In Storm-Ravaged Galveston, Echoes of New Orleans

It is has been three weeks since Hurricane Ike blew ashore on Galveston Island bringing up to 20 feet of Gulf waters over the low-lying land, killing a still yet to be determined number of residents — several hundred remain missing — and inflicting billions of dollars in damage. The television satellite trucks and cable news stars are gone and the nation's collective eye has turned elsewhere. But thousands of area residents now live in a stench-filled world where the incongruous is normal and the dangerous real.

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Hurricane Ike Hits the Gulf

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• The 1900 Galveston Hurricane

The slow descent into the Looking Glass land that hurricanes create begins just south of Houston along Interstate Highway 45, the road to Galveston Island. The first odd note is the number of blown out billboards and signs. The gold has gone from the Golden Arches, the toll-free phone number on the billboard for the class action law firm has been torn and tossed to the wind. Then the blue tarps begin to appear, stretched taut over the rooftops of strip malls and apartment buildings.

Crossing the bay, the wetlands are dotted with a sofa here, a plastic garbage can there and suddenly along the causeway, a flotilla of beached, battered boats appears, awkwardly stuck in the median, wedged against highway signs, land-bound, askew and sad. Capturing the wholesale destruction of a hurricane is difficult. We learned that with Hurricane Katrina where the images, no matter how awful, were insufficient measured against the reality. The most overpowering sensation is the smell, a stench that seems to imprint itself on the brain's memory bank, suddenly wafting back hours after you have left the scene. It's a phenomenon well-known among homicide detectives and soldiers.

Like Katrina, the tragedy is found in the particular and often reflected in the horrors facing the most vulnerable. In November 2005, three months after Katrina blew though New Orleans, 82-year-old Marguerite Simon sat on her front porch on Egania Street in the Ninth Ward. Spread out on the bushes along the path to the front door of her small home was an American flag, drying in the sun. The tiny, small-boned woman wearing rubber boots and a paper mask, had smoothed out the crumpled, wet flag that had draped her late husband's coffin.

Three weeks after Ike swept across Galveston, 74-year-old Francis Sullivan — "I'll be 75 on the 17th if I make it!" — is on her front stoop and eyeing a small triangular wooden trophy case on her living room floor amid a stinking pile of family belongings. The box contains the flag that had draped her husband's casket six years ago. It is an ironic coincidence, a reporter's happenstance, brought about by a random turn down a neighborhood street that looks like so many others on the island — lifeless homes with leafless, saltwater-poisoned trees, battered fences hung with soggy towels, shattered windows, and front yards filled with piles of wet carpet, soaked clothes, moldy pots and pans, beach chairs and books, all water-laden, useless, even dangerous from soaking in the diseased stew, and hung about with the smell of decay. Perhaps 20,000 households share this circumstance, according to Galveston Mayor Lyda Ann Thomas.

"It looks like someone picked up my home and shook it," Francis said. "It looks like a mixmaster inside and smells like I don't know what."

Francis fled the island and the home where she had lived for "40 odd years" with her husband, a sea captain for Texaco, taking only a few photographs and the bank books for the Galveston Grandmothers Club. It was the first time she had left during a storm. In 1983, Hurricane Alicia, a category three storm, had blown hard but with no surge. This time, Hollywood Heights, her West End island neighborhood just two blocks off the beach was quickly put under water by Ike. A moldy black water line high on the yellow siding shows where the water had crested, perhaps as high as 15 feet. The green storm shutters had held, but had been blown open and the water flooded into the home. The back bedroom's wooden floor had collapsed. Somewhere in the hole she hopes to find her husband's treasured sextant from his seafaring days.

The volunteers from the Baptist Church had come by earlier in the day and cut down the battered, ancient oak tree that had shaded her backyard. It had fallen, ripped up by the winds like a weed. A small sign in the yard remained in place: "She who plants a garden, plants happiness." Her barbecue and garden shed had stayed put. Francis laughs but not heartily.

See photos of Hurricane Ike here