TRANSCRIPT:  	Smith Point, Texas Village Meeting

DATE:		       	February 27, 2009

LENGTH:		2 minutes, 42 seconds

PARTICIPANTS:		Don Jacks, FEMA  

			Jennifer Anderson, Chambers County Long Term Recovery Steering Committee
							
      	Fred Anderson, Chambers County Long Term Recovery Steering Committee
            			    			
ABBREVIATIONS:	[U/I] = Unintelligible
      			[PH] = Phonetic Spelling				

	Speaker					Transcription
	
Don Jacks: 	Driving south on Texas State Highway 562 south of Interstate 10 in southeast Texas. The road ends at a small fishing village called Smith Point on a finger of land that juts into the eastern side of Galveston Bay. Smith Point produced a lot of the Texas oyster crop before Hurricane Ike slammed ashore in September 2008. Today, residents are struggling to rebuild and to get the oyster boats back out on the Bay. The purpose of my visit today���.a village meeting at the Smith Point fire house. The 200 or so residents are discussing long term recovery. I talked with a few of the residents���

Jennifer Anderson: 	I���m Jennifer Anderson and I am on the Steering Committee for the Long Term Recovery of Chambers County.

Fred Anderson:	I���m Fred Anderson, a member of the Long Range Planning Steering Committee.

Jennifer Anderson:	���and what we���re doing today is getting input from our entire community as to what they think we need to do in the long run to make Smith Point a better place to live.

Fred Anderson:	We are meeting here today to deal with the issues that have been brought on our community from Ike and some of those short range issues that we���ve dealt with are obviously folks displaced from their homes and then those that were displaced from their homes returning to places that are uninhabitable.


Jennifer Anderson:	I���ve gotten a couple of emails from friends and they���ll say, ���I hope everything���s back to normal.��� Because unless you���ve lived it, you have no idea that things are not back to normal. They will never be back to normal. There���ll be a new normal but it���s not normal now.

Don Jacks:	Again Fred Anderson���.

Fred Anderson:	Well very clearly in my mind the new normal is the spirit of the people and the way I mean that is that immediately after the storm we evacuated to Tyler and when we returned we found-- we found a few hearty souls down here who were very eager. Jennifer and I decided that that���s something we can we build on so we started working, we started digging in, and the new normal emerged out of that with the spirit of the people.

Don Jacks:	Driving in today, I saw a sign I don���t see very often. It said, ���Road ends.��� You really have to want to be coming to Smith Point to come here. Talk about that.

Jennifer Anderson:	I think there���s a problem with that sign because it should say, ���The road begins here.��� This is the beginning of the world not the end of the world in our opinion.

Don Jacks:	The beginning of the world and a new beginning for Smith Point and Chambers County, Texas. Join me for part 2 of the Chambers County long term recovery story when I talk with a six decade resident of Smith Point and the Mayor. For FEMA���s new media���I���m Don Jacks.