Biggest obstacle to Galveston recovery is water

GALVESTON— As hundreds of Galveston's residents sought tetanus shots at this island's single emergency room, city officials revealed Thursday that the key to curbing the growing health crisis triggered by Hurricane Ike hinges on a single crippled water distribution system.

And fixing it could take weeks, officials said Thursday. “Our water system is bleeding, literally bleeding,” explained Steve LeBlanc, Galveston's city manager. “Because at this point we have so many leaks in the system, we're basically bleeding out more (water) than we're pushing into the system.”

When asked when water could be distributed at pre-Ike levels, LeBlanc said: “Oh, God, it's going to be weeks and weeks, and if you add the west end, it's going to be months and months.” That one problem is at the core of a growing health risk for residents here and poses the biggest roadblock in getting residents back who evacuated before Hurricane Ike.

The roughly 45,000 people who fled Galveston Island are among the more than 1 million who evacuated the Texas coast as Ike steamed across the Gulf of Mexico. Gov. Rick Perry said 22,000 people are still living in more than 200 shelters, and he joined Galveston city officials on Thursday in asking for patience.

“I absolutely understand they want to get back to their homes. ... I'd like to get back to the mansion,” said Perry, who moved into temporary quarters about a year ago for renovations to his official residence, which then took heavy damage from a fire in June.

Galveston Island remained closed, as did the worse-off Bolivar Peninsula, where the storm's surge washed entire neighborhoods into the sea. Search teams pulled out of both areas this week after sweeping every house, authorities said.

Ike's death toll in the U.S. stood at 56, with 22 in Texas, and there was still the fear that more victims would be found. After Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, bodies continued to turn up for more than a year.

To the northwest, life took more steps toward normal in Houston, where traffic picked up on the downtown streets less than a week after the vast Category 2 storm blew through.

The Port of Houston — one of the world's busiest — reopened all but two of its terminals on Thursday, with the entire port set to resume normal operations today. The Port of Galveston planned to reopen Monday.

CenterPoint Energy said it had restored power to nearly 900,000 homes in the Houston area, and the utility was fast approaching the point where more people in the nation's fourth-largest city would be with electricity than without. About 1.5 million are still without power statewide.

Growing health crisis

In Galveston, city officials were warning of a growing health crisis.

“We've seen cases of diarrhea. We had one case of flesh-eating bacteria. We basically have a growing concern of health-related, I can't even name the things, you know, nauseated people,” LeBlanc said.

“We just want to avoid a mass infection type situation.”

The county's top health officials said that no infectious diseases have been found on Galveston Island or other areas hit hardest by Hurricane Ike in Galveston County.

But Dr. Harland “Mark” Guidry, the chief executive of the Galveston County Health District, said conditions remain unhealthful because of broken sewerage lines, polluted water and dangerous debris.

Health officials were closely monitoring reports from emergency medical personnel in Galveston, the Bolivar Peninsula and the Bacliff-San Leon areas for signs of a disease outbreak.

Guidry warned that the three areas remained hazardous because of raw sewage on the ground, hazardous household chemicals spread by the storm surge and dangerous objects such as exposed nails.

“These are not safe and healthy places to be,” he said.

Mainland Medical Center in Texas City began accepting patients in its emergency room for the first time since the storm, hospital spokeswoman Deborah Beverly said.

There are no plans for state or even federally operated mobile clinics on this very immobilized island. The single medical treatment facility — the University of Texas Medical Branch — was partially flooded during the storm and had to have its patients evacuated last week.

It could take up to two months before UTMB can admit patients and treat an entire island city of 58,000, the city's population. Because of its diminished capacity to treat anyone with serious illnesses and injuries, UTMB's emergency room has been taken over by two U.S. Health and Human Services Disaster Medical Assistance Teams — one from Iowa and one from Connecticut.

Galveston Mayor Lyda Ann Thomas on Thursday implored “to be a little more patient — not for months — but for a few more days.”

UTMB and the surrounding neighborhood of Fish Village had partial power restored as of Thursday morning, but the rest of the island remains dark except for a few buildings with generator power.

Water service has been restored to the central parts of the city, although it is unsafe to drink or cook with. And while cellular communications are mostly back online, the sewer system is still overwhelmed.

Beach homes in jeopardy

Meanwhile, there are concerns that hundreds of people whose beachfront homes were wrecked by Hurricane Ike may be barred from rebuilding under a little-noticed Texas law. And even those whose houses were spared could end up seeing them condemned by the state.

And it could be a year before the state tells these homeowners what they may or may not do. Worse, if these homeowners do lose their beachfront property, they may get nothing in compensation from the state.

The reason: A 1959 law, the Texas Open Beaches Act. Under the law, the strip of beach between the average high-tide line and the average low-tide line is public property, and it is illegal to build anything there.

Over the years, the state has repeatedly invoked the law to seize houses in cases where a storm eroded a beach so badly that a home was sitting on public property. The aftermath of Ike could see the biggest such use of the law in Texas history.

Texas General Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson, whose office is responsible for policing the beaches, said he saw hundreds of houses in jeopardy of being declared on the beach unlawfully as he flew over the coastline this week. He said no decision on whether homeowners can continue living there would be made for at least a year, while authorities watch the shifting boundaries of the beach.

A.R. “Babe” Schwartz, the former state senator who wrote the law, had little sympathy.

“Every one of them was warned of that in their earnest money contract, in the deed they received, in the title policy they bought,” he said.