November 16, 2008
By Emily Ramshaw
The Dallas Morning News

CHAMBERS COUNTY, Texas – When Hurricane Ike swallowed their beachfront home and all of their belongings, Darlene and Mark Pagels tried to hold it together.

Photo: JoAnn Dunlap cooks for her family in the garage in Bridge City. The family’s garage is used for closet space as well as the living room and kitchen. Two months after Ike struck Sept. 13, finding housing is still difficult in this swath of Gulf Coast. (Guiseppe Barranco, The Beaumont Enterprise/AP)

They borrowed underwear and shoes. They slept in one-hour shifts at a local hospital. They ate free meals in a tent outside their church. And they waited, through September, then October, for a mobile home from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

When a FEMA trailer finally landed on the Pagels' property last week, it came with a padlocked door – and orders that they not move in until inspectors gave them the OK.

"We have a house that's unlivable, but we're still paying the mortgage on it. We're wearing other people's clothes and eating other people's food. And now, we're staring at a trailer that we can't get into," Mrs. Pagels, 58, said wearily, wringing her hands. "The red tape, it's just enormous."

More than two months after Hurricane Ike obliterated Texas' coastal communities, thousands of residents from Oak Island to the Bolivar Peninsula have yet to see any federal aid. Hundreds are still living in tents, disabled cars and condemned, mold-ravaged homes, digging through the mucky remains while they await FEMA inspectors, insurance adjusters, mobile homes and utilities.

Their devastation – and local leaders' fury at the layers of bureaucracy – is mirrored at the state level. Nearly a month after Gov. Rick Perry asked FEMA to fully cover 18 more months of costly debris removal, the federal agency has yet to respond to him.

And county judges who met with Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff last week say they were told Texas was in such good financial shape that the state may be left with much of its own cleanup costs. But state officials say they're far from being able to afford the recovery and are asking Congress for $30 billion in relief.

"People's lives are literally stacked up on the side of the road," said Anahuac Mayor Guy Jackson, who has helped organize the Chambers County efforts. "The storm surge swept their houses clear away, and they're having to fight FEMA every step of the way."

FEMA officials say they are working round-the-clock to help provide housing and to meet state leaders' requests.

They've offered everyone who needs housing an apartment or hotel room – key in populous spots like Galveston, but an untenable commute for many who live and work in remote fishing villages.

They've given rebuilding checks to thousands of uninsured coastal homeowners, many of whom are now unemployed and are using the money to feed and clothe their families.

And while the trailer delivery process has sped up dramatically in recent weeks – officials have moved families into nearly 1,000 mobile homes, and are adding 60 more a day – at least 2,000 Texas families are still waiting.

FEMA officials say there's an arduous but necessary checklist to complete before storm victims can move in, from changing local zoning laws to conducting environmental assessments to getting utilities delivered.

"Ike created a lot of hardships that we're working very hard to try to remedy," said FEMA spokesman Simon Chabel. "I hesitate to beg patience. But know that we recognize the problems, and we're doing everything we can to get people in the best possible housing."

OAK ISLAND WOES

In the two months since Hurricane Ike careened into Galveston Bay, little has improved in tiny Oak Island.

The neighborhood where generations of Texas fishing families dragged in their haul and the children of Vietnamese immigrants played among crab traps is now a giant mud flat, dotted with cheap tents and interrupted by heaping mountains of debris.

There are refrigerators, washing machines, lawn furniture. A kitchen cabinet still stocked with shattered dishes. Home videos and CDs labeled "family pix." And baby clothes and dress shirts hanging in high tree branches like haphazard Christmas ornaments.

When Ike came through, 56-year-old Dianna Hart took what she could: "Some pictures, important papers, a few oil paintings and mama's Bible."

Her family helped spearhead the development of Oak Island's fishing industry in the 1800s and has lived through every storm since; she and her husband, Steve, figured their house would take a foot of water, but never that they'd lose it altogether.

Yet when they took their aluminum boat to their flooded neighborhood after the storm, they could motor right up to their former living room.

"I said, 'Steve, where is our house?' " Mrs. Hart recalled, staring down at her mud-crusted toes and swatting an unrelenting black cloud of mosquitoes. "And then I just went to bawling."

INSURANCE FRUSTRATIONS

The Harts' woes span the coastline – a patchwork of blue plastic-coated rooftops, of stranded sailboats, of streets lined five feet high with trash. But they're luckier than many.

A doctor gave them a crowded camper, and they were the first in the neighborhood to get a makeshift utility pole. Mrs. Hart plucked three of her mother's wedding dishes from the mud – miraculously unbroken.

And they've forged an unlikely alliance with the Vietnamese crab trapper across the street, whom they'd never spoken to before the storm.

But they've received no word from their insurance company, which took a month just to send an adjuster ("a 19-year-old kid," Mr. Hart said, "who wanted to talk about nothing but alligator hunting").

And they can't get FEMA to cut them a check until they know how much their own policy will cover.

"We can't get anybody to give us a straight answer," Mrs. Hart said, lighting her third cigarette in as many minutes. "It's like time just stands still."

The Pagels are living a similar nightmare. Private insurance won't cover the full cost for them to rebuild. And neither FEMA nor insurance is giving them anything for the contents of their home – computers, microwaves and televisions that were sucked out of the house by floodwater, then scavenged by looters.

"It's taken us to the edge, for sure," Mrs. Pagels said. "But all you've got to do is see the sunset from our back yard to know we'll find a way to stay."

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