Texas Nursery Still Recovering After Hurricane Ike

Teas Nursery has weathered a century of Gulf storms, so John Teas has some perspective on the damage to his family’s business.

“It could have been a lot worse,” the owner of Houston, Texas-based Teas Nursery said, as he surveyed the damage a few days after the storm.

The nursery lost part of the greenhouse roof, tin roofs covering their flowers, plastic roof and sidings on buildings and the shade cover.

Teas said Ike was worse than Hurricane Carla, which hit the area in 1961 and knocked a foot of trees out of a pecan tree. He said the nursery has been cleaning up since the storm, but it was going to take awhile to clean everything up because days later, half of the business was stillwithout power.

“We can’t do business without electric power,” he said. “We have some power. Our problem is that some of our power is off of a Bellaire Boulevard power line, and the other buildings are on another power line.”

The nursery was finally back on line — and servicing customers whose trees were damaged and landscaping torn up in the storm.

That may sound like good business for the nursery, but Teas said the damage he saw was about as bad as it comes.

“We have had a lot of storms come through here in the past, but we didn’t have the inventory we had today,” Teas said. “There weren’t any big trees to fall on anything.”

Big pecan trees and plastic siding still littered the ground at the business on the Wednesday after Ike, and Teas said he lost about 5 percent of the plant material because it had been blown around in the wind.

All the cut flowers in the florist cooler were lost.

But, his customers still have been calling, and even though, the business might have to restock a lot of plants, Teas is happy because he knows his business got lucky.

“We laid all of the trees and big stuff on their sides, and that worked to minimize the damage,” Teas said. “I was on vacation before the storm, so the people here didn’t think to take down the shade cloth, but I am happy that everything didn’t blow clear away.”

Even with all of the damage around the business, trees uprooted and siding blown off of a number of buildings, Teas still kept things in perspective.

“You never know where a hurricane is going until it hits land. We could have had things a lot worse than this,” he said.