Ike......here we go again

man that is one ugly storm. news just said the hurricane force wind zone is some 200 miles wide & could produce a 20 ft stormsurge with another 10 feet of waves breaking ontop that.

i wouldn't worry about evacuating to escape the wind as long as i didn't have a tree over me (i've got about 8 of them, yikes). but i think people do not realize the power of water. it is just water, after all. it doesn't hurt you when it splashes you. you can even float in it. they should have played more pictures of the latest tsunami for those who decided to stay. it's not just the water, it's that floating house that's gonna crush yer skull.

"nothing in the world is more flexible and yielding than water. yet when it attacks the firm and the strong, none can withstand it, because they have no way to change it. so the flexible overcome the adamant, the yielding overcome the forceful."~~tao te ching, thomas cleary translation

edit: 40% still there huh? this is what they just put on our local news concerning the expected storm surge:

"galveston island will temporarily disappear"
 
The local CBS affiliate (digital channel 5.1) has a weather broadcast on digital channel 5.2. This afternoon they took the weather channel off the air and replaced it with a tie-in to KHOU, the CBS affiliate in Houston. It is interesting to be able to watch Ike through the eyes of the local TV station.

Just showed 85 MPH wind gusts on Galveston Island.
 
REWahoo said:
Just showed 85 MPH wind gusts on Galveston Island.
Click to expand...

We've had gusts as high as 60 MPH here, today. I don't envy them with gusts that high.

My front yard looks like the city dump - - today was trash pickup day, and there is trash blown all over the neighborhood.
 
NASA - View of Hurricane Ike From Space Station

272683main_ISS017E015703_hi.jpg
 
Thanks for the good wishes, folks. It looks like southeast Texas is going to need all the luck we can get over the next 18 hours.

What a day. From 9 to about 6, I worked non-stop to button down every possible thing I could. I've got my Rita boards on all of the lower floor windows. Every thing that weighs less than 50 pounds is tied down or in the garage. (With two cars! A miracle in its own right.)

Despite the urgency, it was a typical home improvement day in some respects - I sliced through the cord of my circular saw. :rant:

One key decision I made about 1pm - to put boards on the second floor window closest to the big sycamore tree. That damn tree is always shedding something - I just don't trust it to hang on to all of it's limbs. So I went dumpster diving at a construction site a few blocks away and pieced together enough of a plywood panel to make a cover. The story of how it got the the second floor is too long to tell right now...

About three, when I thought I was done, one of my neighbors decided he too was going to board up his windows. We finished about 5:30, after a trek to his storage facility to retrieve the boards he had a handyman cut for him a while back.

Maybe 5 or 10 families have evacuated out of 30 houses on the block. Only four houses are boarded up, though. One will hold three families tonight.

I hope no one regrets not making the trip to Lowe's.

A few weird things about today. This morning our dog was very agitated, barking for no apparent reason. Working outside, I noticed late in the morning that there were no birds or squirrels out, even though the winds were very light. Another is that be haven't had a drop of rain yet, even though the winds have been picking up for the last 4 hours or so.

I didn't watch the TV until just a few minutes ago, which brought me back to the 21st century. For much of the day, however, I found myself wondering about how folks 100+ years ago might have sensed something big like this was coming. What an important invention the modern barometer must have been.

No worries now, though. We're tight as a tick here in our little cocoon. The lights are on, the internet is working and the "hunker down" cliches are flying out of the TV. Time for a nap, so I'm awake when big storm reaches 'ol Htown.

Harry
 
I can't believe so many people stayed in Galvesto. On Fox news, they are interviewing some guy on the phone and his store already has 5-7 feet of water in it. In fact he says the whole island is already covered with water. God bless them all!
 
I hope there are some solid brick multi-story buildings for people to try and shelter in.

mew
 
that's one impressive cat 2. looks like the eye has emerged just in time for landfall. good luck to you harry and all others under that cross-section of a nautilus

 
Htown Harry said:
What a day. From 9 to about 6, I worked non-stop to button down every possible thing I could. I've got my Rita boards on all of the lower floor windows. Every thing that weighs less than 50 pounds is tied down or in the garage. (With two cars! A miracle in its own right.)....

Harry
Click to expand...
We have used the back bumpers of our 2 cars to hold boards braced on the inside of the garage door, so that it cannot bulge inwards. Do you do anything like that?

We are the only ones on our street with boarded up windows. We made a few neighbors feel bad enough that they told us they feel bad about not boarding up.

I'm mostly worried about a fire starting because of a careless homeowner and burning down the whole neighborhood.
 
Rustic23 said:
KHOU TV -90,000 people in Galveston did not head warning to evacuate!
Click to expand...
Galveston only has a pop of less than 60K. Surely, there aren't 30K media types there also...

Galveston had ordered evacuation of the island, but Galveston City Manager Steve LeBlanc said about 40 percent of the city's 57,523 residents chose to stay. "It's unfortunate that the warnings that we sent out were not heeded," he said.
 
Mike1968 said:
Galveston only has a pop of less than 60K. Surely, there aren't 30K media types there also...
Click to expand...
We got to see Geraldo Rivera rolling around in the gusts, so we can only hope...

Rustic23 said:
DW said the officials should go around with a sharpie and require them to write their next of kin on their body.
Click to expand...
This may be an urban legend, but rumor has it that the Galveston evacuation authorities were making the recalcitrants write their SSNs on their arms.

Hopefully a happy bunch of survivor Galvestonites will be back online soon to confirm.
 
i see my above pic of ike is still linked to its source and so still updating. learned that one when i tried to copy/paste the cones of death. so this time i secured a snap shot just before landfall (the original of the updating pic above)...

img_713733_0_b2996770c7b3b7f4df8b53b5b0ebf582.jpg
 
I just spoke to friends who live under Ike's path, 140 miles north of where the hurricane made landfall. They lost power at 7AM. The neighbor directly across the street had a large oak tree fall across the driveway, crushing the neighbors truck. Six houses up the street, a 70' pine fell on the roof, almost splitting the house in two. The house had recently sold and the new owners moved in a week ago.:p

Harry, Rustic, 2B, LOL! and other SE TX posters, are you there?
 
REWahoo said:
I just spoke to friends who live under Ike's path, 140 miles north of where the hurricane made landfall. They lost power at 7AM. The neighbor directly across the street had a large oak tree fall across the driveway, crushing the neighbors truck. Six houses up the street, a 70' pine fell on the roof, almost splitting the house in two. The house had recently sold and the new owners moved in a week ago.:p

Harry, Rustic, 2B, LOL! and other SE TX posters, are you there?
Click to expand...

I probably saw that house. In our neighborhood just about everyone has one or more trees down. There is no wind damage to houses, but a few trees are on houses. However, the trees appear to be sitting on houses and should be removable without damaging the houses.

There is tons of car traffic in my area because it appears to be the only way to learn what's going on. There could be power and/or restaurants open within a 10 miles of your house, but you would never know unless you went out on a scouting mission. Without power, most folks are relying on the radio for news, but the news is mostly the "big picture" for folks outside the area. It's not news to us that we have no electricity. It's not news to us that there was a hurricane. It's not news to us that trees were blocking roads until we cut through them with chainsaws. It's not news useful to us that folks are being rescued from refusing to obey mandatory evacuation orders.

So to get useful news, you send out a scouting party. LOL! goes south 5 miles; Alan goes west 10 miles; 2B heads east. We then compare notes: no open gas stations; a grocery store is open, but no perishiable goods.

After of day of no internet, no phones, no cell phone coverage, no power, no A/C and useless news on the radio, we drove to stay with relatives near Dallas. If power comes on at our house, it would be hard to find out that news. We will try to call neighbors daily I guess to get the useful news. If we can't reach them, it means power is not restored.
 
per other ike thread, after a hurricane, rental cars can become scarce for visitors because so many cars get damaged that locals grab rentals as they put their cars in for repair. my evacuation plan for myself involves grabbing pictures & papers, putting them in the trunk and putting me & the car into some nice off-coast hotel with an enclosed parking garage.

on the guy who bought the house with the tree through it, wind insurance will not be written while a named storm churns. so if that owner recently bought and moved in, hopefully he was able to secure insurance first. i recall in the 1990s, i was putting an offer on a house after andrew when insurance become such a pain. in the contract a placed a condition that i should be able to secure insurance from a private carrier but the owner decided not to bother and refused my offer. i've been with state insurance (citizen's) ever since.

if i ever do another house in hurricaneville, instead of trees i would work only with bamboos. they're messy but i love them. they offer some shade & give plenty of height, up to 40 or even over 60 feet tall, yet when one falls on your house, who cares, it's only bamboo.

regarding news, this is a huge, unaddressed problem which was of particular frustration for us after wilma in 2005. just as lol! says, all the news you get is for the outside world and the news you need as a survivor of the storm is no where to be found. where are gas stations with power & fuel? where are supermarkets that have power & food? how about where's a restaurant or a bar with a television set where you can take a break from cleaning up? does anyone have a hot shower available, a gym, the y? what is the progress on restoring power? water supply?

that was one of the reasons i didn't have a chance to even see my mom before i got out of the area. though i was sure she was ok (brother lived nearby and her facility had an industrial generator), i had to just head across the state without making a side trip to see her because i didn't know when i'd find a gas station and my scouts knew only of gas in naples, over 100 miles away.

so local information is very important for both the welfare & the morale of hurricane victims but it is just that which the idiot newscasts ignore. maybe being helpful doesn't sell enough product.
 
LOL! said:
If power comes on at our house, it would be hard to find out that news. We will try to call neighbors daily I guess to get the useful news. If we can't reach them, it means power is not restored.
Click to expand...

Glad you are OK!!

One way to find out whether or not you have power, is to call your own phone number. If your answering machine picks up, you have power.

For tips on stores and gas stations that may be open when you return, try local message boards if there are any. Keep turning that radio dial to try to find a station with more local information (In New Orleans, WWL radio went above and beyond what anyone could reasonably expect in providing specific local information after Katrina and Gustav and they had streaming audio online for evacuees to listen to).
 
Harry checking in...

I'm writing from work because we don't have power at the house. We lost the lights about 3:00 am Saturday just as the TV weatherman said "as you can see here on the radar, the feeder bands with hurricane force winds are approaching downtown."

We had three of four trees in the backyard go down and sprung a small leak in the roof, but everyone is OK.

More later.
 
Glad you are OK, Harry! Sounds like you have a chainsaw in your future... be careful, as chainsaw accidents are very common in the aftermath of hurricanes.

I was lucky because my neighbor and Frank both offered to do the chainsaw work I needed after Gustav. Frank had his own to do, so I took the neighbor up on it. Otherwise, I'd probably be another chainsaw accident statistic since I am not good at that sort of thing.

I noticed that Harbor Freight (here) had a LOT of blue tarps, so maybe they have some there, too, if you don't want to wait for FEMA. Or maybe the leak is small enough that you don't need a tarp.
 
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