Hi, Guys and gals!
Well, after two weeks we are back. Thank you for all of your kind wishes! I have been through many hurricanes in my life, being a native Houstonian. I though I was fairly prepared for Ike, but there have been some changes here in Houston that I did not count on. I should have been more aware! About two years ago the Pecan trees started dropping their limbs all around town. I have been a wet spring and the trees were heavily laden with Pecans, the weight of which were too much for the limbs. “Logger†Edna got up in my mother trees with a chain saw and cut back many of the limbs.
Also, because the water table is so high in this area and the ground is mainly Texas gumbo, the root systems of our trees do not go down, but spread out across the top of the soil. This is normally not a problem, but when you add high winds to the mix, you have a major problem. So, in Houston, the majority of the problems were caused by broken tree limbs and toppled trees. A limb in Houston is usually about two feet in diameter. These limbs took down a tremendous amount of power lines.
With the mass evacuation of the coastal regions, gasoline becomes a premium, especially around the highways. Now add to the fact that power was lost on Saturday night and you have no way to pump the gasoline. Any station that had power and gasoline also had a waiting line of at least a mile long, sometimes up to two.
So, our power went out on Saturday night and we were without power for two weeks. Now my mom is staying with us until her power comes back on sometime next week. She is in charge of the complaint department and is doing an excellent job in that position, as she has complained about everything. We have given our chainsaw an excellent workout and I have had to replace the saw chain twice now. All the people on our block made it a community effort to remove fallen trees from houses and to cut up the trees that had fallen across the highway.
We got the trees off our house and cars. I had put up a brand new storage shed two days before that was then blown apart. So, far we have repaired the power lines where they come into my house, rebuilt the shed, repaired the patio cover that blew apart, repaired the Cyclone fence that was smashed my a fallen tree, picked up all of the blown shingles from off our roof and covered the roof with blue tarps. We cut up all the trees and carried everything out to the street. The city came by yesterday and picked up all of the tree limbs, but left all the bags of leaves. Go figure!
We have also gone to my mother’s house everyday to clean up and make repairs. The power company has not hooked her power drop back to her house. She wants to go back home and doesn’t understand why we won’t leaver her in a dark hot house all by herself. Did I tell you that she complains a lot?! If the power company doesn’t have her power hooked up by Wednesday, I have an electrician scheduled to do the job.
Our lives are slowly getting back to normal but our hearts go out to the people who have made their lives along the coast. Galveston and the Bolivar Peninsula are a disaster! Homes and business were swept away by the 20-foot water surge, not to mention the winds. The sand has been washed away under many homes leaving a 10 empty space between the foundation and the ground. (Houses are built of stilts pounded into the ground, then the foundation are poured around the stilts.) In Texas, your beach front property is measured by the grass on your land. If the property has NO grass, then it is considered beach and the state takes ownership. Many people are losing their homes because the water washed away their grass!
Ice has been a very valuable commodity, but now FEMA is letting tractor trailer loads just melt because it is cheaper to let it melt that to keep it frozen. (We went to Whataberger yesterday and I looked at the drink dispenser, it was loaded with discarded ice, something people were begging for just the week before.) Many people have been buying generators, but the folly there is you need gasoline just to keep them running. We were cooking using sterno for the first week and then used propane camp stove the next week.
So, what have I learned from Ike? This winter, I will have all of my trees trimmed way back. I will reinforce my patio cover with cross members to keep the top in place. I will purchase a stand-alone freezer to keep in the laundry room and keep it full of ice. If I do buy a generator, it will be a Generac unit that runs on natural gas and kicks in automatically to power the house. We had plenty of bottled water and probably didn’t use ½ of it, but we were lucky as we never lost running water.
Did anything work perfectly? Yes, our telephone worked great! We also used the Triumph to run a fan and the TV, but sparingly.
Have fun, drive fast & safe, be kewl,
jclay
