I write this as Hurricane Ike approaches the Houston Galveston area, and which should make landfall sometime in the dark hours tomorrow morning, September 13th, 2008. A Houston Chronicle interactive map shows that Ike is, as I write this, at 27.7 degrees north and 93.5 degrees west, making it some 180 miles away from Houston.
Ike is now projected to pass east of downtown Houston with winds over 100 miles per hour and with a massive storm surge. The Weather Channel now says that Surfside has knee deep water already. Sabine Pass has 36 mph winds, while Galveston now has winds of 41 - 50 mph. We have roughly 25 mph winds in Houston as of 5:20pm today.
I believe that Hurricane Ike will have many of the same effects that Hurricane Alicia had on Houston when she rolled through town 25 years ago. I was on the cusp of entering my last year of high school when Alicia hit. I stayed up all night, alone, in my parents' front room, listening to music via the family stereo through some headphones. Or, I did so until the power went out. I still stayed up and stared out at the darkness right next to the front windows, something in hindsight I would never do again. Sometimes I would see terrific bolts of lightning light up the entire sky. When those struck, I could sometimes see the branches of our trees in the front yard extend all the way to the ground. Those trees are not there anymore, having fallen victim to a curb and gutter improvement project that the City of Houston did when Helen Huey was district council member.
Alicia battered on all night that night, but my parents home suffered no damage of any kind, not to the roof or windows. The winds finally began to calm down around 6:00am that following Friday morning. My father awoke and the winds had quieted down enough to where I felt adventurous enough to walk outside into our back yard. There was a patio in the back yard, but when I opened the door I could see that there was debris everywhere. I was about to step out when my dad told me not to do that. That turned out to be some wise advice, as we subsequently discovered that we had a downed power line lying in the patio. Houston Lighting and Power employees came by later that day to deal with the downed line, but we did not get our power restored until 2 days later. That turned out to be a minor nightmare as this left us without air conditioning in Houston during August. That will be the one saving grace of Ike. The forecasts say that we will have temperature highs in the 80's next week and lows in the 60's and 70's. We will be spared having to sweat like pigs even if we lose power.
But I digress. I was allowed to go outside in the front yard in mid-morning. All of the residents in the neighborhood congregated together, it is rather amazing how natural disasters get people to do that. About one in five of the homes in my parents neighborhood suffered some form of damage, mostly trees that had fallen on roofs. Several people had garages that had been struck. People came out with chainsaws and started to chip away at clearing away some of those trees. Debris was everywhere.
My dad told me to start cleaning up the front yard the next day. It took over 30 trash bags in order hold all of the pine tree branches and needles that had fallen over the yard. I feel sad that I did not have a camera to record Alicia like I do now. I don't know whether businesses boarded up, like they have on Westheimer now.
But there are some things I do vividly remember about the aftermath of Alicia. People piled up their debris on the medians of many major collector and arterial streets, like Westview in Spring Branch or Richmond near Gessner. The City did not finish collecting it all until months afterwards.
Another vivid memory I have was looking at the front page of the papers the next day and seeing photos of shards of glass that had popped out of downtown skyscraper windows that were stuck vertically into the concrete! I now work downtown. When Rita struck in 2005, I warned fellow employees that this might happen again, but it will happen when Ike strikes tomorrow.
That winter, some friends of mine and I went out in the dead of a very cold December night on a trip to Galveston beach. We were young and absolutely nuts for doing that. It was freezing cold that night, but we were lubricated by lots of beer. We walked for hours and talked about what our futures would be like. One thing I couldn't help but notice was that the beach was entirely barren. It seemed that the sand dunes had been pushed back dozens of yards.
Things are starting to get interesting, but the real fireworks have yet to come. There is a construction crane down Westheimer that I am a bit concerned about, but otherwise the Wizard is up on the second floor. No flooding for me, but I am worried about the wind and the trees in our courtyard. All but one of my windows are boarded up, the one that isn't being too large to be covered by plywood. It's funny because when Alicia hit, nobody took off and left town. Since Katrina hit New Orleans three years ago, it seems that millions take off every time anything comes remotely close to town.
Otherwise, the Wizard is hunkered down with some supplies to last for maybe three days. The Big Evil Company Linux clusters are shutdown with no restart until Sunday. I'll check in on the kinfolk and some other friends in a while. It's time for Ike to let her rip.
Wizard
Posted by The Mighty Wizard at September 12, 2008 06:00 PM