We're safe and sound in Bryan. We relocated from Cypress our neighborhood is really beat up. 50 year oaks torn up root ball and all. Our house seems water tight for the moment, about half the houses on my block are leaking or missing sections of roof. 11011011
The storm has passed us now. We came through pretty well. I lost a little metal shed, and half of a tree that fell out into an open space. theLimeyBrit lost power, so he and family are here with us tonight.
Here's pics of where my friends are from. Bridge City. http://kogt.smugmug.com/gallery/5953607_Nn2hu#371134406_jLgnE
We had damage from Ike this morning. Rain and then we had winds that broke trees and damaged roofs. It blew part of the roof off of my yard shed that I've only had for 3 weeks. I guess I'll be roofing tomorrow.
we got power back after 33 hours at 3:30pm. Still millions without power. I'll be back at work in the morning, though schools are still closed through wednesday. Only internet is through my cell phone and cell phones are pretty clogged in houston and cypress. 11011011
7-8" of rain here. Water's over the road. Mud's in the basement. I broke my wheelbarrow yesterday building gravel check dams in the gully that eroded in the side of the road bed by my property. And tomorrow's Monday.
Ike swept through here on Sunday. We lost power ~1:30 PM and it didn't come back. Sustained winds of 40-50 MPH with gusts well into the 70's. Good the power went out when it did because the Bengals played like ****. I was up in Devou Park when the worst of it hit. Trees down everywhere, power lines down, the place was generally looking like a war zone. When it was all said and done over 90% of the city (two million people) had lost power and as of this still ~80% still don't have it, myself included. I'm posting this from on campus. Most places are still closed, many cell towers are out, and since there's no electricity there's a run on gas since the pumps are electric. The places that are selling gas are well over $4/per, if they're not out. My only real news source until this morning was a radio powered by AA batteries. We're not expecting power back until the weekend. Pictures coming.
NOAA has a bunch of "aftermath" sat pictures up, which show pretty close detail of areas like Galveston. It's even vanilla-HTML accessible. This one in particular looks pretty hairy -- can anyone identify what all the spoo across the road is at the lower left corner of that image? . _H*
From this page: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/09/the_short_but_eventful_life_of.html I'm guessing it's something like this:
We got power back sometime last night (around 36 hours after it went out, at 2:30). As for damage, we just lost like 4 shingles, but our neighbor had a whole 5 square foot patch torn off. And my high school (Mason) was delayed by two hours - which isn't too bad, but the district to our west (Lakota), east (Kings), and south (cincinnati public schools) were (from what i heard, so it might not necessarily be true) all closed. I was actually out riding my bike when our power went out, since I was oblivious that there actually was a storm - its not like we usually have our blinds open. It didn't feel that bad, but i did nearly get blown over a few times.
theLimeyBrit has his power back on now - Saturday afternoon until Tuesday morning. He and family stayed at my house for the duration.
Glad everyone is okay. I braved the grocery store last night. Apparently, there are still some neighborhoods around here without power.
Thanks for the boston.com "bigpicture" reference -- ironically enough even though it's supposedly my home-area site I don't poke around on it that often. The big plus there is that all the stuff is presented in totally vanilla HTML that works in all browsers under all security scenarios -- as opposed to sites like, say, Picasa, and Dan, if you can generate a simple linear list of picture links instead of just sending folks like me to Picasa it would actually allow me to SEE them... . And that is definitely a very hairy pic of the flotsam. eep. I wonder how far inland an event like that could push around here -- given that the GPS says I'm less than 40 feet ASL, it wouldn't be pretty. . _H*
The picture made me think of how wasteful it all is. Most places just burn or landfill all that debris. That's what happened in my area after the July Derecho. Here's a recent article about the potential to recycle materials and derive energy from disaster debris. Current practice is that government contractors can't be bothered to do it because it's too much hassle for too little cash. Disaster cleanup companies I've seen have had an ambulance chasing/gold rush mentality; including, at times, my employer.
