These days, my blog-buddy Jack Cluth lives in Portland, OR, but when I first met him online, and up until a little more than a year ago, he lived in Seabrook, TX. Seabrook is a suburb sort of between Houston and Galveston, not far from the Johnson Space Center (as in “Houston, we have a problem”). In fact, his blog was originally called “The People’s Republic of Seabrook”, and when I first discovered it many, many years ago, I initially started reading it because I thought he was in Seabrook, NH, just up the road a piece.
Anyway, being directly in the path of Hurricane Ike last week did quite a number on Seabrook, TX. And, as coincidence would have it, Jack just happens to work for an insurance company as part of one of their first-responder deployment teams that get sent to disaster areas to help quickly process insurance claims for the people whose lives have been torn asunder. So Jack and his co-workers have found themselves dispatched to the Houston area.
Jack’s not directly working in his former town, but he did have a chance to get over there and survey the damage. Things might not be quite as bad as they are in Galveston, but everything is in pretty bad shape, he says. His ex-wife still lives there, and her neighborhood wasn’t too badly affected, but I can only imagine how otherworldly it must feel to be dropped in to a very familiar place, only to find it in ruins. It’s one thing to be in a disaster zone where you don’t have any attachment, but it’s completely something else when you have such a close personal connection.
Best of luck to Jack and his co-workers on their latest mission, but even more good wishes to the people of the Texas coast who have been badly shaken up by the hurricane.
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It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT. Since you cannot click [...]
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