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9/2/2009

One rough year later
Everybody at Rice has an Ike story, and here are six

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

While most Houstonians go about their daily business with one wary eye on the weather, others still sting from the impact of Ike a year ago.

It's nearly impossible to talk about Hurricane Ike at Rice University -- or anywhere else in town -- without running into stories of the terrible trials and long recoveries some have experienced over the past 12 months.

	Experts and community leaders will gather at Rice Sept. 14 for a one-day symposium, "Hurricane Ike: Revisited," to discuss the lessons learned from the storm that made landfall Sept. 13, 2008.

When the hurricane hit Sept. 13, it damaged the Rice campus in ways that are nearly undetectable now but at the time presented significant challenges. Trees were ripped up, basements were flooded and almost every building suffered minor bruises. Quick work by staff and contractors got Rice back on track, with classes reopening three days later amid the massive effort to recover as quickly and sure-handedly as possible.

"One of the things Ike taught us is that we have an extraordinary staff, a group of people who are willing to step up and do whatever it takes in order to help the university recover," said Barbara White Bryson, Rice's associate vice president for Facilities, Engineering and Planning, who rode out the storm at the command center in Lovett Hall. "That was a wonderful and reassuring experience."

Most people in the Rice community suffered to some degree, spending a week or two -- or longer -- without power. There was debris to pick up and damage to repair, but time and elbow grease healed most wounds.

Some can laugh about it now. Like many of his colleagues, Farès el-Dahdah, associate professor of architecture, found himself without power and water as the storm raged around his Houston high-rise. Though many had left the top floors, el-Dahdah lived low and felt secure enough to stay.

There was an advantage, he said. El-Dahdah's apartment has a door to the courtyard pool. That let him fill buckets with pool water to use his toilet.

That was also a disadvantage, he said. "All the doors to the courtyard were locked by the management, so the only way to the pool was through my apartment. Until we were all ordered out of the building the next day, everybody was coming through my place to get water."

Others caught the full fury of the storm, which became the third most destructive in the nation's history, causing an estimated $24 billion in damage, behind only hurricanes Andrew and Katrina. Rice did its best to help Ike victims by giving them time to take care of their homes and families, but some suffer the effects to this day.

'Whose house is this?'

	JANET THOMPSON

When the shingles started ripping away from her roof, Janet Thompson said it sounded like a herd of cattle.

"It was the most amazing sound I've ever heard," she said.

Not long after that, water started pouring in from above.

Thompson, business manager at Fondren Library, said only two rooms of her 7-year-old southeast Houston home survived the furies of Hurricane Ike, and it was in one of those rooms that she, her husband and adult son huddled. They had pulled as much furniture and as many treasured items as they could in with them before things got bad.

"They say there was a tornado that never really touched down but was hovering in the vicinity," she said. Houses to either side of Thompson's were barely touched, she noted, but those in the path of the apparent twister, including four houses across the street, were badly damaged.

Janet Thompson said it was like watching snow fall into the house when insulation started tumbling into her kitchen at the height of Hurricane Ike.

The Houston native said her real concern as Ike approached was flooding. "Never once did we think about it coming through our roof. We had no tarps or anything. But it wouldn't have mattered, because we ended up with three or four inches of water in the house."

The family's long recovery began with a move to an extended-stay residence managed, fortunately, by her daughter-in-law's father. Then came clearing out the house -- ripping up carpets and tossing furniture. "Our insurance company was wonderful," she said, but extracting settlement money from the mortgage company, where the insurance checks went, was a monthslong battle that forced the Thompsons to dip into their savings to pay contractors.

"That was a sore spot with me. It still is," she said.

The family moved back in at the end of February. "For a long time, when I came home, I'd think, 'Whose house is this?" said Thompson. "It's just now beginning to feel like my house again."

'All the ceilings there came down'

Huddled in the middle of the house with her daughter, granddaughter and a neighbor, Diania Williams thought to herself, "Next time, I'm getting out of here."

	DIANIA WILLIAMS

Williams, a receptionist at the Rice School of Architecture, was up all night listening to Ike's wind and rain lash her home near Houston's Beltway in the southeast part of town. When water started coming in, her fears were confirmed: The mighty wind had stripped the roof of shingles.

"In the front entrance and the bedrooms, water was just pouring in. All the ceilings there came down and fell on the floor," she remembered. Though the family stayed in the house after the storm, they spent their time in the back rooms while contractors first sealed the front against further leakage, then came back months later and repaired the damage. The new shingles, she said, will handle winds up to 120 mph.

Williams said she'd never seen a storm like Ike in 30 years in Houston. "If they tell me one like that is coming in again, I will leave. It was scary."

'I knew it was going to be bad'

The hammer blow came from above at James Springer's house, too, but it happened in an instant when an old oak gave in to the wind.

JAMES SPRINGER

"It didn't uproot; it broke four to five feet off the ground," said Springer, the manager of Rice's Library Services Center. "It fell right into the kitchen, then the den, then the extra bedroom. So it came through about three-fourths of the house.

"Then we had two days of rain."

Springer was miles away from his '60s-era Baytown home when disaster struck. He had spent Thursday boarding up and planned to stay despite an evacuation order, as his parents were determined to ride it out. "Rice was very nice. Everybody in a mandatory evacuation zone was given the time to go home and do whatever we needed to do," he said.

But when his folks, Baytown residents since the '70s who own the home next door, fled to their daughter's place a little further inland, Springer reconsidered. He checked the weather Friday morning and left to join his wife and young daughter at a friend's Hill Country house. "Ike had stopped right there in front of Galveston. I knew it was going to be bad," he said.

	A tree through the roof caused major damage to James Springer's Baytown home.

Springer knew what he was coming back to. His parents discovered the damage -- about $100,000 worth -- the day after Ike.

"We didn't realize how dangerous a tree can be," he said. "When it breaks like that, it's a fast fall and has a lot of crushing ability. I remember during Hurricane Alicia (in 1983), my parents had a tree that uprooted and slowly leaned against the house. All it hurt was some shingles."

The hole in the roof let in enough water to wreck the rest of the house, he said. Except for the bathrooms, everything had to be gutted, and the rebuilding process took eight months. The family found an apartment for the duration.

Springer's shady old neighborhood is a little less so now. Two trees fell to the storm, in opposite directions. He suspects a mini-twister knocked them down.

Since Ike, he's cut down seven more trees that were too close for comfort. "We hated to do it, but we wanted to make sure we didn't have anything near the house."

'That's all they were going to cover'

There are those in the Rice community for whom putting Ike in the rear-view mirror seems a long way off.

DANIEL HERNANDEZ

Daniel Hernandez, a maintenance assistant who takes care of Wiess, Sid Richardson and Hanszen colleges, still has a large hole in the roof over his kitchen and one bedroom that his insurance company wouldn't pay to fix.

"They gave me $4,000 for the damage inside and said that's all they were going to cover," said Hernandez, a six-year veteran at Rice who also works nights at The Methodist Hospital. Once the shingles came off in the wind, he said, the rain did the rest of the damage.

Hernandez and his wife, who works part time, have four children, ranging from 1½ to 19. They didn't evacuate during Ike and now are living with the storm's consequences as best they can. "Rice gave me two weeks to take care of my home after the storm, and Methodist gave me one week, but only the things inside are fixed. For the outside, I don't have the money. The roof is completely gone at that part of the house."

	Daniel Hernandez is still struggling to repair the damage to his home caused by Ike's powerful winds.

So he's making the repairs himself, in what little spare time he has between two jobs and parental duties. "I like my jobs, but I don't have a lot of time, and the materials are expensive," said Hernandez. He said other priorities put a dent in the budget for fixing the house. "My daughter (a nursing student at the University of Houston) said the other day, 'Dad, I need two books.' She said one was $500, the other one $800. Oh, my God …"

Like Springer, Hernandez has also taken down trees that sat too close to his house. "I don't want them coming in," he said.

'We had critical schedules'

When she walks around campus these days, Bryson notes how bright it is. "The thing I notice the most is that we lost about 30 percent of our canopy," she said. "We lost about 50 trees on campus, and that has been exacerbated a bit by the stress of the summer heat, so a few more have died."

The good news is that repairs are essentially complete and that Rice has won mitigation funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency for upgrades to the glass at the Shepherd School of Music's Alice Pratt Brown Hall and Baker College. "You can get laminated, steel-reinforced glass systems that are hurricane-resistant, and we will be installing those," she said. The new north colleges use the same glass, and she expects more to be eventually installed at Rice Stadium's R Room, which was damaged when Ike blew in its windows.

Bryson was pleased that Rice contractors were able to meet critical completion dates for the BioScience Research Collaborative and Duncan and McMurtry colleges despite damage to the buildings and the loss of construction days to the hurricane. "They did an amazing job overcoming those challenges despite significant damage to both sites," she said.

Other adjustments are being made in preparation for the next storm. For example, Rice's off-campus graduate student apartments will have quicker access to emergency generators if the power goes out, Bryson said.

"We have continued to look at the campus and determine areas we're concerned about, to make sure we're prepared as we move forward," she said. "The knowledge we gained from Ike has helped."