2006 Comes to a Close EDITORIAL

LIBERTY, December 29, 2006 - 2006 was certainly a much better year than 2005. During the last days of December 2005 we were all still in the throws of making a partial recovery from Hurricane Rita.

The hours of pounding, nonstop winds destroyed power lines, roofs and made life intolerable for days and for some weeks.

Financial losses, lost business activity, the lack of air conditioning in the days that followed with heat indexes off the charts were miserable.

I can remember longs lines at gas stations to purchase much needed fuel.

So many people evacuated that my neighborhood in Liberty was diserted with no children in the street,  no cars parked in front of the houses and an incredible silence and darkness at night. The only thing you could hear at night was the distant sound of a portable generator blocks away.

Whether you chose to stay or to evacuate, either way there was suffering.

In the days after Rita, we had true democracy.  You saw fancy SUV’s waiting in the lines for bags of ice and water right behind vehicles you think wouldn’t even run. For a few days, we were all the same because we were all suffering from the same conditions.

Even though it’s been a year since the storm, some still feel its’ effects and still feel the loss. Just this week Anna Moorhead notified i-dineout.com about the loss of the family cat during the storm hoping, by some slim chance, it may be recovered.

During the close of 2006 let’s all be thankful we made it through a very rough time that was much harder just a few miles to our east near where Rita made landfall and that our recovery is near complete.

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