Ike is heading for the Gulf of Mexico

[Astronuc]

I talked to my mom this morning, and she said as soon as they got power, she headed to washing machine to do laundry. She had just started a load and was going to iron some shirts when the power went out. The first thing my dad did when the power came on was head to the computer in order to get on line.

Last night when I was talking to my sister, the first question from my brother-in-law was, "What happened to the stockmarkets?".

Cordless phones don't work, but only the conventional phones which draw power from the phone lines. Thank goodness for the old fashioned phone service and phone companies. The cell phone service is very spotty in Houston. Cell towers require electricity.

 

[Math Is Hard]

Cordless phones don't work, but only the conventional phones which draw power from the phone lines. Thank goodness for the old fashioned phone service and phone companies. The cell phone service is very spotty in Houston. Cell towers require electricity.

My parents don't have regular phone service yet, but do have cellular service, thank goodness. If I call their landline I just get a message that says I can't be connected due to the hurricane in the area.

My brother is going into video game withdrawal. I think he's going to have a meltdown soon.

 

[wolram]

How are people coping with every day chores like, laundry or storing food ?

 

[Borek]

I talked to my mom this morning, and she said as soon as they got power, she headed to washing machine to do laundry. She had just started a load and was going to iron some shirts when the power went out.

All moms in the area did just that. No wonder infrastructure didn't hold up.

I got an order for my programs from Houston, TX tonight, so while it surely is bad - there are signs of hope.

 

[Astronuc]

How are people coping with every day chores like, laundry or storing food ?

Without refrigeration, obviously one cannot store frozen foods or dairy products. Dry products have to be used. Vegetables will not keep very long, especially in the heat and humidity.

My parents go to restaurants or shops which do have power, and parts of the area do have electricity.


I wonder how D H faired.


When we lost power for a period, we used to boil water on camping stove and pour it into the sink or bath tub. Laundry was done manually.

 

[Ronnin]

Milk and eggs are in short supply. My wife had to buy the little personal sized milks so we would have something to make our mashed potatoes with. You take so much of this stuff for granted until something like this happens.

 

[D H]

I'm baaack, one hour short of one week without power (and internet)!

The surge rose to within a hundred yards or so of our door. No problem! Slight problem with trees down, however. What a mess.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Hey DH! It is good to hear that you are okay.

So tell us all about it. How long did it last, how bad did it get, did your house sustain any damage, etc. It looked like you took a direct hit from the eye wall.

 

[hypatia]

So very nice to hear from you DH, we were worried. Yes tell us more.

 

[Astronuc]

I'm baaack, one hour short of one week without power (and internet)!

The surge rose to within a hundred yards or so of our door. No problem! Slight problem with trees down, however. What a mess.

wb D H. I'm glad you made it through.

My folks got power back last night. Apparently the power company connected them to a working transformer down the line.

I think there is a shortage of small stepdown X-formers. I think a lot of them shorted and blew.

Along the shorelines of the bay an on the coast, it's a mess.

 

[Evo]

Hey Welcome back DH!

You've got to get a cell phone with internet access!

Glad to hear you made it through.

 

[Math Is Hard]

Glad to hear you are OK, DH!

 

[D H]

So tell us all about it.

Wednesday, Sept 10. This storm is definitely going to hit us. After work I start boarding up the house.

Thursday AM. Work from home while keeping a constant eye on the storm. Every update has the storm hitting closer to us. Finish boarding up the house. Work computers are shut down around noon, so work is over for the duration.

Thursday PM. I ask our sons to skip their last classes in college and come home before Houston starts contraflow (Houston never did invoke contraflow). We don't know yet whether or not we will skip town.

Friday AM. Last check around the house. Lawn furniture, hoses, tools, random junk are all potential weapons when tossed around by a 100+ mph wind.

Friday afternoon. Fish or cut bait time. The creek is rising. Forecasters are speaking of a 25 foot surge. Do we stay or do we go? We stay. The storm appears to be on track to hit Galveston directly, which will put us under the eye but out of the surge. Just in case I am wrong I bring the axe and a good hand saw in the house so we can chop our way out of the roof.

Friday evening. We lose power around 6:30 PM, one of the earliest to suffer loss of power. Winds aren't even hurricane level yet! Hurricane force winds start around 9 PM.

Friday night. Yep. This is definitely a hurricane. WTF is that blue-green lightning with no thunder?

Early Saturday morning. Wake up a bit before 4 AM. While I can sleep through a hurricane, the dead silence of the eye is a bit much. One of my sons woke up half an hour earlier: The whole house was "vibrating". Good sign: I see light reflecting off the street rather than water. The surge threat is more or less over. Go back to bed after watching the hurricane resume. WTF is that blue-green lightning?

Saturday morning. I can not only sleep through a hurricane, I can sleep through a tornado. The south side of the eye wall stirred up a lot of mini-tornados, one of which ripped through our neighborhood. Several neighbors lost *huge* trees, some of which jumped thirty feet to dive into roofs. We had a huge branch jump thirty feet before diving onto our driveway. By all rights it should have hit our roof or our truck.

Saturday - Tuesday. Cleanup. Lots of cleanup. By Tuesday I am getting very sick of cleanup.

Wednesday. The power company is surveying the damage!

Thursday. Our yard hasn't looked this nice for a long, long time (ignoring for the huge piles of tree branches, of course). Tree trimmers from Utah clear the trees that fell on the power lines. Once clean, electrical workers from Tennessee repair the power lines. We have power! I am so glad to be returning to normal.

 

[Math Is Hard]

My parents in Clear Lake got their power back this evening. Things are looking up!

edit: grr! I should have kept my mouth shut. It went out again. :(

 

[Astronuc]

WTF is that blue-green lightning?

Probably electrical shorts or transformers blowing. I've seen that before in a storm. Apparently some areas lost power and others didn't.

Or it's far enough away that the thunder dissipates.

 

[lisab]

Wow! DH, that's a great post...great story! Glad to hear you didn't get flooded.

 

[Borek]

That's a way to get remembered by other PFers Sounds like your looses are minimal?

 

[Astronuc]

There's a picture of a single home standing in an otherwise empty area that used to be Gilchrist, Tx. Here is the caption.

A single home stands in what used to be a neighborhood in Gilchrist, Texas. Judy Hudspeth said it belongs to her sister, Pam Adams, and that it was rebuilt in 2006 to withstand a Category 5 hurricane.

GALVESTON, Texas (Sept. 18) - The death toll from Hurricane Ike is remarkably low so far, considering that legions of people stayed behind as the storm obliterated row after row of homes along the Texas coast. But officials suspect there are more victims out there and say some might simply have been swept out to sea.

Exactly how many is anybody's guess, because authorities had no sure way to track those who defied evacuation orders. And the number of people reported missing after the storm, whose death toll stands at 17 in Texas, is fluctuating.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Thanks DH. Great post. But I can't believe that you slept through it!

 

[russ_watters]

Wow! DH, that's a great post...

Really, you should submit it to a newspaper or magazine.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

FORT MORGAN, Alabama (AP) -- When the waves from Hurricane Ike receded, they left behind a mystery: a ragged shipwreck that archeologists say could be a two-masted Civil War schooner that ran aground in 1862 or another ship from 70 years later..

The wreck, about 6 miles from Fort Morgan, had been partially uncovered when Hurricane Camille cleared away sand in 1969.

Researchers at the time identified it as the Monticello, a battleship that partially burned when it crashed trying to get past the U.S. Navy and into Mobile Bay during the Civil War.

After examining photos of the wreck post-Ike, Museum of Mobile marine archaeologist Shea McLean agreed that it is probably the Monticello, which ran aground in 1862 after sailing from Havana, Cuba, according to Navy records. iReport.com: See video of the ship from iReporter Tammy Brewer. [continued]

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/US/09/19/ike.mystery.ship.ap/index.html?iref=mpstoryview

 

[Ivan Seeking]

There is an aquaintance of mine who lives in the Houston area who still hasn't emerged on the net. Almost two weeks without power? That has got to be getting old!

 

[Astronuc]

Ike apparently did some serious damage in Texas, along the coast of Texas and Louisiana, and in the middle of the country.

AP Investigation: Ike environmental toll apparent
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081005/ap_on_go_ot/hurricane_environment

WASHINGTON - Hurricane Ike's winds and massive waves destroyed oil platforms, tossed storage tanks and punctured pipelines. The environmental damage only now is becoming apparent: At least a half million gallons of crude oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico and the marshes, bayous and bays of Louisiana and Texas, according to an analysis of federal data by The Associated Press.

In the days before and after the deadly storm, companies and residents reported at least 448 releases of oil, gasoline and dozens of other substances into the air and water and onto the ground in Louisiana and Texas. The hardest hit places were industrial centers near Houston and Port Arthur, Texas, as well as oil production facilities off Louisiana's coast, according to the AP's analysis.

"We are dealing with a multitude of different types of pollution here ... everything from diesel in the water to gasoline to things like household chemicals," said Larry Chambers, a petty officer with the U.S. Coast Guard Command Center in Pasadena, Texas.

The Coast Guard, with the Environmental Protection Agency and state agencies, has responded to more than 3,000 pollution reports associated with the storm and its surge along the upper Texas coast. Most callers complain about abandoned propane tanks, paint cans and other hazardous materials containers turning up in marshes, backyards and other places.

No major oil spills or hazardous materials releases have been identified, but nearly 1,500 sites still need to be cleaned up.

The Coast Guard's National Response Center in Washington collects information on oil spills and chemical and biological releases and passes it to agencies working on the ground. The AP analyzed all reports received by the center from Sept. 11 through Sept. 18 for Louisiana and Texas, providing an early snapshot of Ike's environmental toll.

With the storm approaching, refineries and chemical plants shut down as a precaution, burning off hundreds of thousands of pounds of organic compounds and toxic chemicals. In other cases, power failures sent chemicals such as ammonia directly into the atmosphere. Such accidental releases probably will not result in penalties by regulators because the releases are being blamed on the storm.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry also suspended all rules, including environmental ones, that would inhibit or prevent companies preparing for or responding to Ike.

I wonder how many companies took advantage of that and dumped their hazardous waste into the environment - and the people of Texas and Louisiana? I remember heavy rainstorms in Houston when chemical companies would pour chemicals out of the stacks. One could smell the chemicals while driving along the freeways near the plants, and the car would get covered in a chemical residue.

 

[D H]

I wonder how many companies took advantage of that and dumped their hazardous waste into the environment - and the people of Texas and Louisiana?

My nose says quite a few. The air has had that rather distinct chemical plant smell to it on multiple occasions in the past three weeks.

Things still aren't quite back to normal. Trucks (*big* trucks) are still making the rounds, searching for piles of trees to pick up. The storm ripped a huge swath of the exterior of the office building in which I work from the first floor to the sixth. The building is still under repairs and is still unoccupiable. We hauled our company's servers and computers to one of the owners' house so that we could work. It has taken me up to an hour to make the drive there with so many traffic lights on the blink. I have been working from home as much as possible to avoid the incredibly bad traffic.

 

[D H]

Ike update

Finally! The Seabrook seafood markets (at least a few of them) are open. Not having had a good seafood fix for months, I went out and bought $70 worth of seafood today.

I have such fond memories of Galveston, Bolivar, Kemah and the Texas City dyke (best place to go crabbing).

Kemah is OK, kinda. Landry's restaurant chain destroyed Kemah long before Ike hit. Ike decimated Seabrook's Point. Most Seabrook restaurants (far better than any in Kemah) are gone. Bulldozers have cleared what Ike didn't. The http://www.galvnews.com/story.lasso?ewcd=d237b58175f95ddc" in Harris County suffered some kind of damage. A room with a view:
http://images.chron.com/photos/2008/11/12/13937631/600xPopupGallery.jpg

 

[D H]

The exterior of our office building is finally being repaired! Ike ripped all of the bricks off a 20 foot wide, six story tall swath of a corner of the building. The building inspector declared that entire corner as unsafe from top to bottom. (Ike also filled the building with two or three feet of water; the entire building was deemed unsafe for a month.)

A lot of my neighbors have now nice new roofs, nice new fences. We were lucky, with damages of only a thousand dollars or so -- less than my deductible. At least I got a tax deduction out of it.

 

[Brilliant!]

Awesome! I live in Houston and stayed during the hurricane. It was a pretty incredible event to go through. But what is almost as incredible is how long it's taking insurance companies to take care of their customers. Everywhere around town, whether it's a 40-story office building, or 2-bedroom house, you can still spot tarps on roofs and boards in windows. It's ridiculous.