Reply #117: Rescuers Fear for Those Stuck on Texas Peninsula

[dogday]

CHAMBERS COUNTY, Tex. — The rescue trucks and ambulances, neatly arranged in a double column, sat waiting at the point where State Highway 124, the road to the Bolivar Peninsula, disappeared underneath a storm-bloated ocean. Early Sunday afternoon, that was the closest the rescue workers could get to the string of little towns they had fled two days before as Hurricane Ike approached, leaving behind what they estimated were a few hundred holdouts


As they waited, stymied, for the waters to recede, their minds were occupied with visions of the worst. “There’s going to be substantial deaths,” said the emergency medical services coordinator for High Island, Robert Isaacks. “It looks pretty grim, to tell you the truth.”

He added, “The water’s slowly but surely going down now, but it’s not going down fast enough for us.”

The Bolivar Peninsula is a barrier island-like finger of land east of Galveston Island; between the two is the entrance to Galveston Bay. It is normally reached by ferry from Galveston or via the rice-farming country east of Galveston Bay, where on Sunday drowned cattle were half-buried in piles of debris along the gravel roads.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/15/us/15scene.html