The (Continued) Aftermath of Hurricane Ike

Here is part of an email I received today from a gal I got to know when I was down in Pasadena both last April and last July. She and her husband both work in Shoreacres (for the city), a little bitty beach community north of Galveston but hit really hard by Hurricane Ike. I had emailed her last week, hoping I would hear from her when she got the chance. As Missie mentions in her email, Galveston and Houston are getting the press, but it doesn't mean other communities aren't suffering:

"We are doing ok. Not to much damage at our house, we are waiting for the insurance adjustor. The city I work for was hit very hard. The news is covering Galvestion and Houston, leaving the little towns out. We have worked 12+ hour shifts for the past week. David and I are hoping to get a day off soon.

"Our beach front is gone. The Houston Yacht Club was almost destroyed. If you go to our city website, you can see pics from the area - www.cityofshoreacres.us/ike.htm."

The photos are all copyrighted, so I can't post any on this blog, but they're definitely worth looking at if you have a minute.

To give you a sense of how small Shoreacres really is, here is a post from the city web site, from their running updates about what is happening - "We estimate that 575 of our 650 homes have been flooded and today are uninhabitable. I believe it was Winston Churchill who said, "When you're going through hell, keep going." That's exactly what we're doing as a community. Shoreacres is showing what it's made of, and it's all good. Our citizens have pulled together with neighbors, city workers, volunteers and disaster relief teams. The results are incredible."

The Strange and the Bizarre

How's this for a strange sight while driving down the road? It's advertising "Red Bull". The can is welded to the trunk/rear of the car.

Sunrise in Dallas

College Living de ja' vu

It's nice to be home after getting in this evening from Austin (150 mile road trip). While studying all things related to cargo tank trucks for the last four days, two co-workers and I stayed in dormitory style housing down in Austin. It was like being back in college :=) Community rooms. Community bathrooms. Cafeteria food (and no, that style of food hasn't improved!).

Here are some pictures:







I'll get one week at home and then head back to Austin for two weeks (to finish out the month of September), again staying in a dorm room and eating cafeteria food. I never thought an apartment would feel like the Hilton, but it certainly does :=)

Headlines from Hurricane Ike

(Updated Sunday evening)

Seabrook, where I took all the pictures of pelican statutes, is closed to all the residents with the police turning away any cars trying to get through. According to the news, they have no infrastructure - - no water, no sewer, no power, no nothing.

Here are a couple pictures I found of the storm and its effects. This is heading southbound on the main interstate (I-45) into downtown Houston and the freeway I used to get through the city.



Here is a picture taken from the International Space Station (pretty impressive, huh?).




(Updated Saturday Morning - - I've been to both the Space Center and the Kemah Boardwalk.... Both were between my hotel in Webster and where class was held in Seabrook, so those locations have probably taken a pretty good beating too! This info is from Yahoo! News.)

"Some 30 miles inland, storm surge of about 10 feet was pushing into a neighborhood near Johnson Space Center.... Nearby, the popular Kemah Boardwalk at the mouth of Galveston Bay, ringed by million-dollar homes, was submerged, state officials said."

This is what the entrance to Kemah and the Boardwalk looked like two months ago:



>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

"It's going to be a scary 36 hours"..."If you're a Coastal resident resident and don't evacuate, you'll face imminent and certain death"..."Storm surge in Galveston could be as high as 25 feet [which, based on a map of the city, would cover the entire land mass of Galveston]"..."Flooding could reach parts of Houston [20 miles from the coast]"..."40% of the residents of Galveston are refusing to leave [Galveston has a population of 60,000]"....

For a Category 2 storm, Ike is already showing some massive strength and size. It is 800 miles wide, which makes it approximately the size of the entire state of Texas. As I write this Friday evening, the eye was not expected until after midnight, but parts of Galveston are already flooded. Seabrook - where I was less than two months ago and which had all the pelican statues - is already flooding. The flood walls of Galveston, which stand 17 feet high, have waves crashing over them. Kemah, which is a resort town just down the street from where I had class in July, started mandatory evacuations two days ago and their famous boardwalk (a smaller version of Santa Barbara or Atlantic City) is starting to get torn apart.

After the fiasco of Hurricane Rita three years ago when Houston officials tried to get everyone in the city to evacuate and the roads were so badly clogged that cars ran out of gas or over-heated, this time they're telling the majority of residents to just stay put.

Dallas, 200+ miles to the northwest, is expected to have tropical storm winds and lots of rain starting tonight and getting progressively worse tomorrow. The breadth of Ike is definitely going to affect a large swath of Texas in the next 24 hours!