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OT: This is Why People Should Evacuate
By JLP | September 28, 2008
From Two Weeks After Ike, More Than 400 Are Still Missing, in today’s Houston Chronicle:
Gail Ettenger made her last phone call at 10:10 p.m. She was trapped in her Bolivar Peninsula bungalow with her Great Dane, Reba. A drowning cat cried outside. Her Jeep bobbed in the seawater surging around her home.
Ettenger, 58, told her friend she was reading old love letters by flashlight. “I think I really screwed up this time,” she said, according to Monroe Burks, Ettenger’s neighbor who had evacuated to Houston.
That was Friday, Sept 12. On Wednesday — 12 days later — her nearly nude body was found face down by a huge debris pile in a remote mosquito-ridden marsh in Chambers County, about 10 miles inland from where her gray beach house once stood.
Isn’t that horrible? I can only imagine the fear that must have run through this lady’s mind during the last moments of her life.
I thought about riding out Ike but changed my mind when I saw that it was moving closer to my part of Texas. I got to thinking about it and figured out that it’s just stupid to sit through a dangerous storm if you can be somewhere else. I asked myself, “What do I have to gain by staying?” NOTHING! It’s not like I’m going to be able to hold my house together as the winds tear it apart! I chickened out and I was 100 miles from the storm’s landfall!
Topics: Hurricanes |
