Two Weeks After Ike, More than 400 Are Still Missing

[tekisui]

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/hurricane/ike/6027458.html

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.

Two weeks after Hurricane Ike swept through the Texas coast, 400 people remain missing, mostly from Galveston County, according to an analysis of calls logged to a hot line set up by the nonprofit Laura Recovery Center to assist local authorities.

Until Wednesday, Ettenger was one of them.

About 60 of the missing lived on the Bolivar Peninsula, stripped bare by the storm surge that felled beach houses like a bomb. More than 200 were listed as missing on Galveston Island itself, according to a city-by-city analysis of the data conducted for the Houston Chronicle by Bob Walcutt, executive director of the recovery center in Friendswood.

Hot line and rescue workers hope that many people, especially on Galveston Island, will be reunited with family and friends as hurricane recovery efforts continue. More than 145 already have been located through blogs, media Web sites, Red Cross shelter lists, endless phone calls, welfare checks and sometimes dramatic rescues led by the Galveston County Sheriff's Office and other agencies.

Yet disturbing tales told by survivors from Bolivar communities like Gilchrist, Crystal Beach and Port Bolivar suggest some may never return.

"There's still lots of people who are not accounted for," said Capt. Rod Ousley, of the State Parks & Wildlife Service, which is helping to search for survivors or bodies in remote corners of several coastal counties. "We don't know if they got washed out to sea, or buried in the sand or in debris piles. We just keep looking until they come up ... we're just going to keep trying."

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http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/hurricane/ike/6027458.html

[Marrah_G]

1. Sadly, it is to be expected.

Hopefully the bodies will turn up, but the sad reality is that many never will.

[Digit]

2. Reading old love letters by flashlight

that is such a sad story and an awful outcome.

[slipslidingaway]

3. :(( n/t

[Lisa0825]

4. I work in Galveston.

I go back to work tomorrow, and part of my job will be investigating workers who are still unaccounted for, and trying to see if we can locate some of them.

Not the kind of job one ever wishes to do.