GALVESTON — On Wednesday, the 12th day after the hurricane, islanders who had fled inland began returning home to learn what Ike had taken and what Ike had left for them.

Many rose before dawn from borrowed beds in cities they had never intended to visit and headed south expecting to spend hours in traffic waiting to cross the causeway leading home. However, the traffic cleared out quickly, police reported.

Most of the early-risers interviewed Wednesday said the trip was quicker than they expected.

By sunrise, people all across the island were at work, hauling to the curbs the accumulation of years, decades, of domestic life.

In the East End Historic District, dainty antique chairs and couches were piled in haphazard heaps along with modern electronics and the surplus semi-junk Americans keep in garages.

The homecomings were as varied as the junk heaps.

The old East End houses mostly were spared above the first floors. People lost furniture and other contents, but the structures were intact.

Elsewhere, people came home to nothing.

First floor units in the Palm Terrace and Oleander Homes housing projects, which are north of Broadway in the central city, took in as much as 8 feet of water.

People who had very little when they left had to kick in their front doors to find that the little they had was ruined.

They found household pets dead in the courtyards, and they were angry.

In one of the hardest-hit parts of town, south of Broadway between 61st and 65th streets running to about Avenue N, people were stunned.

Several said they had called up aerial images of the neighborhood from the Internet and seen the roads clear. They had taken that to mean their homes were spared.

What they found instead were houses taken down to the ground.

Residents now think they were hit by a tornado, as well as a hurricane.

It was the same story in the neighborhoods east of English Bayou, where flooding began while Hurricane Ike was still far out in the Gulf of Mexico.

People said they didn’t expect the damage to be as bad as it was.

But in the random way of natural disasters, some people were spared altogether.

They tended to report that fact in whispers, as if it were embarrassing.

“My place looks the same,” said John Hayman, 68, who lives on the second floor of an 1870s-era building on The Strand.

“I feel so sorry for people who’ve lost everything.”