Hurricane Ike Cuts Links to Home

Oluwadamilola O. Akinfenwa ’12, a native of the Houston suburb of Sugarland, had just wrapped up his first week at Harvard when Hurricane Ike started barrelling through Galveston Island and Houston on Friday. Akinfenwa found himself unable to contact his family when 110-mile-per-hour winds disabled most means of communication in and outside of the city. Not until Monday night did he finally get through to his family and hear they were safe.

Southeast Texas may be almost 2,000 miles away from Cambridge, but for some Harvard students from the Lone Star state including Akinfenwa, Hurricane Ike was more than just a big weekend news story.

Roberta V. Steele ’09 also spent much of Friday and Saturday unable to talk to her family. Her parents live outside Houston along Galveston Bay. After having stayed with family and friends during the mandatory evacuation, they were allowed a temporary return to salvage some possessions. Steele said looters were spotted in her mother’s neighborhood, and her house might have to be torn down due to damaged from a felled tree.

“Now they’re just sitting and waiting,” she said. “You feel bad that you can’t do anything, but we’re lucky.”

Marie C. Kodama ’09, who is taking off the semester, was spending time in her hometown of Houston when Ike struck. She said that even in her relatively undamaged neighborhood in west Houston, dozens of trees are strewn across the street, and many streetlights are bent in the wrong direction.

“Almost all of Houston is congregating in the two big malls because they’re the only ones with power,” she said.

Kodama said that a general feeling of frustration has taken over the city, manifesting itself in the frequent angry phone calls to local radio shows.

“They’re angry about the infrastructure problems, and [the Federal Emergency Management Agency] took a while to get started,” she said.

But she added that a newfound sense of community has emerged in Houston as “a lot of neighbors are helping each other out” in this time of crisis.

Many in the storm-prone region did not expect Ike, a Category 2 hurricane, to wreak so much havoc. While Akinfenwa said that his family boarded up the windows for Hurricane Rita in September of 2005, they did not do so for Ike.

In preparation, Kodama’s family had only bought food for a few days.

Tough times remain ahead for Houston. Kodama and other Houston residents are waiting for the power and water to return, and authorities have imposed a 9 p.m. curfew on the city to ensure safety. Meanwhile in Cambridge, students said they are making sure to stay in touch with loved ones. Akinfenwa calls home daily, despite the remaining problems with cell phone service in Texas.

Akinfenwa said he still plans to go home for Thanksgiving. “The lights better be on by then,” he said.

—Staff writer Hyung W. Kim can be reached at kim27@fas.harvard.edu.