and its five damaged roof panels account for a little more than half of that $21 million estimate, said Willie Loston, director of the Harris County Sports and Convention Corporation.

Roof damage allowed rain to soak carpets and walls at Reliant Center and Reliant Arena, he added, causing an estimated $6.2 million and $3.8 million in damage respectively.

The figures are preliminary and the actual cost could be significantly higher or lower, Loston said.

But since the county is eligible for a 70 percent reimbursement from FEMA for its $10.3 million deductible, the county likely only will be responsible for $3 million in repairs, he said.

It’s not clear to me who’s paying for that. The Texans? The Sports and Convention Corporation? Harris County general revenues? Some of each? Help me out here.

The man is consistent, I’ll say that much for him.

Some Galveston officials aren’t too pleased with their Congressional representative, Ron Paul, R-Lake Jackson, for voting against the $22.8 billion disaster recovery aid package on Wednesday.

“That’s sad. That’s bad,” said City manager Steve LeBlanc.

“I find it very distressing,” said Councilwoman Karen Mahoney, who represents the West End of the island, where damage was extreme. “He’s voting against aid for the region that he represents? I don’t find that very representative.”

Depends on who you think he’s representing. Or, more accurately, what he’s representing. I don’t think there’s any question about that.

Thought experiment: Would Paul have voted No if he had a general election opponent who had the wherewithal to bash him for the next month in TV ads over it? I think he probably would have regardless. But it would have been fun to watch him defend himself for it. Maybe next cycle.

By the way, to go off on a tangent for a minute, I got a press release in my Inbox saying that the Log Cabin Republicans are endorsing Ron Paul for re-election in CD14. He’s the only Texan to get an endorsement from them; they recommended a total of only 33 candidates for Congress and Senate nationwide. The release is reproduced beneath the fold.

UPDATE: The story in the paper reminds me of this:

“In several disasters that have befallen my Gulf Coast district, my constituents have told me many times that they prefer to rebuild and recover without the help of federal agencies like FEMA, which so often impose their own bureaucratic solutions on the owners of private property,” Paul wrote in a 2005 column.

Paul voted against government assistance for victims of Hurricane Katrina and later told the Washington Post he had no regrets.

“Is bailing out people that chose to live on the coastline a proper function of the federal government?” Paul said. “Why do people in Arizona have to be robbed in order to support the people on the coast?”

Like I said, consistent. Wrong, in my opinion, but consistent.

(more…)

Time to make sure your Irony-o-Meter is fully calibrated.

Hurricane Ike’s destruction is sparking one of the largest rebuilding efforts the state has seen in decades, but at the same time is highlighting a thorny facet of the region’s labor force: A lot of the recovery work will be done by illegal immigrants.

Homeowners have already turned to day laborers — many of whom are undocumented — to help clear brush, tent roofs and repair other storm damage. Contractors have hired them to rebuild or restore businesses and the city’s infrastructure.

And the major work of rebuilding small towns along the Gulf Coast or big homes in Galveston will likely be aided by undocumented workers.

But this tug and pull of the labor force highlights an uneasy dilemma: The region needs the muscle of undocumented immigrants, but simultaneously is a cog in a broader crackdown of illegal immigrants at worksites.

“There’s just no mechanism in place right now to provide those important laborers work authorization,” said Leigh Ganchan, a Houston immigration attorney with Haynes and Boone. “It’s a shame that employers can’t tap into a whole segment of society that’s willing and capable to provide those services. Our nation is more vulnerable than it would like to admit, I think. Vulnerable, meaning we need people to help us rebuild our infrastructure after major disasters like this.”

Carlos Gonzalez, Mexico’s consul general in Houston, expects the area’s existing immigrant population will do the rebuilding work, a key difference with what happened post-Katrina. New Orleans experienced an influx of Hispanic immigrants because it did not have as large of an immigrant population as Houston.

“You will find the immigrant community — as they always have — will play a very big role,” said Laura Murillo, president of the Houston Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.

And the anti-immigrant community will bitch and moan about it. The comment that follows from the anti-immigration activist about giving citizens first crack at rebuilding jobs sounds nice in theory, until you realize that the process of checking everyone’s status before hiring them to clear debris or whatever would mean huge delays to the task at hand, and in the end there wouldn’t be nearly enough workers to do everything that needs doing. I mean, that was the way of the world before Ike, so why should it be any different now?