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Situation in Jasper 'desperate'
By Christine S. Diamond and Bronwyn Turner
The Lufkin Daily News
Tuesday, September 27, 2005

JASPER — This is a city without power and in peril, rescue workers said Monday, citing a worst-case scenario of two months without electricity for the town nicknamed “The Jewel of the Forest.”

The curtain of trees surrounding Jasper became her enemy when Hurricane Rita roared through. "We sustained hurricane winds of about 100 to 120 mph for about a nine-hour period, so we have thousands of trees down within our city," said Jasper Police Chief Todd Hunter, who paused during a hectic day to sound a shrill note of alarm. "Our city is without gas. We have no gas except to run emergency vehicles, This city is without food. There were some MREs (Meals Ready to Eat) brought in yesterday, but it was not enough.

"People are becoming desperate. They've been three days without water. They weren't prepared," he added. He asked people to call their state representatives and senators and "try to encourage them to get our food and get our water to us, because we're desperate and we need them now. People have been without all basic needs for days."

Denise Kelley, Jasper's acting city manager, warned the emergency cannot be quickly resolved. "We are told it could be anywhere from one to two months before we get power again," said Kelley, speaking outside the city's Emergency Operations Center. Jasper's electric provider is based in Beaumont and — until Beaumont is up and running — all the repairs in Jasper are useless. "We never thought we'd get hit this hard being this far inland," Kelley said.

Without power, the city was left incapacitated.
Without power, the city's water wells stopped pumping, leaving 15,000 residents and evacuees without running water for three days, according to Hunter and Kelley.
Without power, grocery stores closed, and the perishable food left within them has spoiled.
"We are at the point now where everything is melted," Kelley said.
Several stores had offered to provide their food to the emergency command center at Jasper's central fire station, Kelley said. And restaurant owner Robbie Lovett of Elijah's Cafe had promised workers at the command post two hot meals a day until supplies ran out, she said.

"Right now must of our businesses are shut down for lack of power," said Tom McClurg, executive director of the Jasper Economic Development Corporation. "Businesses would like to open but can't."

"We have no power — generators are just now getting here," Kelley said.
Only two years before, McClurg and other city leaders had spoken of the city's economic boom. Now, with an extended power outage in the future, Jasper will see a "significant loss of sales tax value, and many employees without vacation benefits will have hours lost at work,” McClurg said.

Without power, refueled gas stations have no way to transfer gasoline to customers' vehicles, Kelley said.

"There is no gas except to fuel emergency vehicles," Hunter said.
Jasper, Hunter said, was never intended to host Hurricane Rita evacuees.
"Most of the Rita evacuees had to keep going north," McClurg said.
But when those fleeing Rita ran out of gas and found themselves stranded in Jasper — which ran out of gas itself on Friday afternoon — the city was forced to absorb the newcomers in addition to the 800 Hurricane Katrina evacuees who had arrived almost a month earlier, according to McClurg.
To make matters worse, those who did reach safety north of Jasper are trying to return to their homes only to be turned back, stranded without gas, food or money in Jasper, she said.
"People need to stay put," Kelley said.

Dwindling resources
Outside the command center Monday, a young mother of three was given an emergency fuel-up by Ricky Rogers of Spring. His company, Roland Robert Distributor Inc., had just purchased the fuel tanker to help with Hurricane Katrina but was instead diverted to Jasper to help with Rita victims like Dana Trammell.

Out of gas, with two children to take care of, Trammell was overwhelmed. Her husband, who had uncontrollably high blood pressure, and her 3-year-old son, who was suffering seizures, had been taken by helicopter to a hospital beyond her means' reach.

With 16,000 people to feed, the city was in desperate need of food, even MREs, Hunter said.

"I need people to call state representatives and senators to get water and food to us," he said.

Drinking water and ice are also on short supply, Kelley said.

"We've issued a boil water notice because there are so many water leaks," she said. "Thirty-foot pieces of water pipe were jerked out of the ground."

Kelley, the city's financial manager, said when she was named as the acting city manager she never thought she'd be “dealing with a hurricane."

Standing in the shade of the converted fire department/cafeteria holding a plate of food, Kelley's strong facade broke as she spoke of her own home, barricaded by so many uprooted trees that her husband had to cut her a path with a chainsaw.

"Everybody is exhausted. You know how it is when you don't sleep and you're tired and hungry," Kelley said.

"We have had some looting but we are not taking reports unless essential," Hunter said. "I have an 18-man police force that has grown in size two times by volunteers from other departments.

"When we get food, people are going to get desperate.”

McClurg said they hoped to put the city back together as soon as they could. In the meantime, he said, “We are thankful for outside assistance."

Broken home
"We started out with one house and ended up with two," joked Sandra Sheffield about the hole left in the middle of her family's house off state Highway 63 just north of Jasper.

Behind the house Sheffield grew up in and returned to with her husband four years ago was an open-air camper and the new trailer home where her mother-in-law now lives. While Sheffield and her mother-in-law, Mildred, holed up in the frame house during the first part of the storm, it was the other two structures that were left unscathed from the storm.

"We decided the cooler was the coolest place we own," Sheffield laughed.

Sheffield and her husband, a minister, had spent the last 30 years away from Jasper and decided to come back when a chaplain position opened at Goodman Unit, a state prison. That's where her husband spent the duration of Hurricane Rita.

"The storm came through and my mother-in-law and I were at home alone," Sheffield said, estimating that the storm arrived about 3:30 a.m. Saturday. "I got scared of the weather and moved my mother to the floor by a supporting wall."

Not long after that, the first tree fell. Not waiting for what would happen next, the Sheffields got in their car and "made a new driveway to the neighbors' house. We rode the storm out there."

There were already 14 people at the neighbor's home, but when headlights cut through the horizontal gusts of rain and the Sheffield women appeared on the back porch, they were quickly made welcome.

Later, a second tree fell on their severed home.

Like many homes and store fronts in Jasper, a large taped-X covered the Sheffields' front picture window. A few feet away from the unbroken window, the wood frame house bore a gaping hole as if something had taken a bite out of it. An insurance company saw to the removal of the two giant pine trees on Sunday, Sheffield said.

"In a couple hours they got the place looking a lot better," she said.

On Sunday, a journalist with Good Morning America who had been staying at a motel in Jasper arrived at the Sheffields' home for an interview that aired Monday morning. After the interview, knowing the journalist's motel lacked water and electricity, 81-year-old Mildred offered the young man a cold shower in her new trailer.

"Really, we all are during pretty good," Sheffield said.

Powerless
Margie Warren, of Port Arthur, said her grandmother's Jasper home might be without electricity for three weeks.

She and her sister had evacuated their Port Arthur homes, as they always do for Category 3 and 4 hurricanes, and sought refuge in Jasper, where they grew up.

"We left (Port Arthur) at 4 a.m. Thursday and got here about 7 a.m.," Warren said. "We got stalled in Kirbyville once."

Port Arthur police told Warren to call back in three to four days to see if they could return home.

Behind her on the porch, Warren's mother, Mamie Warren, spoke of the perilous storm they weathered together Saturday.

"It started pounding on us real bad from 2-7 o'clock," Mamie said.

"It sounded like a freight train. The rain wasn't so bad," Warren said. "We opened the door and saw all the trees going down."

From their shaded spot on grandma Mary Ella Grant's covered porch, high above the street, Grant's prodigy could view the massive destruction Hurricane Rita wrought. Several century-old trees that had once adorned the city park lay on their sides split in gnarled pieces, their exposed giant rootballs still intact.

As they recounted their storm saga, Warren's sister, Patricia Broxton, walked up, her arms extended passionately as she proclaimed, "I had to go and see if it was up. Lufkin is wide open! I bought kerosene lamps, batteries, flashlights, candles, cigarettes — whatever money could buy!"

I'll think twice next time
With temperatures soaring near the 100-degree mark, the family gathering behind another small Jasper home resembled something of a Labor Day holiday affair.

But the group assembled on Ronny Billingsley's back patio Monday afternoon wasn't on holiday. They should never have been there at all.

Jasper, Billingsley said, was under a mandatory evacuation Thursday. Most of those resting in the shade, drinking water from aluminum FEMA-issued cans, came to the Billingsley home from Vidor and Pine Forest —communities in the path of Hurricane Rita.

So why did Billingsley, a justice of the peace, ignore the warning? "We had too many people coming up here to take care of," he said. "I'll think twice next time there is a Category 4 storm coming in, though.

"We are 120 miles from the Gulf and you don't expect this kind of damage from a hurricane," he said, looking over at his neighbor's broken home. "We've never had a Category 3 storm come through like this. People didn't know what to expect. But we do next time."

Billingsley's guests began to feel the beginnings of the hurricane about 11 p.m. Friday.

"You ought to have been here," said L.M. Hock of Pine Forest.

"It wasn't bad 'til 11 o'clock, when the winds picked up to gale force," Billingsley said. "About the time you'd think it was through, it would get worse."

Huddled in the dark with flashlights, the Billingsleys were soon joined by the Sheffields. Without power they were dependent on their son, a senior at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, to keep them apprised of the hurricane's progress based on information he saw on the weather station.

"He would call us every 45 minutes or hour and give us an update," Billingsley said. "That was the only way we knew the worst wasn't over with."

Shingles were blown off their roof and their well-mown yard was covered with broken limbs. Otherwise, Billingsley said, they were doing well with operational phones, running water and some power supplied by a generator.

"We are just all so relieved that nobody got hurt, and no real property damage. We feel real lucky," Billingsley said. "As far as the daily grind and daily business, we are at a standstill."

The one thing they do have is time, he said, with no jobs to go to because everything was shut down.

"There were garbage trucks running this morning,” said John Britt of Vidor. “I couldn't believe it.”

With power out for so long, the focus had shifted to cooking the contents of a defrosted freezer.

"We had a whole bunch of ground meat," Billingsley said. "When we are through with that, we have venison we'll fry up. And when that is gone, we'll take what fish we got and fry that up."

"We have plenty of canned goods,” Hock said. “We all brought some.”

Billingsley, bare-chested in the Texas heat, sat up straight as he announced he had one thing to say about the weekend ordeal.

"The people in East Texas are what I call survivors," he said. "They are going to figure out what to do. They'll cut what they need to cut. They'll get by on what they got."

On Sunday, the group had gone to town, where they had heard on the radio that FEMA was handing out water and MREs.

"If I had nothing else to eat, they'd be great,” said Derek Billingsley , the Nacogdoches man who spent Sunday trying to dodge police roadblocks to reach his family in Jasper. “Anything is better than nothing.”