thanks for sharing all those links
It's just horrific. I'm glad you've kept us updated.
Aaron is sunburned and muddy but still "out there"
Aaron spent the day getting hissed & growled at by giant alligators and slogging through acres of mud, in the continuing search for bodies along the Texas gulf.
Think your life has some challenges? -- here is part of the post Aaron made in his field notes earlier today:
"....Refrigerators float. Mattresses float. Walls and windows and staircases and roofs float. Boats float, of course, and so do life jackets, coolers and bottles of vegetable oil.
Shoes float; so do plastic toys. Surprisingly, televisions float. Stuffed animals, dressers, hats and mardi gras beads float. Collanders float, cows float, and armadillos and marsh rabbits and horses and snakes float.
The theory is that people will, too, and that’s why we spent the day searching a massive debris field in southern Chambers County.
Apparently no one really knows how many Bolivar residents are still missing a week after Ike. We do know that much of what was Gilchrest and a good chunk of Crystal Beach is now a splintered jumble against a treeline about 5 miles inland of East Bay’s northern shoreline. (emphasis added)
That’s where we took the cadaver dogs today. Five teams spread out across Chambers County – some traveling by all-terrain vehicle, some by airboat, some by swamp buggy. We searched shorelines and ranches and refuge marsh.
No one has yet found a body.
Everyone agrees that doesn’t mean one or more isn’t out there; it’s just that there’s so damned much debris on the ground, and so much death stink in the air, it’s awful hard to know for sure.
But Chambers Co. Sheriff Joe LaRive – and the game wardens and deputies and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employees and dog handlers – all the good people out there today, feel a certain duty to be as sure as they can possibly be.
For Bobby Anderson, who says his friend Sandy was swept out of the rafters of a Crystal Beach building at the height of the storm. For the people Game Warden Hector Gonzalez talked to who, one moment, saw a dozen people on the roof of the house next to theirs; the next moment, nothing.
This low country has a habit of keeping its secrets on a schedule all its own. Like the story I heard this morning about a skull that washed into a duck blind a couple of seasons back; turned out to be the noggin of a fellow who had disappeared a decade before.
Not finding bodies a week after the hurricane ... is that good news or is it bad news? It's awful hard to know for sure...."
Keeping you in our mind's eye -- that all of you return home safely soon....
Mark
Sorry to hear about your friend
That must have been tough for you -- wondering where your friend was. It's sort of amazing that his body was recovered that long after his death. I had a friend who was killed while swimming off the coast of Australia -- he was an incredible swimmer, but made a couple of fateful decisions that led to his premature departure from this world. It took several days for his body to re-appear as well.
As time goes on, the chance that the search parties will recover intact bodies grows slim. There are a lot of hungry animals on the ground in that post-Ike area of the world.
It is a very dangerous search that those game wardens and others are engaged in -- lots of irritated snakes, gators and biting insects to contend with.
Mark
