Ike: In Words
Anyway so your report in words. I left my home Wednesday evening, packing up the house, myself and the cats and went inland to Sugarland. I wasn’t under a mandatory evacuation then, however as Ike’s projected path turned to a direct hit I got a call at 7am informing me that my zip code was now under mandatory evacuation. I was glad I’d left early, I avoided the traffic. Houston was much better prepared this time, so there wasn’t the insanity of the long traffic jams Rita caused.
At first as the storm started to come in Friday, I really kinda thought: wow, lots of storm surge but this wind isn’t much worse than a Houston rain storm. It was surprising. You could hear gusts of wind, but there wasn’t a drop of rain. That lasted until around 11pm, when the power started to flicker. I finished watching Monk, my favorite tv show (by that point I was sick of Hurricane broadcast) and just as the show ended, the power went out. My mother was still asleep upstairs, so I sat downstairs listening as the gusts of wind turned to wailing gusts, and the windows rattled. However, it was still fairly calm. Again, I’ve heard worse with the rain squalls.
So I went upstairs, tucked the cats into the room so they could be easily ‘caught’ and tried to go to sleep. The worst part, so far, was that since the power went out the house skyrocketed in heat and humidity within half an hour. I was sticking to the sheets, and simply covered in sweat. Well that’s when the wind really hit. About 2 in the morning we started hearing thuds and clangs from the roof, and a roaring freight train sound all around the house. Green light kept flashing into the room from the blown transformers and they boomed like small explosions. My mother and I decided that now was the time to go downstairs, since it sounded like something was being ripped off the roof or about to come through the roof. The rest of the night was spent hovered around a radio, listening to the house groan around us as the windows rattled. We also lost some siding around the windows, so ended up having to place towels around the windows to prevent water from leaking all over the floor. Every time I looked outside, you’d see this… swirl of white all around. Imagine standing in the center of the flushing toilet bowl, and what that would look like. I was able to see this because the park behind my mother kept power a good deal of the night, letting us see the storm’s fury. This wild wind continued until near sunrise, we never got the eye.
At sunrise we were able to finally poke our heads outside, discover my mother’s roof shingles were now lawn ornamentation and her new Hardy Plank had been pulled off outside the windows and actually snapped in half! Now, the OLD siding that she was told needed replacing? That stayed intact! Trees were down everywhere, turning a residential neighborhood into a passage in the jungle book.
To be continued… later…
Kristen
