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One Lone House Stands in a Gilchrist Neighborhood

This is an amazing yet sad story of a family that took the lessons they learned during Hurricane Rita to build a house that could withstand some of the toughest storms the Gulf of Mexico had to offer.

Their house survived Hurricane Ike last week. But little else did. Read the whole amazing story by Jason Hanna with CNN.

Here is just an excerpt:

Warren and Pam Adams lost a house to Hurricane Rita in 2005, so it seems they’d be relieved to learn their new home withstood Hurricane Ike.

But not when their house is the only one still standing in their section of Gilchrist, Texas.

Ike’s storm surge last week devastated the Bolivar Peninsula town, flattening most of the roughly 200 homes there. The couple’s yellow house at the beach — supported 14 feet off the ground by wooden columns — was the only house on Gilchrist’s Gulf Coast side not to be flattened.

“As we got there, the tears started flowing,” Warren Adams, 63, said Thursday after his first visit to the home since evacuating. “There’s a yellow house sitting there, but that’s all. It was devastating.”

Although the house is there, it might not continue to stand. Huge storm surges walloped the interior, making it uninhabitable and destroying many belongings.

Appliances, furniture, and a grandfather clock were some of the many things rendered useless. Warren and Pam, two of the beach town’s several hundred permanent residents before Ike, spent part of Thursday salvaging what they could and lamenting the destruction of their friends’ homes.

More on flood damaged belongings and restoration.

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