The Definitive Story
Posted by Guano & Associates | Posted in | Posted on 10:33 PM
Ok, so... here's what happened:
All last week, we tracked Hurricane Ike's progress and it looked like it was going to miss Houston so we weren't too worried. Thursday morning, I had a big meeting at work so I woke up at 3am and couldn't get back to sleep. I checked online and saw that the projected path went directly over the top of our house. Once I got to work, I pulled my boss aside and asked if I could take the time to go take care of the house. No problems. But, this was at 8am, Swedish time and the U.S.-based travel agent we use wouldn't open for another 8 hours or so. I called their after hours service and got a 9pm flight out Thursday night from Luleå to Stockholm.
I spent the entire day in the meeting, met Kathy and the kids for dinner and then caught the flight to Stockholm. Rented a room at the airport Radisson and was asleep by 11pm. But, got a call at midnight from the travel agent saying they were going to close IAH and wanted to know what I wanted to do. So, I had her divert me to Dallas and then she called back at 12:30am to let me know it was all arranged. Up at 4:30am to catch the flight from Stockholm to Frankfurt, out of Sweden by 6:30am. Then, caught a 11-hour flight from Frankfurt to Dallas, arriving about 3pm followed then by a 4-hour drive to Houston.
As I left Dallas, traffic got intense northbound about 50 miles south of town and stayed nearly bumper to bumper until I got about 50 miles north of Houston. Then the streets were empty! As I pulled into town, every store, light and street was vacant and deserted. Arriving at the house, I found that the neighbors had hauled in all of our loose items and were ready to go. There was a momentary thought to put up the plywood on the windows but it appeared the eye would go well east of us. We sat down in the lawn chairs, in standard Houston style, to sit and watch the storm roll in. I can't thank my neighbors enough for all the help, hospitality and thought they put into making sure I was comfortable and all precautions taken.
About 1am, it started raining and I was getting sleepy from my long journey. Stumbled back to the house and fell asleep. About 4am, I woke up to strong wind and rain. It sounded like it was going to break in the upper story windows on the northwest side of the house. I grabbed my camera and tried to go out the front door, but there was so much negative pressure on the door, I almost couldn't get out. That scared me because I could only imagine a tornado on top of the hurricane!
I staggered out on to the porch half-dressed and watched the wind blow down through our driveway like a wind tunnel. It was bending over the pine trees; the weather channel said they were +70mph gusts and it looked as hard as anything I've ever seen. I tried to take pictures of the pine trees bending but everytime I did, the lights would flicker and the street lights would go out. Finally getting my picture, I watched the window blow and I had the overpowering urge to step out of my sheltered porch and into the driveway and feel the full force of the wind. But, then the image of patio chair blowing from the neighbor's yard and hitting me in the head restrained me. (I found out later our neighbor Nicole watched me through this whole sleepy photo-taking inner-struggle!) After I went back inside, I filed my first blog report and then power went out. Had little else to do, so I went back to sleep. Tried to at least, as the wind blowed, I wondered if this whole trip was such a wise idea.
As it got light, I went outside. The rain was still coming down very heavily and the wind was gusting but much lighter. Walked over to Russell and Nicole's to see if they had power or news. They provided some breakfast. I got antsy so went for a walk in the heavy rain. No debris in our yard, no damage that I could see. Very light damage to a shed at one neighbor and it appeared a trampoline at another neighbor's as mangled, but otherwise not bad at all. Tired of wiping rain out of my eyes, I went home, changed into dry clothes and went for a drive. That's when I started to realize that we got lucky. There were downed trees all over the subdivision, several homes missing siding and shingles. Many fences were blown down and a few street sign poles (metal) were bent over at the ground.
From there, I drove south to Katy to check in on Curtis' family and saw worse damage all along Fry road. It seemed to get worse as I got closer to I-10 but as soon as I got into Cinco Ranch, it improved dramatically. Again, similar damage, trees, fences, shingles and siding.
Since then, it's been a lot of waiting for power to come on, helping with generators and water, trying to find gas that doesn't require you to wait for 2 hours, finding food.
Target opened yesterday morning as did McDonalds, Walmart, Taco Cabana and a few others. I only went into Target because the others all had lines outside. I felt guilty as I passed families buying toilet paper, any food they could get their hands on and water while I was buying a DVD, some shorts and a t-shirt (I only had Sweden cold clothes!), and some toiletries to take back home for Kathy. I could only imagine the checker wondering how impractical someone could really be! I was supposed to fly home today but the flight was cancelled; tomorrow the flight is overbooked so I guess I'll be here until Wednesday afternoon.
We'll always remember Matt as the kind husband and father, not as the hurricane conquering fool with a lawn chair sticking out of his head.
I think that you can count your blessings when you consider how difficult it would be to replace siding and shingles from 4000 miles away.
Dad