[Soledad O'brien, Cnn Anchor:] Let's talk about Hurricane Claudette. The winds have slowed from the hurricane force to tropical storm. Finally this morning it was downgraded to a tropical depression. But at least two people were killed and the storm was wreaking havoc when we spoke yesterday to the mayor of Galveston.
[Mayor Roger "bo" Quiroga, Galveston, Texas:] Winds are blowing probably around 40, gusting to about 50 miles an hour. The reason I said the west end looks bad is because that's probably where most of our lower lying areas are, on our west end and the Highway 3005 is probably cut off right now.
[O'brien:] And Mayor Roger Quiroga joins us this morning on the day after Claudette. And I've got to tell you, Mr. Mayor, wow, I can finally make you out and see what you look like. Yesterday I didn't know what I was seeing there. Thanks for joining us this morning. We sure appreciate your time, because I know you're really busy.
[Quiroga:] Well, thank you, Soledad.
[O'brien:] Let's talk a little bit about what happened overnight and really through the day and overnight. Give me an assessment of how many homes were destroyed, and if not completely destroyed, at least at this point are uninhabitable.
[Quiroga:] Well, we have quite a few homes that are on the west end of Galveston Island, especially in the Bermuda Beach area of Westward that have taken on quite a bit of damage. Most of the damage that was done yesterday is because of beach erosion. Our infrastructure was really damaged. A lot of roads were undermined and we've got quite a bit of assessing to do this morning, and we started late yesterday afternoon.
[O'brien:] You've been declaring a state of emergency. Does that mean that you've got a lot more damage than you thought you were going to get when we spoke yesterday?
[Quiroga:] No, not really. Basically the reason we had to do that was in order to get the ball rolling as far as federal funds and state funds are concerned. We had to do that so that we could recover those funds that we expend repairing the roads and doing some other things.
[O'brien:] I know you took a big tour of the area. Give me a sense of what you saw.
[Quiroga:] Well, we did take a tour yesterday and we were actually quite surprised on the amount of damage that we saw. Houses were underwater. Half of the homes were basically caved in. The houses that were on the beach were undermined by the currents. They were still underwater, to a certain extent. Our roads were undermined and they all caved in, or quite a few of them caved in. And that, you know, was basically what we saw on the west end and the debris that the waves kind of brought in to Highway 3005 was just amazing. It was a lot more than what we had originally thought.
[O'brien:] Tell me a little bit about the evacuations. And I've got to tell you, Mr. Mayor, those pictures are really dramatic. How many folks did you ask to leave and when can they expect to come back to their homes?
[Quiroga:] Well, we tried to contact about 3,000 folks on the west end. We actually made contact the half of them. And then yesterday when we had to go and rescue a few of the folks, you know, they were asked why they didn't leave. And their answer was that they didn't expect it to get this bad. Well, we tried to give as much notice as we can for those folks on the west end of Galveston Island to come on this side of the seawall to get protected. But, you know, some folks would rather stay with their property and ride things out, and we don't think that's the wise thing to do.
[O'brien:] Power outages across the area. How many folks are out of power? When can they hope to get that back?
[Quiroga:] Well, we don't actually have a count on that yet. Our electric company, CenterPoint Energy, is working hard around the clock to get that power back on to folks, especially on the west end. On the east side of 101st Street or 103rd Street, there's pretty much power everywhere. So it's basically the part of the island that is not protected by our seawall.
[O'brien:] All right, well, Galveston Mayor Roger Quiroga, thanks for joining us this morning. I know you have your hands full, so we appreciate your time.
[Quiroga:] Thank you.