7am. You can hear the relief in the newscasters voices that dawn is breaking and Houston is still on the map. Not sure about Galveston, but Houston is still here. Now instead of constant weather reports the newscast is made up of people calling in their damage reports or the “what’s happeining here” reports. Ok, at 5 I thought we were nearly done with this, but I really think it’s almost worse now. The wind is really blowing. Maybe because I can actually SEE the trees bending halfway over. Still not light enough to video. The wind is really ripping through these trees. I saw a branch or something fly by one of our windows. Evidently Ike is not done with us yet. The newscasters say we could see heavy wind until late afternoon. The sound of the wind is constant now. I don’t hear the branches hitting the roof anymore, either they have broken off or we are on the other side of the eye and the wind has shifted. The girls are watching a video on the dvd player, but are getting a little stir crazy. I don’t want them walking around the hosue because of all the windows and I really think the wind is stronger and more consistent now than earlier.
8am. I just heard the storms location on the radio. I guess we were going through the eyewall at 7. A neighbor heard from someone south that another band of high wind and lots of rain headed our way in about an hour. Great. We’ve been looking out the windows and man, what a mess! Branches and leaves everywhere. Our windows are plastered with debris.
9am. Yep, here it comes again. I think we have had wind from every direction and sometimes from more than one at the same time. The girls and I were watching an evergreen bend waaaayyy over when we heard a loud pop. I thought it was another transformer blowing, but then we saw the HUGE pine tree laying across the road a few houses up. I can see a tree snapped in half across the street laying across power lines. Our next door neighbor (who is in Italy for 2 weeks) has a pine tree laying across his roof. Just heard on the walkie that a friend is going to drive the neighborhood to look at damages.
Bad news. It sounds like our neighborhood got hit really hard. Lots of trees are down, and more than a few have damaged houses and garages. We’ll have a lot of cleanup to do.
12 noon – Ok, we’ve been at this for a solid 12 hours now, and it looks to be coming around again. Winds out of the south this time. Just when I thought we were out of the woods with our pine trees. Winds from the south would blow 2 of them right onto our house. We’ve been out walking a little bit. Still lots of rain but it’s nice to get out of the house. And we needed a shower anyway, right? They say maybe by 2pm we’ll be mostly done. I don’t know. I do know the guys are chomping at the bit to play manly man and fire up the chainsaws. Overall, so far so good. I will say it was much worse than I had anticipated. I thought I would be clausterphobic staying in the closet, but last night I felt the smaller the space the better! Don’t think I will do this again. Even though they begged us not to evacuate unless we were asked, I thnk next time I’ll just wait until the last minute and then leave. I still can’t imagine those people that stayed on the Island. I think I’ll turn the radio on to see if they have any reports from down there.
12:45 Still MORE wind. Jeez Ike, get a move on already! Maybe I’ll take a nap.3:00 Finally a break in the wind and rain. As I was getting some clean clothes to put on I heard two very loud power surges. I ran to the window and smoke was pouring out of our across the street neighbors garage. People were running to her house as she was running across the street with her baby. Turns out they have power lines down in their backyard and they are laying in their pool. There apparently was electricity in the grid somewhere and it ended up in their house. Anything plugged in on that side of the street lit up! Their entire electrical panel in their garage was friend. Guess they’ll be staying somewhere else for awhile. After that excitement we drove through the neighborhood to assess damages. Wow. So much worse than I could have imagined. Trees down everywhere (80’ pine trees), through houses , smashing garages and cars. Street signs laying flat on the street. Debris everywhere. And, we are officially without water. Went to brush my teeth and nothing came out. We filled all three bathtubs for just such an event, but come on… and I’ve been hearing that it could be weeks before we get power. Supposedly 2 million people in Houston alone are without power. That was before the storm even went north to Conroe and Huntsville. I guess the next time it rains I’ll take a bar of soap out with me! J The neighborhood is a mess, but people are already beginning to clean up. It would help if the rain would stop for more than 10 minutes at a time.
