3 weeks after hurricane, 34 people still missing

BOLIVAR PENINSULA, Texas — Jerrith Baird last spoke to his grandmother by telephone the night Hurricane Ike swept away most of the houses on this narrow spit of land.

The grandmother, Jennifer McLemore, 58, who worked at a local hospital, had holed up with her dog in a newly built beach house on stilts. She giggled with nervous fear, as she described to her grandson how three neighboring houses were being carried away in a flood, along with a trailer home she owned.

Then her cell phone went dead. The next day Jerrith, 17, kayaked from High Island, where he lives, over to the town of Gilchrist, then waded through debris to where McLemore's house had been. Nothing was left but a couple of pilings sticking up from a concrete slab. Her car was half under water in the bay. No one has heard from her since.

"To me the worst part was thinking what may have gone through her mind," Jerrith said.

Three weeks after Hurricane Ike hit Texas, at least 34 people from the Bolivar Peninsula, where the storm did the worst damage, are missing, and some are presumed dead, said Galveston County officials and the Laura Recovery Center, a nonprofit organization that has tracked missing people for the county.

All last week, volunteers and state rescue workers combed miles of debris on the peninsula and in the marshes on the east side of Galveston Bay, using dogs trained to find human cadavers.

The volunteers say it is slow going, wading through salt grass and brackish gullies, full of the detritus of ruined lives — broken houses, boats, cars, machinery, appliances, toilets, bicycles, toothbrushes, vases, tools.

Two bodies of people from the Bolivar Peninsula have been recovered so far. On Sept. 24, Gail Ettinger, 58, a chemist who worked for oil companies, was found dead, face-down in a marsh on the mainland, about 10 miles from where her house in Gilchrist succumbed to the floodwaters. Three days later, Herman Mosely, a carpenter in his 40s who was last seen in a local bar, was found on a small uninhabited island in Galveston Bay.

So complete was the devastation on the peninsula that county officials and local firefighters fear some hurricane victims may never be found.