Hurricane drives Emporians home

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By Bobbi Mlynar (Contact)

Monday, September 15, 2008

Photo by Adam Vogler

Gabe Withington, Chris Ford and Kimberly Mounkes have returned to Emporia after having lost everything during Hurricane Ike.

Three former Emporians headed back to Kansas to escape Hurricane Ike, after their refuge in Winnie, Texas, was destroyed by the winds and water that accompanied the storm. Another Emporian and her two children rode out the hurricane as it moved north to their home outside Kady, Texas, about 10 to 15 miles west of Houston.

Chris Ford, Gabe Withington, and Ford’s fiancee, Kim Mounkes, had gone to Winnie, Texas, Friday night from Crystal Beach, Texas, near Galveston.

“The eye of the hurricane hit Galveston and Crystal Beach got the back end,” Ford said, adding that the back side inflicted the worst part of the damage.

He had boarded up his home and was boarding up other people’s beach houses when he decided to leave.

Motels seemed to be all booked, but they managed to get the last room in Winnie.

“About 11 o’clock, the power shut off. Shortly after that, winds came and floods started ripping things down,” Ford said. “The motel I was staying in was pretty much destroyed. The one next to me was flat. There were signs laying on vehicles.”

Electric power went out and Ford went out to look at damages.

“I took me a nap and decided I was coming back to Kansas,” he said.

He has since learned that the main bridge home to Crystal Beach has been destroyed and the only other bridge is heavily damaged; the island can be reached now only by ferrys.

Ford was there when Hurricane Gustav inflicted a small hit on Crystal Beach, and a prior hurricane dumped rain on the area. Ike took a more direct approach.

“It was a pretty nasty storm, that’s for sure. ... I kind of had a hunch, but I underestimated it, I guess,” Ford said. “I’ll take it a little more serious” when the next hurricane is forecast.

The trio searched for fuel as they traveled north to the Dallas area, and finally found gas in the small town of Centerville, about 40 miles north of Dallas.

Ford, who went to Crystal Beach to work in construction, expects to return there when power is restored.

Former Emporian Caroline Walker Trulock, sister of Gazette publisher Chris Walker, said this morning that much of the area around her home and Houston is without electricity and water is contaminated.

Trulock’s home sustained roof and fence damage when the storm whipped through. Schools have been closed until further notice, trees were uprooted and debris that flew through the air from other houses is scattered through the neighborhood.

“You wake to a different world,” Trulock said of the day after the hurricane. “You go to bed that night and you wake up and it’s a different existence because you are without some of those luxuries that you just take for granted. I don’t think people realize electricity is a luxury.”

Trulock’s husband, Hines, who works for an oil-drilling firm, was in Brazil on a job when the hurricane blew inland. She and their children, Ethan, 7, and Olivia, 5, were at home, prepared for the storm to hit.

“Common sense just tells you,” Trulock said. “We knew watching the news ahead of time that this was going to be pretty big, just with the mere size of it.”

Trulock had filled up both of the family vehicles with gas and bought sacks of charcoal in anticipation of needing to grill food instead of cooking it on the stove; she also stocked up with a good supply of ready-to-eat foods, like peanut butter, tuna in a bag and other non-perishables.

“I’ve been through a hurricane before, but nothing like this,” she said. “... You learn to be resourceful. You learn not to panic too much because you can’t. Even though everything on the outside of your house is just completely out of control, you have to maintain a sense of calm inside your house for your children.”

Trulock lived in North Carolina when Hurricane Hugo in 1989 was so powerful it tracked up into the mountains of North Carolina and caused significant damages. Another hurricane a few years later struck the outer banks of the Carolinas, but wasn’t as devastating as Hugo, she said.

Ike barreled in during the night, bringing with it rain and battering winds.

“It was just incredibly loud,” she said. “It did sound like a freight train. The wind going through the windows was just phenomenal.”

Ethan thought the house was being hit by a tornado, and Trulock explained it using a harmonica for comparison.

“The wind is traveling through these flaps and it’s making noise. That’s what’s happening to the house,” she recalled telling her son. “It will be okay. In my mind I was thinking, ‘How do I really know that?’”

Their neighborhood fared better than Houston, where she took the children Sunday afternoon to get them out of the house after the flooding downtown had receded.

“I think the news person in me was kind of curious and the photographer in me said, ‘I want to see what this is like’ and I wanted to take pictures of it to remember for the kids,” she said.

“It was just amazing to see the destruction in downtown Houston.”

At the Chase Morgan Bank, one of Houston’s tallest building, windows were shattered and blinds were dangling from the openings.

Glass continued to fall out onto the sidewalks below.

“It’s like glass just falling from the sky. There must be two or three city blocks that are just glass,” she said. “You’ll be walking along and there’s an office chair out in the middle of the street. The blinds are all mangled and scattered out along the streets like confetti. It’s just weird.

“Manuals and stuff, full of financial information — like there was an acquisition, a whole acquisition of some company. Briefcases. Anything that people left in their offices is fair game for being out in the street.”

Trulock viewed the scene with “shock and awe. ... You expect to see damage in the coastal area. To experience it in a major metropolitan area to the degree that it is right now down there, it’s just a mess. And the glass, the amount of glass, really thick glass. It almost looks like ice cubes. It’s amazing that it did so much damage.”

Along the way, Trulock encountered a Chicago Tribune reporter who wanted to interview her.

“I asked, ‘What’s going on in the real world?’” Turlock said.

Without electricity, the car radio is the family’s only contact with the outside, and that is only sporadic.

“Really, all in all, it’s not bad,” Trulock said. “It’s really the inconvenience of no electricity and we cannot drink the water.”

Refrigerator trucks are reportedly coming with ice and other goods from San Antonio and Trulock has heard that some grocery stores have generators and may be re-opening soon.

She’s grateful the family cars have gas, at least for now.

“You can go by the gas stations and the pumps are all out of gas — not that anybody could pump gas, because there’s no electricity,” she said.