BOLIVAR PENINSULA, TEXAS — Still tough and stalwart at 80, Claude Kahla survived Hurricane Ike. His hardware store did not.
"Blew it right off the concrete slab and sent it sailing out into Galveston Bay," Kahla said Tuesday, standing where his 12,000-square-foot store had once been.
Kahla, a Bolivar native who had refused to evacuate, was surrounded by devastation. Homes had been ripped from their moorings and shredded into debris that clogged roads and marshes. Cars and trucks were buried in the sand and marsh grass. Utility poles had been snapped in half.
Long rows of sheared-off home pilings stood like sentinels, marking scores of denuded beachfront plots. Dead fish and seabirds gave off a putrid smell.
Ike had disgorged the prosaic totems of a beach town's life: a flat-screen TV, a water ski, a sofa, a tricycle, a tackle box, an unopened case of bottled water. Sea grass had been deposited atop utility poles by the surge, which Kahla described as well over 20 feet.
Ike punished Bolivar more savagely than any other community along the Texas coast. Virtually nothing was spared.
"Oh, man, this is unbelievable. Amazing, just amazing," said Alan Bunn, a navigational coordinator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "Everything's gone."
With the peninsula cut off by floodwaters and debris, rescue teams were slowly searching for about 350 people who authorities say defied a mandatory evacuation order.
"We're trying to pull 'em out, but some of 'em just plain refuse to leave. These are some hard-headed folks," said Bobby Jobes, a state game warden.
Jobes and fellow warden John Feist used an airboat to search for survivors -- or corpses. Jobes said they had rescued about 15 people.
What did survivors say when rescued? "They said: 'Wow,' " Jobes said.
The wardens said they had to persuade an 89-year-old woman and her 59-year-old niece to leave their waterlogged home. The women didn't want to abandon their dog and cat. The wardens put the women, and the pets, on a National Guard helicopter.
"There's a different breed of people down here. They're hardy, stout, crusty kind of people," Feist said. "They've lived through all kinds of hurricanes, so they thought they could live through this one too."
Kahla figured he could take on Ike. "I've never left the peninsula for a storm. It's not the way we do it around here," he said as he cleaned up debris from his store near Gilchrist.
