Galveston still hurting from hurricane’s beating

The beaches of Galveston, Texas, were packed for Memorial Day.

“There’s new sand. There’s people everywhere. Everybody’s happy. Beach looks beautiful,”  said Leann Payne of Baytown, Texas, one of an estimated 250,000 holiday visitors to Galveston, a sliver of an island just off the coast. “Couldn’t ask for anything better.”

In fact, you could.

As officials prepare for the Atlantic hurricane season, which begins Monday, residents of Galveston and other coastal areas of Texas are still a long way from getting back on their feet from Hurricane Ike, which pummeled the state on Sept. 13.

“Many of the most severely impacted communities may face years of recovery before they can even begin to see their communities made whole again,” the Federal Emergency Management Agency said in its official impact report three months after the storm.

Ike caused $11 billion of damage on Texas’ coast, FEMA estimated, and more than $8 billion more in neighboring Gulf states, making it the third most destructive hurricane in U.S. history. It was so ruinous that the World Meteorological Organization, which decides such things, retired its name.

Hurricane names rotate every six years, but there will never be another Hurricane Ike. One was more than enough.

It has been 8½ months since Ike hit, but FEMA is still shuttling coastal families back and forth between temporary homes, and officials are still trying to identify all of the 37 people believed to have died in the state — four of the last five bodies were identified last week through DNA testing, The Houston Chronicle reported.

Along the Texas Gulf Coast, people remain jittery. In a survey released last month by CPL. Retail Energy, one of the state’s largest power providers, 62 percent of residents said they did not believe they were prepared for another major hurricane.

Galveston at the center of the storm
Galveston, where Ike made landfall, was hardest hit, suffering nearly $3 billion of the state’s toll. And it is there that the recovery has been most painful.

The last of the state and federal recovery centers on Galveston and Pelican Islands, which make up the city, didn’t close until April. Reconstruction of the city’s seawall still hasn’t been completed, and only one of its fishing piers is usable.

Eighteen teachers were laid off from Ball High School as part of the Galveston Independent School District’s restructuring after  enrollment fell by 22 percent in Ike's wake. Now the high school struggles with a severe teacher shortage, because on some days, nearly a fifth of its 150 teachers are absent as they rebuild and move, Superintendent Lynne Cleveland said.

Finding substitute teachers “is a struggle,” said Lisa Schweitzer, a teacher who took 10 days off this school year to move out of and then back into her home.

Interactive Hurricane briefing What you need to know about hurricanes, their origins and their effects

“Subs are also in the same place we are, and so many people don’t live here on the island anymore,”  she said.

Classrooms have doubled and tripled up, and sometimes more than 600 students are crammed into the auditorium, said Dean Blair, the school’s principal. On a few occasions, the school has resorted to showing classes informational films or episodes of “America’s Funniest Home Videos.”

The city's economy, which is based on an $800 million tourism industry and the University of Texas Medical Branch, its largest employer, also is reeling. Mayor Lyda Ann Thomas said 47 percent of the city’s tax base was in the hardest-hit west end of the island, and she predicted that it would take five years to build it back up.

Damage to the medical center also curtailed health care in the region. The main hospital still has fewer than half the beds it did before the storm, and its emergency room remains closed.

Beach rebuilding boosts tourism
The quarter-million Memorial Day visitors equaled the number of tourists for the holiday a year ago, rewarding officials’ decision to ship in new sand to rebuild beaches along 2½ miles of the 6-mile stretch of shoreline that Ike eroded by more than 50 feet.

“I was actually expecting less but, wow, it’s beautiful,” said Claudia Holloway of Houston, a tourist who returned for the first time since the hurricane. “We love it. And we’re coming back again.”

An msnbc.com-NBC News special report By Alex Johnson of msnbc.com with Phil Archer, Mary Benton and Alana Gomez Dong of NBC station KPRC in Houston. NBC stations KVEO of Brownsville, Texas, and WOAI of San Antonio, Texas, contributed to this report.

The turnout was “a good barometer of what the balance of the summer will bring to the island as far as tourism is concerned,” said Lou Muller, executive director of the Galveston Park Board of Trustees.

But in the longer term, FEMA's impact report said, “the double jeopardy of Ike and the general economic slowdown do not bode well for the tourism industry.”

Overall economic data will not be available until next month, but one key measure — business at  hotels — indicates that far fewer people are visiting for more than just a day trip.

Quarterly tax reports on file with the state comptroller’s office show that the city’s hotels registered $12.6 million in taxable receipts in the last three months of 2008, down by 30 percent from the same period the year before.

Thanks to displaced residents and out-of-town contractors rebuilding the city, receipts rebounded in the first three months of this year, the last period for which figures were available. But even with that temporary influx, 19 percent of the city’s hotels with 10 or more rooms reported about $1,000 or less in taxable receipts from January through March.

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