Kevin Boulware

It’s only been three months since Hurricane Ike devastated Galveston, Texas.

Yet national news coverage of the city’s recovery efforts is minute, and that bothers former Kansan Kevin Boulware. To him, it’s as if the rest of the country has forgotten what happened there.

“It’s become second-hand news and that part gets to me,” said Boulware, a former Kansas University student who lived in Galveston a year before the storm hit. “I think that’s normal but sometimes I feel like I just want things to stop, and everybody look at this.”

Boulware, 21, spent a few weeks at a hotel in Arlington, Texas, after leaving Galveston with a family that had befriended him. In early October he returned with them to see the destruction. Although he had been warned about what to expect from friends who were there, Boulware was still shocked.

“Things were so much worse,” he said. “I really expected to go back and have the energy to clean up and return to daily living. It didn’t turn out like that at all.”

The house Boulware was renting was heavily damaged and needed more cleaning than he could do. His landlord plans to repair the building but Boulware isn’t optimistic.

Boulware also recalled driving around the city and seeing three caskets lined up along the side of a road. He stopped and asked a nearby man about them.

“He said, ‘Do you want to buy them?’ ” Boulware said. “I just lost it and got back in my car.”

Boulware left Galveston and returned for awhile to Shawnee where his parents live. They traveled with him to Galveston on Thanksgiving Day to see if anything could be salvaged.

“It was just horrific,” he said. “There are major holes in the walls just from deterioration. There were dead rats.”

Although the city is starting to recover, there are still large piles of debris along curbs, waiting to be picked up, he said.

Boulware received federal assistance to help with his housing costs. He now lives in a hotel near downtown Houston where he works in a restaurant. He also does some modeling.

“I’m re-establishing my life here in Houston and I think I’m doing a pretty good job of it,” Boulware said.

But he still thinks about Galveston and how it used to be. He hopes one day he will live there again.

“I can’t return until it’s feasible and people have come back,” he said. “I think about it daily.”