Galveston Trip

During Spring Break, April 12th thru 18th, a team of 9 of us from Hillside Church went to Galveston, Texas to help the cleanup and rebuilding from Hurricane Ike (September 08). Four people from our team were from the Farm Drive Center, 3 middle school boys and 1 high school girl. Hurricane Ike hit the area in September and did quite a bit of damage but the EFCA Crisis Response is still busy helping rebuild homes and lives. Below is a picture of an apartment complex that has been abandoned and nobody has touched it since the hurricane hit. We worked right down the street from this apt. complex.

Galveston is an island on the coast of Texas about 40 miles south of Houston. The island has a seawall that is about 20-30 feet high which was not enough for the 60 or so foot sea surge from the hurricane. Most of the flooding actually came from the other side of the island, from the bay side. Here is a pier that is on the Gulf of Mexico side. Note the truck. That was crazy!

This is one home that the owner had called about, asking help to have it demolished. This is going to be a hard job for someone since the flood waters pushed the house off it's foundation and right next to the house next to it.

A lot of work has been done already and there are a lot of beatiful homes in
Galveston. Here is one completed.

Some of the worst damage was to the Bolivar Pennisula which is directly east of Galveston. We spent part of a day looking around there. We took a ferry from Galveston across the bay to reach the pennisula. We found this house driving around. We guessed it was maybe 1/2 mile from it's original foundation but we have no idea. The original house can be found on Google maps and you can see how far it is away since it blew across the highway and landed near a cemetary! Not in Kansas anymore!

Most of the houses in this area were beach houses and most were on stilts. Did not help much. Notice the rooms upstairs still have furniture in them.

We were planning to gut houses like we did in New Orleans. When we got there we found out that there was not much gutting left to do. The gutting left to do was with rentals and until the owner requests help, we couldn't help. There still is a lot of work to be done rebuilding and skill is not required. We were sent to a house that the previous team had hung new dry wall and now needed to be taped and mudded. We put our expert tapers to work, Chuck and Julie while the rest of us mudded over the tape and then sanded it down and repeated the process 3 times. Below are our FD kids actively working over Gary. They were awesome, hard workers.

Taking a Cal Trans break!

One of our best mudders!

Helping cut dry wall to do some last minute patch work. These guys really were hoping to do some demo work. Near the end of the week, the owner decided to gut one of the bathrooms so they got their wish. I will post a video of that work later.

Our FD kids with the owner of the house, Rose.

Our Team! It was a great week of working on this house and spending time together traveling, sleeping, and eating together in Galeston Texas! We'd all love to go back!