Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Inside Ike

Shortly after my last post from Houston last Saturday we lost power. It was around midnight, so Mom and I got out our flashlights and lit a few candles. After a while we clicked on the battery powered television and continued to watch the eye of Hurricane Ike make landfall on Galveston island sixty miles south east of us.

Throughout the night we would look out the windows at the dancing trees and listen to the wind make the chimney hoot like a giant Coke bottle. Every so often the weather stripping beneath the back door would vibrate as the air was sucked out of the house. It made a startling reedy sound like a bass clarinet.

By three or four in the morning the winds were at their peak. I ventured onto the front and back porches and was struck by the loudness of the wind. But it was the sky that surprised me the most. The ever-present dull amber glow of the Houston sky was intermittently splashed by bursts of intense a blue-white light characteristic of electric arcs and exploding transformers. I paused to say dude, then went back inside.

By 5:30 AM the worst seemed to be passed, and we went to bed grateful that no serious damage had been done to the house. When we woke up the next day and took a look around the neighborhood, we glimpsed the damage others experienced.

But that's tomorrow's post.

1 comment:

Joy B said...

We were tempted to stay here in Clear Lake, but have always told ourselves to leave whenever it might be bad. So the mandatory evacuation helped us decide it might be bad. Our next door neighbor stayed. She said we both had power through the whole thing, with a few flashes off. And both our houses had no damage. The eye went over our house for an hour and a half. The second eye wall was even stronger than the first. Our huge maple tree may not make it. It was already injured a few months ago in another storm. And part of our fence is dead, but it has been suffering from old age for a long time.