Pearls of Wisdom and Foolish Mutterings

What Happens When We Make Assumptions?

Hold on a minute. Maybe I should have been more concise in my comments about Bolivar Peninsula. The small town of Crystal Beach on Bolivar Peninsula is the furthest thing you could get from a resort community and none of the residences in Crystal Beach could ever be described as "sumptious private residences." Probably 85% of the "beach houses" that were washed away - and I do mean "washed completely away" - were not vacation homes or get-aways. These "beach houses" were primary residences for regular working people just like you and me - albeit, ones who prefer living on the beach and are willing to risk their house being blown away.

These are people who board a ferry every morning to go to work in Galveston or Houston or Baytown - at the chemical plants or at construction companies or in grocery stores - and then get back in line for the ferry every night after work to go home to their little house that just happens to be on the beach. Because that is where they have chosen to live, not because they have houses elsewhere and this is a second residence. These people paid their taxes, paid for their little houses - and all of them are small - Crystal Beach is a working community and people who have the money to build luxury private residences would not come to Crystal Beach to do it.

I don't know if it's even possible to get homeowners insurance on a house built on a beach, but if it is, I'm sure it's expensive and the few houses that are back up are the lucky owners who did have private insurance. As for the other 75-80% of houses that now consist of nothing more than the supporting pillars that their houses were built on, most of those owners became homeless after Hurricane Ike and are either now living with friends or relatives or are still homeless.

In fact, the owners of the houses closest to the shoreline lost everything - their homes, everything in their homes and even the possibility of ever rebuilding because the shoreline eroded so much that they lost their land. Their land is just gone, because the state has a right to a right of way extending back a number of feet from the water and when the hurricane changed the shoreline, those folks just lost it all. They lost even the option to rebuild and they have absolutely zero recourse. Zip. Go live somewhere else.

Yes indeed, we have homelessness in Texas and it increased exponentially after Hurricane Ike. But so did our compassion.

As for the infrastructure of Crystal Beach being rebuilt, well, those people have paid taxes just like all the rest of us have, so who's going to say to them, "Sorry about all that money you paid in city and county taxes over the years, but now you're going to have to do without water, electricity and phone service. We don't want to build it up just to chance getting it knocked down again."?

Oh yeah, that "govenment money" that is supposedly handed out so freely? Ask any of the people in Crystal Beach what kind of government assistance they got to rebuild. Ask them what FEMA did for them after Ike hit. But you'd better be ready to run when you ask because they're liable to pick up the nearest piece of debris and chunk it at you out of pure frustration. FEMA wouldn't even go to Bolivar in the days after the storm when people were stranded there without food, water, ferry service or anything else. And even if the ferries had been running so they could go to Galveston to stand in line in one of the mismanaged and poorly operated FEMA Emergency Centers,they would have had to walk there because all of the cars on Bolivar were washed away or destroyed by the flood waters. Yep, I have a picture of all those cars stacked up, too.

I won't usually debate with anyone about greed and bureaucratic incompetence in our country because there's plenty of that. However, that is not the case and does not apply in this case. My heart broke for those people today and whether I think it's crazy to rebuild there or not is really a moot point. These people are pulling themselves up by the very thin and frazzled string they've been hanging on to for the last six months and they are reclaiming their town without any help from Uncle Sam or anybody else. Not only did they not get help from FEMA (don't get me started on FEMA either, because FEMA was a big, huge joke here in Texas after Ike came through. It was the greater Houston communities who banded together and provided emergency supplies and shelter to everyone who neeed it - NOT FEMA.)

These folks should be applauded, not vilified. So let's get our facts straight before we start casting stones.