We still don’t have power, and it has been ten days since Ike rolled into Houston. I was going to wait until I could write this at home, but I will try and get it done on my lunch hour.
On Thursday, 11 September, we shut down the office at noon. I told everyone to go home and get ready for Hurricane Ike. One Friday, we stayed home and battened down the hatches. All loose items in the yard were put into the garage. Our Venetian Lamps were removed and bubble wrapped. We froze as much water as we could fit into the freezer, and we filled every water bottle we had and put the rest into the refrigerator. We got our landline, non-portable telephone out of the attic. Standard hurricane preparation.
On Friday night we went next door after dinner and drank some wine with our neighbors. I wish we would have drank more. We hurried home about 9:00 PM, and did our final load of dishes from supper. We did not want to have dirty dishes in the sink when the hurricane hit.
We joined Jared for a nice lunch and the Lucky Burger, and then went on down to visit Ree and Quinn as they were making their own hurricane preparations.
The lights flickered for the first time about 9:30 PM. They came back on almost immediately, but we knew that it was going to be a long night. We got into bed about 10:30, just as the lights went out for what we thought was the duration. Ike’s eye was still 7 hours away from landfall.
I fell asleep and slept well until about 2:00 AM. The wind was blowing relentlessly from the north at that time. It sounded as if semi-trailers were driving up and down our street without stop. The wind was son strong that the rain sounded like hail hitting the windows. And there were flashes of light that we could see in the dark. About one flash every 2 to 3 minutes. I thought it was lightning at first, and started counting down to see how far away the strikes were hitting. I never heard thunder. Then one of the light flashed occurred nearby. A low THUMP flowed closely. This was not lightning. This was transformers exploding. This was a very, very bad thing.
Doreen woke up about 3:30 or so because of the noise. Shortly thereafter, say about 4:00 AM, we got our power back on! It lasted about 15 minutes. THEN it was out for the duration.
We have a little hand-crank radio we received as a premium for am NPR donation. It gave us as much information as we needed, but not really as much as we wanted. It told us when the eye made landfall – about 5:00 AM if I recall correctly, and that the winds would not start dying down about noon. The winds were so overwhelming it was very depressing to hear such a prediction.
I had been walking around the house to make sure that none of the windows were broken and nothing was leaking. Everything went well until the winds switched to the west. We have a weak spot in our sun room where we have had rain blow in before. This started leaking like a faucet. Luckily, Doreen spotted the leak before it got too bad, and we were able to get bowls under the worst leaks. Almost all of our wets facing windows leaked a little, and it became a routine to check and wipe the windows as we walked by. Finally, when the wind turned southerly, we started getting water into our big windows in our living room. I have to jury-rig a method to grab that water, but there was still a lot of wiping and pouring to keep the floors dry.
Then, in the early afternoon, everything started to calm. There was water standing in the streets because all the storm sewers were plugged with tree litter. The entire neighborhood looked like a rainforest. There were green leaves everywhere. There were branches, large and small, down everywhere you looked.
In our yard, our small orchard tree was pushed over. We think it is rescuable. One of our banana trees was knocked completely over, and another was bent. Our garage was pushed out of kilter so that one of the people doors is almost impossible to open, and the garage door is also very difficult to lift. That will have to be fixed. But other than that, and the minor leaks in the house, we are OK.
Goodness. I assumed since you hadn't been that active on e-mail that your power was still out. How miserable; at least the weather's cooling a bit.
ReplyDeleteClaire