Hurricane Ike, 600 miles in diameter, devastated Haiti and Cuba then came roaring into the Texas Gulf Coast in the wee hours of Saturday, Sept. 13, and gave the Galveston-Houston areas a sodden hard kick in the face. Normally bustling with more than 4 million people, Houston was eerily dark and quiet following the storm’s 8-hr battering that littered manicured lawns with tons of debris and toppled majestic trees and power lines in a jarring tangle that would take weeks to clear. Few people were unaffected.To the south, whole neighborhoods were chewed up and spit out by the enormous storm surge that left only colossal debris piles and a few isolated posts where beautiful beachfront c...