Power and water out for a week or more. Sewage spewing into homes and streets. Long lines for gas and supplies. A rising death count not just from a major catastrophe, but complications in its aftermath.
None of it sounds too rosy, but a week after a storm as big as Texas began its multibillion-dollar destructive path, smashing coastal cities and leaving millions without power and water in one of the nation's most populous cities, a number of independent disaster experts agree that things are going surprisingly well here.
Just as the botched responses to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita became synonymous with government ineptitude and a callous disregard for suffering, the speed at which Texas is recovering could become a new barometer for disaster recovery, several experts said.
But they warned that in the swell of need that will come, room for error will abound.
"Although I'm sure it's hard to feel this way for some people, things there appear to be coming along quite well," said Hugh Gladwin, who has studied public responses to hurricanes at Florida International University since 1992, when Andrew flattened much of the southern part of that state. "It could have been so much worse."
So far, the successes in greater Houston have been abundant: power and water have been restored to millions, airports are closing in on full capacity, gas lines are diminishing, looting and crime has been described in some quarters as "phenomenally low," most of downtown and pockets of other areas opened for business and welcomed employees back to work and many schools will see the return of students next week.
Temporary delays
Even failures and problems have been measured. A flap between local and state officials over whether distribution sites for supplies should have been set up all over the city led to temporary delays in the delivery of supplies, but the centers still were up a day ahead of schedule, Texas Homeland Security Director Steve McCraw said.
"For food, water and ice, you can never get it there fast enough," he said. "How long does it take? It takes too long. It always takes too long."
Of course, in more devastated areas, little has gone perfectly.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff got an earful from local officials after his tour of the communities of in the Beaumont area, which had nearly finished rebuilding from 2005's Hurricane Rita when Ike swept ashore early last Saturday.
"The people in my town have nothing — I mean nothing," Bridge City Mayor Kirk Roccaforte told Chertoff. "People have been wiped out. I'm frustrated why they got money in New Orleans (for Hurricane Katrina) and we've gotten nothing."
In terms of sheer property and infrastructure damage, Ike, no doubt, will compare with many of the worst hurricanes in history, experts said.
Walter Peacock, director of the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center at Texas A&M University, said he was working in Miami when Hurricane Andrew hit. Although that 1992 storm had Category 5 winds, Ike may cause as just as much devastation, he said.
Homes were flattened in Florida, but much remained, unlike the Bolivar peninsula after Ike, which suffered catastrophic damage.
Texas now confronts myriad problems, he said, including managing the vast number of the displaced, rebuilding uninhabitable coastal towns such as Galveston and getting power and water running after major destruction of infrastructure.
Still, through it all, Peacock said, emergency responders and elected leaders have managed the crisis and avoided major loss of life and a great deal of suffering.
"I was (in Miami) and had to share a household with four other families for nearly six months, and right after the storm, there was at least three or four days of zilch happening," he said. "But especially compared to Katrina, Lord have mercy, it's been a good bit better."
Areas of concern
The federal effort has been better so far, too, said Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University.
But as days turn into weeks and weeks turn into months, the task will grow much more difficult, and he said he had yet to be convinced the Federal Emergency Management Agency could handle it.
He noted that 20,000 to 30,000 children still are not settled after Katrina in 2005. Displaced residents with chronic medical problems will have lost paperwork; Galveston could be largely uninhabitable during an extraordinary "toxic" cleanup; and vast amounts of people could be hit with prolonged psychological stress as they return to work or rebuild their lives, said Redlener, who also will lead a team of physicians en route to Austin to man mobile medical units for the tens of thousands of people staying in state-run shelters.
"What I'm afraid of in Texas is that we're going to need tremendous amounts of resources and focus to make sure that people who won't be able to return to normal for a considerable amount of time will need to get a broad range of services over an extended period," he said. This recovery, he added, "is in some ways much more complicated and challenging for officials and families than most people realize."
Mike Lendell, a senior scholar at Texas A&M University's Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center, said some aspects of the recovery could take years.
One of his students recently finished a dissertation on buildings that, by 2003, had yet to be repaired from the 1989 earthquake in San Francisco.
"What you see a week later is the very beginning of the process," he said. "It's really important to have realistic expectations. The recovery is a marathon, not a sprint."
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