Ike Story - 9/23/2008

I have gotten a few e-mails from people around the country asking how I am doing and how it was to go through Hurricane Ike. 

First of all I guess I should write about the day of the storm.  I had the day off as my office was closed.  I went to the grocery store and bought alot of canned foods, snacks, bottled water, dog food, etc.  Not much, the bill was under 30 bucks.  I sat at home looking at hurricane coverage on TV.  First thing I noticed was that it was about 10 AM and it was already flooding in Galveston.  That was an onimous sign already.  But locally, not much was going on.  Perfect sunny day with light winds.  That changed around 2 or 3, the winds picked up bigtime.  I went outside to catch a view of everything.  Becoming partly cloudy, but nothing out of the ordinary. 

Around 5, the winds were constantly high and gusting to out of the ordinary speeds.  Little did I know on the other side of town lights were already going out.  The rain in my area started late, around 11.  I live about 90 miles from the coast, so I didn't think things would be bad.  Well, around 12 the winds were tropical storm level and the rain was nonstop.  Amazingly I still had power and cable TV was working fine.  Everything stayed going until 2:30am, the lights went off for good after blinking a couple of times.  I had a lantern, flashlight and radio, so I started listening to the local newstalk radio.  They had people calling in giving updates from around the city.  Some were scared crap-less, some were actually calling from outside, some were actually driving around the city during the storm. 

I wasn't really scared, I didn't think the house would blow away, but I was worried about something hitting the windows or windows blowing out.  So I kept away from the windows, but listened to the radio the entire time.  From the hours of 4am to 6am we had the highest winds of the storm in my area.  Could really feel the home standing up to the winds at that time.  The rain continued north of Houston until 11AM.  Most of the city stopped getting rain hours before.  No damage to my house at all.  But a week and a half later I still have no power at the the house with no real idea of when that will happen. 

It was an intense night, but considering my house is still brand new I hoped it would last and it did.