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From the overheads, you see two main debris vectors.

The main one, heavy construction debris, timbers, walls, sections of roof, down to bits and pieces, runs generally northwest. Specifically between 45 degrees and 63.5 degrees clockwise from the main road through Gilchrist. 290.1 through 310.3 degrees magnetic when transferred to a map.

Most failures were a product of surge damage, rather than wind. You see this because there’s a direct correlation between damage levels and elevation, the higher a location was above sea level, the lesser the damage to structures. It can go the other way, if the winds are strong enough and did from time to time in this storm, but the primary failure mode was from surge.

That indicates to me that the Gilchrist structures failed early in the storm, as the eyewall approached and pushed enough wave and water action ashore to exceed design and material limits.

Later in the storm, or after the storm it’s difficult to tell, you see the other main debris vector, fill transport. The sand was pushed southeast and left easily definable trails as that happened. Could have been the rear eyewall as the storm moved ashore, or if could have been up to days after the storm as surge impounded against the shore was released to course back over the barrier islands to the sea.

It’s an assumption, but a defensible one, that people were hunkered down in shelters and didn’t leave until the ocean ripped open ther structure and forced exit, IF anyone was still there by that time. Historical accounts cover this pretty well. Since the secondary debris vector involves small particulates, generally, and the primary debris vector holds true for larger and heavier debris, I expect to find any concentrations of bodies northwest of the damage areas, specifically on the shore east of Smith Point and south of Robinson Lake.

I also suspect the Robinson Gas Plant sustained heavy damage to a pipeline, storage facility or wellhead, and produced the “oil” slick visible in many of the images. That may still be leaking.

http://www.caller.com/news/2008/sep/16/tales_of_survival/

BOLIVAR PENINSULA — Many years from now, a small group of Hurricane Ike survivors probably still will be telling the story of how, on the night the storm flattened their island, they took sanctuary in a church — with a lion.

The full-grown lion was from a local zoo, and the owner was trying to drive to safety with the animal when he saw cars and trucks stranded in the rising floodwaters. He knew he and the lion were in trouble.

He headed for the church and was met by a group of residents who helped the lion wade inside, where they locked it in a sanctuary as the storm raged. The water crept up to their waists, and two-by-fours came floating through broken windows. But the lion was as calm as a kitten.

When daylight came, everyone was alive.

“They worked pretty well together, actually,” said the lion’s owner, Michael Ray Kujawa. “When you have to swim, the lion doesn’t care about eating nobody.”

Amid the destruction in places like Bolivar Peninsula and Galveston, where row upon row of houses were scoured from the landscape, seemingly impossible tales of survival have begun emerge. Whether through faith or fate, luck or resourcefulness, dozens of people who stayed behind made it out alive, and have harrowing stories to prove it.

As of Tuesday, the official death toll from Ike stood at 47. Only 17 were in Texas — and many of those were people killed by fires or generator fumes after the storm had passed. However, authorities held out the possibility that some victims were washed out to sea.

Among those who made it out alive was Kathi Norton, who put on a life jacket as the storm closed in on High Island, on the Bolivar Peninsula. She and her husband, Paul, knew the dangers of staying, and put their important documents, credit cards, money and cell phones into a plastic bag, and held on tight.

All too quickly, the floodwaters rose and the house started to break apart. Through the gaps, they saw refrigerators, lawn mowers and hot tubs floating past. The deck broke away next. Then the roof started to buckle.

“The whole floor was just opened out,” he said. Norton grabbed his wife and headed for an outdoor staircase, escaping in time only because a flagpole kept the house from crashing down for a few precious seconds. “I look up, the house is coming on us,” he said.

For hours, they sloshed around in 4-foot waves before finding themselves perched in a tree. They finally made their way onto someone’s motor home, which then started to sink. They were able to cling to rafters of a nearby structure and hang on until daybreak.

“We had to grab that staircase and float wherever it took us,” the 68-year-old retiree said.

Willis Turner decided to ride it out on his wooden boat next to his house on Crystal Beach, also on Bolivar Peninsula, but it nearly capsized and he was saved by a rope his wife tossed to him. The two held on inside a home that she said “vibrated like a guitar string.”

“It was like an atomic bomb going off. Right after the eye passed, whole houses came by us at 30 miles an hour — WHOLE HOUSES! — just floating right past,” Turner said. “It was unreal. Unreal.”

Turner and his wife awoke the next day to an island they no longer recognized. The first four rows of houses on the beach were washed into the sea. There were no more restaurants, no more gas stations, no more grocery stores. The neighborhood was gone.

In Galveston, Charlene Warner, 52, weathered the storm with her landlord and a neighbor in the apartment above her own.

“It felt like an earthquake — the rumbling and the rocking of the building,” she said, smoking outside a shelter in San Antonio. “Everyone was praying.”

“It was so terrible. All I could say was, ‘Lord, please don’t kill me. Forgive me for what I done,”’ Warner said, as a tear rolled down her cheek.

After the storm, she and neighbors waited for rescue, but no one came. The water receded, leaving a layer of muck filled with snakes. But with no water, no electricity and a shrinking supply of food, Warner decided to go for help, sliding her way across the goo a block and a half to the fire station.

Firefighters took her and neighbors to a spot where they could get on an evacuation bus. She arrived at a shelter in San Antonio with her purse stuffed full of personal documents and cigarettes, and one spare outfit that she washed and drip-dried on a railing Tuesday.

“I lost everything. What you see with me is all I have,” she said. “I never seen anything like that in my life. I’ll never ride out another storm.”

Cheryl Stanley said she and her husband, Tom, wanted to evacuate their Galveston apartment before the hurricane hit but couldn’t. Their son, Casey, has cerebral palsy, and the three live on the third floor. When they tried to leave, the elevators were turned off, and they couldn’t carry Casey down the stairs.

“It was horrible,” Cheryl said. “The building was shaking all night.”

A few hours into the storm, Casey said he didn’t feel safe in the bedroom, so they moved him to the living room. About three hours later, the ceiling in his bedroom collapsed.

“Thank God, we got Casey out of there,” his mother said.

After the storm passed, paramedics carried Casey downstairs. And neighbors carried the wheelchair.

At the Baptist church on Bolivar Island where the lion spent the night, Richard Jones, a shrimper, said he wasn’t afraid of the beast.

“That little old fella is just as tame as a kitten,” Jones said.

After the storm passed, the lion’s caretakers fed it pork roast to keep it happy.