Category: Structural Damage
Texas rebuilds after Hurricane Ike with resilience and resolve
Elected Chamber County Clerk, Bobby Scherer retired aged 71 last September – just after Hurricane Ike hit the coast of Texas. Retirement has meant relocation to a FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) trailer parked next to his damaged house, built on land owned by his family for over a hundred years which had previously never flooded. He is fortunate; his house can be repaired.
It's seven months since Hurricane Ike's wrath devastated swathes of Galveston Island and then hurtled up the I45 freeway to wreak havoc on Houston. The hurricane hammered the island 50 miles south east of Houston with wind speeds gusting to 125mph, the high end of a Category 2 hurricane. On the Saffir-Simpson Scale for a "Cat 2" the storm surge is expected at six to eight feet.
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The Insurance Hoax
Julie Tunnell remembers standing in her debris-strewn driveway when the tall man in blue jeans approached. Her northern San Diego tudor-style home had been incinerated a week earlier in the largest wildfire in California history. The blaze in October and November 2003 swept across an area 19 times the size of Manhattan, destroying 2,232 homes and killing 15 people. Now came another blow.
A representative of State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co., the largest home insurer in the U.S., came to the charred remnants of Tunnell's home to tell her the company would pay just $220,000 of the estimated $306,000 cost of rebuilding the house.
"It was devastating; I stood there and cried," says Tunnell, 42, who teaches accounting at San Diego City College. "I felt absolutely abandoned."
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