Bun B Reveals The Impact Of Hurricane Ike In Letter

[Elano]

Hurricane Ike struck many people and the devastating consequences are still affecting them. For Texas' own Bun B of UGK, this struck close to home. The emcee recently created a report of sorts on the aftermath of Ike and the obstacles the victims and their communities still have to endure.
"Seven days after Hurricane Ike struck Texas on September 13, I finally got my power turned back on. I live in Houston, a big city that didn't even take the brunt of the storm. But for a lot of the folks living in smaller communities along the Gulf Coast, the impact of Ike was much, much worse," he wrote in a feature for MTV.
He added that the impact of Ike continues.
"It's easy to bring the cameras one day after the storm, two days after the storm. But what about a week after the storm? Two weeks? Some people are just getting back home, just starting to deal with the reality of what's happened. And that's what I wanted to show everyone: what it's like when the cameras leave, and these people in these smaller communities are left to deal with the devastation."
Although Bun did not want to place blame anywhere in particular, he did speak on some of the issues with the circumstances.
"Some of the people we saw were understandably frustrated. They had been displaced for 10-14 days, and the uncertainty of it all was probably too much for anyone to handle, let alone if you're someone with children or trying to take care of your family. I don't want to discredit anyone — FEMA and a lot of the city and state agencies did a decent job getting people organized and getting people on buses out of town. A lot of lives were most likely saved. But I'm not exactly sure how far their plans extended once they did get them out of town. Maybe they were thinking they'd have evacuees for three, four days at most. I don't think they were thinking of having people for one to two weeks."
Part of the inspiration he got came from the communities that stuck together to help each other out of rough times.
"In each city we went to, it was clear that people were coming together to take care of each other. These are the people who have the least amount to work with in the beginning, the least amount of resources with which to rebuild. If they're feeling that the city, state or FEMA aren't taking care of them during the evacuation, they definitely come together and help each other out. It's a community base in these small towns. People are very close, and you're only separated from each other by one or two people, it seems like. People are used to having to pool resources to make something happen, so when something like this hurricane hits, all they can do is rely on each other."
Bun finished his piece by simply advising people not to forget about the victims of the hurricane.