Home Improvement, Remodeling, Toxic Black Mold & Mortgage Refinance Blog

The national media has spent the week covering storm torn Texas’ damage from Hurricane Ike. Something that appeared to fall off the radar though was the damage Ike left in other parts of the Midwest.  Here in the Greater Cincinnati area, we were hit with high winds last Sunday, gusting upwards of 80 mph. These near hurricane force winds wreaked havoc on an area that isn’t used to such weather systems.

By the time the winds died down on Sunday night, our area saw close to a million people without power. Ohio overall saw close to 2 million in the dark, and as of today there are still about ¼ million people without power in the state.

Luckily, I escaped damage to my home. I was without power for about 12 hours, phone for 4 days and internet for 6 days. There are others who weren’t so lucky. The picture above is a couple miles from me where a tree ended up crushing a car. This was a common scene around Ohio, and cars weren’t the only casualties. Four deaths were caused by the storm in the Greater Cincinnati area and numerous houses sustained massive damage from down trees and limbs.

However the story doesn’t stop there. People ended up losing refrigerators full of food. Gas stations had hour long lines, what restaurants that were open were running out of food, and grocery stores had to throw away millions in stock (including Kroger, which is based out of Cincinnati). The saddest part is all the people on fixed income who had to toss away their food.  Luckily, state and local officials are working to issue food stamps to these people so they can restock.

At least normalcy seems to be trumping the frantic week we saw. They are hoping to have power back on to all those affected by this Sunday and we might see a normal week of school and work around here. It did take me by surprise that the media was rather silent on this aftermath of Ike. I saw a blurb about it on the crawl of MSNBC in the middle of the week, but that was it. If you have any stories to share about this massive storm, please do so in the comments. It will be interesting to hear how other people weathered this past week in the area.

 (Additional photos and video of the damage Ike left in the Greater Cincinnati area can be found here.)

By KIM HORNER / The Dallas Morning News

More than 1,500 Hurricane Ike evacuees are still sleeping on cots at 14 area shelters despite a federal program that was supposed to transition them into hotels and motels.

Many cannot afford to move out of the shelters – despite lodging paid for by the federal government – because they have no money for food and other expenses. Others are having trouble getting approval for hotel rooms from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Although thousands of evacuees have made the move to hotels throughout North Texas, many of them are struggling after draining their bank accounts to pay for hotels and food after evacuating a second hurricane this month.

North Texas charities have been swamped with requests for food, gas cards and laundry assistance from evacuees at area hotels.

The city of Dallas, which has spent more than $800,000 sheltering Hurricane Ike evacuees, is trying to figure out how to help Gulf Coast residents who either cannot afford to leave a shelter or who cannot qualify for FEMA’s transitional housing assistance.

“It’s a mess,” said Kenny Shaw, director of Dallas’ Office of Emergency Management. “FEMA needs to come out with a stronger program, in my opinion, and support these people or get them back home.”

Some cannot get help because they were homeless in their hometowns; others are illegal immigrants, Mr. Shaw said. Another evacuee was told her renter’s insurance should pay that bill, he said.

FEMA spokesman Dean Cushman acknowledged the financial dilemma many cash-strapped evacuees face.

“They’re caught between a rock and a hard place,” Mr. Cushman said. He said the agency has not provided cash assistance, as it did after Hurricane Katrina, because that disaster left people neck-deep in water with nothing but the clothes on their backs. He advised evacuees to seek help from social-service agencies.

As for evacuees who cannot qualify for assistance, Mr. Cushman said that FEMA needs an address to provide the help. He also said the agency cannot provide hotel rooms to illegal immigrants.

Dallas officials worry that some evacuees will return to a shelter so they can at least get free meals. More than 700 were still at the Dallas Convention Center shelter late in the week – even though some might qualify for hotel rooms – because it provides meals, activities for children, a phone bank, Internet access and a post office.

“The problem everybody’s been telling me is, you still need gas and food,” said Celethia Edwards of Beaumont, who stayed at the downtown shelter with her husband, five children and extended family. “People are having problems with living expenses. We said it’s better to stay here.”

Devora Knoxson of Galveston, who also evacuated to Dallas before Hurricane Rita three years ago, said she wanted to find a hotel, but she did not know how to get help.

“If I was in a hotel, at least I would have facilities to take a shower every day,” she said.

No agency has an estimate of how many evacuees are staying in North Texas. But area charities have been busy serving large numbers seeking help.

Irving Cares, which usually serves 350 families a month, served nearly 300 families in the past week, mostly people in area hotels.

The charity has provided food that doesn’t need to be cooked, said Teddie Story, the agency’s executive director. Evacuees also have asked for help with laundry and gasoline, things the charity does not typically provide, she said.

“We’re doing what we can to help them,” Ms. Story said.

Mia Paul of Port Arthur, Texas, said she has spent all her money paying for food and other expenses.

“When we go home, we don’t know how we are going to pay the bills,” said Ms. Paul, who is staying at an Irving La Quinta Inn & Suites with extended family.

Joe and Ann Fondren and their 20-year-old son, Chase, of Nederland, Texas, said they were eating one meal a day after paying for several hotel nights. They recently moved to a La Quinta Inn & Suites in Irving, where they can get an additional meal because the hotel provides breakfast.

“We’re happy to be here and to be well taken care of,” Mr. Fondren said.

While some evacuees cannot wait to go home, the Fondrens were wary after evacuating two hurricanes this month and Hurricane Rita.

“We’re tired of evacuating the storms,” Joe Fondren said. “We’re thinking of moving here.”

Faced with staying in Dallas possibly through mid-October, many evacuees said they’re trying to make the best of it.

“God has blessed us to be able to have our lives,” said Ms. Edwards of Beaumont. “I know we’re going through adversity; we’ll rise above it if we keep a positive outlook.”

One week away from Hurricane Ike’s landfall and now it’s clear that the economic impact will be felt for some time. Saturday (9/20), Texas Governor Rick Perry spoke with area leaders in Chambers County, Texas about what they face in the coming months.

Cattle ranchers were hit hard with up to four-thousand heads of cattle killed right away. Those numbers could rise as cattle could die from drinking water or eating the grass tainted by salt.

In Texas, power has already been restored to more than half of the customers. However, about half of the one-point-million customers without power live in the Houston area. Governor Perry said that more than 20-thousand people still remain in shelters, while about five million people have received ice, water or food during the first week of recovery from Hurricane Ike

South East Texas Hurricane Ike Surviors Toxic Black Mold Victims - A Disaster of Epidemic Proportions Happening Before Our Eyes
Toxic Black Mold - the media doesn’t understand it. Insurance companies refuse to pay for clean up. The poor are forced to live with it. How many innocent people have to get sick or die before we address this problem?

(PRWEB) September 20, 2005 — Is it toxic black mold or mold that’s black? Stachybotrys and many other strains of toxic, health threatening molds are becoming everyday household words in America that very few understand. Now the public can find informative and educational content, free mold brochures, toxic mold inspectors and remediation/abatement companies, toxic mold/tort attorneys and much more at one great location on the Internet: http://www.StartRemodeling.com.

Horror stories are pouring in by the thousands everyday. Families are being forced out of their homes for months on end. Some are burning them down to rid themselves of the problem. Schools and businesses are being shut down. Mr. and Mrs. John T. America are becoming seriously ill, young children and the elderly are severely sick and/or dying from this mysterious and little understood airborne toxin attacking their respiratory system.

 I am a fairly new Grandfather and my Granddaughter became violently ill when she was only a couple of months old.  
Why? Because this epidemic, although around for millions of years, is brand new to most and just becoming public knowledge. Very few professionals, including doctors, have taken the time to study up on and train themselves about the problem at hand, much less educate the general population about the dangers that exist in their everyday lives. The simplest thing in the world and something we should all be able to take for granted has been tainted. The air we breathe inside of our homes and workplace.

Since 1997, http://www.StartRemodeling.com has been a driving force on the Internet to educate and provide quality resources to homeowners wanting to improve their homes inside and out. In the last few years, they and their sister site at www.ToxicMoldUSA.com have made it their #1 goal to inform, educate and provide life long solutions to their visitors on how to live safely inside of their homes.

http://www.StartRemodeling.com has done the research, compiled the information and is making it readily available to everyone. They provide everything from informative articles and news releases, to government and medical findings. They provide a free national search for pre-qualified and certified toxic black mold professionals to inspect for and eliminate toxic black mold, toxic tort attorneys to assist those that may be in need of their services and simple do it yourself mold kits for under $10. They also provide a free 50+ page brochure from the site that details everything from simple identification to insurance procedures, cleaning procedures and elimination. They’ve covered it all.

“This is something that I take very personally,” states Jimmy McDonald, the man who initiated the change in direction for the site. “I am a fairly new Grandfather and my Granddaughter became violently ill when she was only a couple of months old.”

“We found the problem to be an accumulation of Stachybotrys and Penicillium molds in the house she was visiting, which ended up in her lungs. The people in that house, friends of the family, were moved out of their home for the better part of a year, lost cherished valuables and life in general was turned completely upside down for them. That opened my eyes and made me want to come up with some solutions that all of us can apply to our everyday lives.”

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For the health of it.

OAK ISLAND, Texas – About a 5-iron shot from the Trinity Bay, a golf club is impaled up to its grip in muck. A huge hunk of sheet metal sways and creaks in a tree. An overturned bathtub and an upright toilet stand near a shattered mirror and a single tennis shoe.

Vickie Dearman finds very little where her father’s home used to be. The slab is wiped clean, scattered who knows where. She wanders around collecting pieces of her family’s life: a cast-iron skillet, some silverware, a ceramic elephant her mother made. There’s no sign of her father’s motorized chair. The 84-year-old was evacuated before the storm.

“There’s his toilet. I know it because of the red seat. I gotta get pictures for insurance,” she says.

About a mile away, down a road that dead-ends into Double Bayou and doesn’t even show on a map, is a place that wasn’t much before and is now even less after Hurricane Ike. Of the four homes and two trailers that used to be here, only one is still standing. Another was moved but remains habitable. The others are mostly in shreds.

Some of the highest recorded wind gusts – over 100 mph – were at nearby Anahuac. The storm surge was 15 feet in some places.

That explains the mess that residents have returned to find.

“We just didn’t think it’d be this bad,” says Ruby Lasseigne. “All you heard about was Galveston, Galveston, Galveston.”

The trailer she used to live in lies in the mud, 30 yards away from its foundation.

“Now look at it. It’s ruined,” she says. “Maybe we’ll get FEMA trailers, but they don’t know we’re here.”

Oak Island isn’t an island at all.

According to the Handbook of Texas, the piece of land between the east and west forks of Double Bayou was named for a clump, or island, of oak trees in the water. Early inhabitants included the owner of a cotton gin in the 1880s, but the town wasn’t officially founded until 1951.

Aside from a seasonal flock of tourists, area residents have included workers on nearby offshore drilling rigs and fishermen, a modest, hard-working lot. In 2000, the population was 255.

As Ike barreled toward Texas, most residents got out. Not Eric and Dennis Stephenson, and Eric’s girlfriend, Robin Dixon. They took refuge aboard two oyster boats lashed together in Double Bayou. Ms. Dixon didn’t like the idea, but she went along with it. Later, she was glad she did.

“I woke up and looked out, and I could see the treetops,” she says. “Our trailer over there, you couldn’t see it. We were in it just a few hours before … I thought it was the end of the world.”

After the storm passed, Eric Stephenson dived into the water and piloted a skiff between trees that marked the road and steered to Oak Island. They rescued three others who’d stayed behind.

Now they’re all left to pick up – and pick through – the pieces.

Michelle Pingry is helping her aunt, Ms. Dearman, look for belongings where her grandfather’s home used to sit. She carries a shovel over her shoulder and sloshes through the mud.

“I don’t know why anyone would come back here,” she says. “People don’t have a lot of money.”

Her own home, several blocks away and 12 feet up on sturdy pilings, took on water but survived the beating.

“The stairs are gone,” Ms. Pingry says. “We can’t get up to it, so I’m down here helping.”

Moments later, she finds a deer mount stuck in a tree, one of its horns in the muck below. She carries it out to her uncle.

“Hey, is this yours?”

“Yeah, it is,” Steve Shirley yells back. “I don’t know that I still want it.”

He hasn’t a doubt about his future.

“I’m rebuilding. Where else am I supposed to go? There’s not much left to salvage. It’s all gone,” he says. “I’ll rebuild, but it’ll just be a metal building. Won’t cost me so much.”

Some of his neighbors aren’t so sure.

Hundreds of thousands of people streamed out of Houston and neighboring cities on Thursday as Hurricane Ike continued on a collision course with the central coastline of Texas.

As forecasters issued increasingly dire predictions for Houston, the state’s largest city and fourth largest in the country, local authorities shut down all schools, universities and government buildings — including NASA’s Johnson Space Center — and ordered mandatory evacuations for thousands of residents. Hundreds of thousands more were evacuated from several counties along the coast, jamming interstate highways with miles of slow but steadily moving bumper t0 bumper traffic.

“Prepare for the worst, pray for the best,” Governor Rick Perry of Texas said at a news briefing at an emergency center in Austin. The governor has mobilized about 1,300 buses for evacuees, put 100 ambulances on standby and activated more than 7,500 National Guard troops. Many of the people boarding buses out of town said they had been through this before.

“I’m very terrified,” said Aretha May, 39, a homemaker in Galveston who was waiting on a bus Thursday afternoon with her two young daughters and their dachshund. “I don’t want to be nowhere around this storm.”

May said she arrived in Galveston three years ago after Hurricane Katrina destroyed her home in New Orleans. Her sister, Evelyn May, chose to stay behind, she said, and has not been seen since.

Today in Americas

“Nobody can tell me where she’s at or if she’s alive or dead,” she said.

Ike is expected to make landfall early Saturday as a possible Category 3 hurricane with winds exceeding 131 miles an hour. After striking somewhere between Corpus Christi and Galveston with an unusually wide wind-field, it would likely continue on toward Houston, lashing the city on the storm’s right, or strongest side, with winds approaching 100 miles an hour, said Chris McKinney, a National Weather Service meteorologist based in Houston.

“Unfortunately the greater Houston area is definitely going to be affected by this storm,” he said about the city, which was devastated by flooding from Tropical Storm Allison in June 2001. “The effects are going to be spread out over a much larger area than might be with another storm.”

On Thursday, Mayor Bill White of Houston urged all businesses to let employees leave and prepare to evacuate, and pleaded with families not to take multiple vehicles. In car-friendly Houston, evacuations during Hurricane Rita in 2005 were slowed tremendously when many families chose to take all of their cars instead of leaving some behind, the mayor said.

As of 1 p.m. Central time, the mayor had ordered people in at least eight Houston zip codes to leave immediately. Ike could drop as much as 6 to 10 inches of rain in some parts of the greater Houston area. Depending on where the storm dump most of its rain, it could inflict serious damage. Northern Houston is generally well protected, but sections closer to the city’s numerous bayous are prone to flooding, said McKinney, the forecaster.

In its latest advisory Thursday afternoon, the National Hurricane Center said the center of Hurricane Ike, currently a Category 2 hurricane, was located about 440 miles east-southeast of Corpus Christi and roughly 470 miles east-southeast of Galveston. It was moving to the west-northwest at a speed of nearly 10 miles per hour. Forecasters can usually determine with high accuracy where a hurricane will make landfall, but they are less adept at pinning down the intensity with which it will strike.

With memories of the $1.2 billion worth of statewide damage wrought by Hurricane Dolly in July still fresh, Mayor Lyda Ann Thomas of Galveston ordered a mandatory evacuation Thursday morning for the city’s population of approximately 57,000 residents. The city had previously only ordered a mandatory evacuation for the city’s flood-prone west end and a voluntary evacuation for the remainder of the city.

“Those who stay, stay at their own risk,” she said.

Thomas urged the estimated 4,000 residents who need special assistance evacuating because of age, disability, lack of reliable transportation or other special needs to gather at 2 p.m. local time at a city community center to board 75 buses to go to shelters in Austin.

Galveston’s west end, an area of million-dollar beach front homes raised on stilts, was already experiencing flooding Thursday morning from high tides, and officials said they were expecting to lose power and basic services across the entire city when Ike makes landfall.

“We are expecting a pretty brutal event to hit us,” said Jim Yarbrough, Galveston’s county executive. He said he expected many people in the county to try to ride out the storm, and added “We don’t think that’s a wise choice.”With gasoline in high demand, prices at the pump shot up about 30 percent Thursday at gas stations throughout the Texas gulf coast, even as the cost of crude oil moved in the opposite direction, falling closer and closer to $100 a barrel. Analysts said that had something to do with Ike’s projected path, which could take it straight through a large swath of the country’s refineries, shutting them down and creating an excess of crude oil. That typically drives the cost of crude downward.

Areas surrounding Houston, TX., are being evacuated Thursday as Hurricane Ike heads for the Texas coast, officials said.

    ”We strongly urge you to evacuate before tomorrow,” said Ed Emmett, chief officer of Harris County which includes Houston, at a press conference.

    Government offices and schools will be closed Friday in Houston in anticipation of the hurricane.

    Officials are still deciding whether to put a contraflow system in place, or reverse highway lanes to make them one way to help with evacuations, Emmett said.

    Fearing a flood surge that could swamp coastal areas near Houston, authorities have ordered more than 150,000 residents to move to higher ground.

    Forecasters said Hurricane Ike could slam into the Texas coast as a powerful Category 3 storm late Friday or early Saturday.

Gasoline prices rose for the first time in 10 days as Hurricane Ike bears down on the Texas coast, according to a nationwide survey of gas station credit card swipes.

The average price of regular unleaded gasoline rose 1.6 cents to $3.668 a gallon from $3.652 a day earlier, motorist group AAA said Wednesday. The last time gas prices rose was Aug. 31 as Hurricane Gustav forced workers to abandon offshore oil rigs ahead of that storm.

Forecasters are currently predicting Ike will hit Texas late Friday or early Saturday as a major Category 3 hurricane but the storm remains unpredictable.

Gas prices jumped 1.7 cents to $3.532 a gallon in Texas. Prices also popped higher in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana, Florida and the Carolinas. Nationwide, Alaska and Hawaii remained the two states with gas prices still tracking above $4 a gallon.

The cheapest gas continues to be found in New Jersey, where prices averaged $3.421 a gallon. Crude prices have trended lower amid heightened concern about weakening demand and in reaction to the slew of storms and hurricanes.

Oil prices continue to hover around their lowest level in five months. On Tuesday, crude futures for October delivery tumbled more than $3 a barrel to $103.26 — their lowest close since April 1.

Early Wednesday, prices were little changed at $103.30 as nervous investors awaited the government’s latest reading on oil and gas supplies and following OPEC’s announced production cuts.

Meanwhile, gas remains about 11%, or 44 cents, below the record high average of $4.114 that AAA reported on July 17, but they are still 85 cents above this time last year