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WORLD> America
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Riding out Ike on an island, with a lion
(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-09-17 14:02
Turner and his wife awoke the next day to an island they no longer recognized. The first four rows of houses on the beach were washed into the sea. There were no more restaurants, no more gas stations, no more grocery stores. The neighborhood was gone. In Galveston, Charlene Warner, 52, weathered the storm with her landlord and a neighbor in the apartment above her own. "It felt like an earthquake -- the rumbling and the rocking of the building," she said, smoking outside a shelter in San Antonio. "Everyone was praying." "It was so terrible. All I could say was, 'Lord, please don't kill me. Forgive me for what I done,'" Warner said, as a tear rolled down her cheek. After the storm, she and neighbors waited for rescue, but no one came. The water receded, leaving a layer of muck filled with snakes. But with no water, no electricity and a shrinking supply of food, Warner decided to go for help, sliding her way across the goo a block and a half to the fire station. Firefighters took her and neighbors to a spot where they could get on an evacuation bus. She arrived at a shelter in San Antonio with her purse stuffed full of personal documents and cigarettes, and one spare outfit that she washed and drip-dried on a railing Tuesday. "I lost everything. What you see with me is all I have," she said. "I never seen anything like that in my life. I'll never ride out another storm." Cheryl Stanley said she and her husband, Tom, wanted to evacuate their Galveston apartment before the hurricane hit but couldn't. Their son, Casey, has cerebral palsy, and the three live on the third floor. When they tried to leave, the elevators were turned off, and they couldn't carry Casey down the stairs. "It was horrible," Cheryl said. "The building was shaking all night." A few hours into the storm, Casey said he didn't feel safe in the bedroom, so they moved him to the living room. About three hours later, the ceiling in his bedroom collapsed. "Thank God, we got Casey out of there," his mother said. After the storm passed, paramedics carried Casey downstairs. And neighbors carried the wheelchair. At the Baptist church on Bolivar Island where the lion spent the night, Richard Jones, a shrimper, said he wasn't afraid of the beast. "That little old fella is just as tame as a kitten," Jones said. After the storm passed, the lion's caretakers fed it pork roast to keep it happy. National Guardsmen dropping off food and water lined up Tuesday in the choir loft to get a glimspe of the lion, and the soldiers jumped back when the lion looked up from it perch on the altar and snarled. Jones said he hadn't stepped foot in a church in the 40 years he has lived on this spit of land. And he wasn't ready to call his survival divine intervention. "I drink beer and chase women, gamble, cuss," Jones said. "You can't call that religion. I'm either too good, the devil won't have me, or I'm so bad the Good Lord won't take me. That's a good toss-up."
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