Reporting in Bridge City

This week at my internship I was working with the Reporters and we did a story in Bridge City. It was interesting, because local oil company Motiva has been a major factor in gutting the houses in Bridge City and trying to get them back to normal. I did a package on it for my resume tape, but sadly it was my first one tape-to-tape so it isn't very good.

Some employees of Motiva took us to a couple of houses to see some of the damage. One of the homes we went to, the family had only lived there for about 2 months (brand new home) and they didn't have any flood insurance. It was so sad. They took us into the house and they had completely gutted it. You could see through the bottom over room up to like 4 feet. They had pulled out all the kitchen cabinets, sink, everything. It looked so bare like no one had ever lived there.

Motiva said they had helped gut around 225 homes by Tuesday, so I'm sure the number has gone up now. They have helped mostly in Bridge City, but that number includes other surrounding areas. They have been helping their employees first and then going out and helping other residents from the area. They have done a great job though.

Bridge City students actually got to go back to school on Wednesday. They aren't all living in Bridge City, so one bus from every district around this area that have Bridge City residents staying in their city are taking Bridge City students to and from school. The elementary schools are set up in portables for the rest of the year, but fortunately the kids are getting back into their normal routine.

Hopefully things will get back to normal soon. It's awesome to be doing my internship now though so I can see things up close and tell others about it.

"Hurricane Ike: Relief 4 the Community"

This weekend my internship teamed up with the Salvation Army and the Southeast Texas Food Bank to collect items for people in Southeast Texas affected by the hurricane. It was fun being at KBTV4 during this. They had 2 big trucks outside of the studio to collect all the clothes, toys, personal items, and food. I forgot to bring food with me the day I went to my internship, so I had my fiancee take some up there the next day. My mom said we were covering 2 things in 1, because we bought Newman's sauce, and all the proceeds from his sales go to help the needy. I'm interested to hear how much they actually collected, because I was only there on the first day. They collected stuff for 3 days. Everything they collected will stay here in Southeast Texas and help the families that lost everything from the storm.

It was cool to be there during the shows though. It's fun working on Live shows like that. I mean yes all the shows are live, but it's exciting to do stuff live on location. During the 5 PM show, I was in the control room just listening to the director telling the 2 cameramen what he wanted them to shoot. It was awesome how amazing they were at getting him what he wanted and running all over the place to get a good shot. I'm used to BYU Daily News, where if we had a Live shot outside the camera sits on a tripod and doesn't move. So it was really cool to be able to see what both cameras were shooting and how the director would take one and send the other one to go find something else.

During the 6 PM show, I was actually outside with the Live shots. I was a grip for one of the camera guys. I told my parents and fiancee I was a grip, and they were like that's great... what's that? It made me laugh and then I explained that it was a fancy term for someone who holds the cables for the camera guy so he doesn't get tangled up and trip over the cords while he is running all over the place. That was still fun even though it's kind of the low man on the totem pole job. I got to look all important and what not. :) Dana Melancon, Chief Meteorologist, kept telling me how good I was at my job. He is really funny.

It's nice to see how many people come out and try to help the community when disasters happen. Hopefully everything can get back to normal soon. Even the high school football game got into it. My old high school played their rival yesterday. That game is called Mid-County Madness. Well this year, they had everyone wear red shirts in honor of Bridge City (hit hard during Ike) and called it Mid-County Kindness. The shirts were red with the cardinal on it for Bridge City, but still had the bulldog and the Indian for Nederland and PN-G. They played the game last night and then today was Mid-County Kindness. They gathered several teams in groups of 10 and went to Bridge City to help out. Sadly PN-G lost, but it was the spirit of the whole thing that mattered.

This week I get to go out with the reporters at my internship, so we'll see how much I like reporting by the end.

Winnie Service Project

My home ward has about 6 cities in it, and 2 of them were under water after the hurricane finally ended. Yesterday we had a 40 minute church service and then went out to help members from our ward. We split up between two houses for the most part. One family needed blue tarps put on their roof and another family needed the whole house mucked. My mom, my brother-in-law Adam, my fiancee Matt, 2 sisters from the ward, and I went to Winnie to muck out a house. We ripped out all the paneling and insulation from the house. We were there a couple hours. Matt and Adam attacked the walls, while the ladies carried it out to the street. It was hard work. Yesterday was a great day though. It has been so long since I've really been to church. We've had two evacuations in a month, so we've had church like every other week. That has been lame, but it was great to go to church and give thanks for all that we have been blessed with.

Before

After

















I also took pictures on the drive down there and the way home. There were several fences that you could only see the tops of because the water was so high. Those used to be open fields and pastures.


















These pictures are of a barge that got brought in during the hurricane and didn't float back out with the tides. It is stuck on HWY 73 and police are located just before it on the road. Every vehicle is stopped to see where they are going. The police are only letting people who live in that area go through, but the people in our crew were allowed to go in to help muck out the house. There were two barges on the highway, but they have already taken one off the road. I heard they are having to take them apart to get them off the road.

Aftermath 1 week after Ike

I went driving around to take some pictures of the aftermath on Saturday. That was one week since Ike hit and everything is still at a stand still. It's kind of annoying driving around town, with most of the stop lights out or blinking. It makes them a 4-way stop and in most cases the other driver's don't know how to use them properly. You may have to wait for your turn 4 times before you actually get to go. Pretty annoying.

These pictures are from the city of Groves. This city neighbors mine.

The tree covers the entire front yard.

The house with the tree that fell into the side of it is my high school teacher's house.

Here's the working crews that have been brought in to get the power back on in the Golden Triangle.

Bridge City was completely under water. Most of the homes had around 6 feet of water in them. My dad's co-worker just finished building his home at the beginning of this year, and he had 6 feet of water in it. These are just random pictures on the main street in Bridge City.

These pictures are taken between Orange and Mauriceville.

During Hurricane Ike

Southeast Texas was safe from the hurricane the week leading up to Ike making landfall. Unfortunately as most hurricanes do, Ike turned and headed straight for the Southeast coast line of Texas. That change put the Golden Triangle in the Northeast quandrant of the storm, the worst area to be in a hurricane. Thursday (9/11) we woke up with a message saying Jefferson County had a mandatory evacuation for the storm surge. Meterologists said the storm surge could get as high as 20 feet in our county. That was a little bit scary. That meant if the sea wall levees didn't hold the entire county would have flooding. My family spent the day doing laundry, packing, and playing Wii Fit. We let everyone else in the county leave the area so we wouldn't be stuck in traffic. The eye of Ike hit Saturday between 1 & 2 AM 1 mile short of being at Category 3.

We evacuated to Lufkin, TX and watched the weather channel all night long. One of the TV stations from Beaumont was streaming on the internet, so we left the laptop up and running to get the local news of our area. We lost the electricity about 7:30 AM and it did not come back on until Monday afternoon. When Ike hit Lufkin, it was only a Category 1. I took my phone outside and stood on the porch to take pictures with the camera on it and captured a couple videos. The debris wasn't too bad around my brother's house, but other parts of Lufkin had trees falling down. You can only imagine what the Golden Trinagle looked like and Galveston Bay where the eye hit. The worst part about being outside during the storm was a pine needle got picked up by the wind and hit me in the leg. It left a red mark for a few minutes. It hurt for a few minutes too. The pine needle came a pretty far distance because my brother didn't have any pine trees in his yard.

The storm lasted a while and then it was over. After that all we could do was wonder what home looked like since the national networks would only focus on Galveston and Houston and nothing about the Golden Triangle. We didn't have power, so we couldn't get online and watch the internet feed from home. My parents went back home Sunday to check on our home even though the evacuation order wasn't lifted. Several of the neighboring cities were under water, but thankfully our home was safe. Now the only problem was the massive power outage, and Entergy wouldn't say when the power would be back.

The videos don't give the wind speed and storm justice.