Sometime Wednesday evening or Thursday morning it became certain that hurricane Ike would be striking Galveston and probably the greater Houston area. The Mayor called for some evacuations and recommended that local businesses that carried out non-essential functions be closed on Friday to allow the roadways to be clear for evacuation. We all remembered what happened with hurricane Rita in 2005 when the roads where jammed with people trying to get out. I definitely remembered it. My 45 minute trip from Hambrick to Conroe, where I was living with Bonnie and Jason, turned into a 6 hour drive.
With evacuations clogging my route home I decided to call Dave and have him pack some clothes for me and meet me at his parents’. I didn’t have to take any major roads and we’d probably have decided to weather the storm there anyway. Staying with Dave’s parents is something we both enjoyed anyway and Dave’s brother Doug had just come home from Idaho too.
We spent the next day preparing the house and helping others prepare for the hurricane that looked like it was definitely headed for us.
The night of the hurricane Dave and I stayed in one of the guest rooms at Dave’s parents’ house. Sometime between 1 and 2 in the morning the gusts of wind began to shake the window above our bed so that every gust was accompanied by “BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG.” It must have been a combination of windows hitting each other and the blinds. During that time we lost and regained power a few times before it finally went out altogether. I got up around 2 and wandered the house to see what the storm was doing. It was definitely wicked windy outside. Around 2:30 Dave sat up and we looked out the window. He mentioned that it looked like the window was being sucked in between gusts. We decided to try to find some place else to sleep. We tried the game room but it was still pretty darn loud up there too. So we got Dave’s brother, Doug, who was sleeping in the game room and we went downstairs with intentions of going into Dave's parents' closet to sleep (the largest windowless room in the house). His parents were sleeping so well and it was so much quieter downstairs that we decided to sleep in the living room. We slept a bit restlessly but heck . . . there was a hurricane raging outside. It was also nice to be able to look out the windows and see what was happening each time I woke up.
Around 7:30 Dave’s parents got up and we looked out and the storm seemed to be weakening. We did a little assessment before they all decided to go back to bed. I was really into reading Eclipse so I stayed up in places that I could find light to read. Around 9:30 a man in Dave’s parents’ ward came by on his bike. He’d been around to the ward members in the neighborhood to see how everyone was. I have to say I thought it quite amusing that anyone would ride their bike in that. The second half of the storm was a lot rainier than the windy first half.
When everyone got up later that morning (Saturday the 13th) we got Dave’s parents generator running in order to keep the fridges and freezer cooling. We also jimmy rigged some plastic and some window AC units into the living room windows in order to have a comfortable place to sleep (it was still pretty moist and warm outside). Most of the day we put things back to normal and Gary (Dave's dad) and Doug helped folks in the neighborhood clear trees from the road. We had a nice evening playing Cities and Knights of Catan by candle light and went to bed in the living room. In the middle of the night the generator stopped working. Gary tried to work on it twice in the middle of the night with no improvement. He decided to try again when it was light and he could see. When we got up Sunday morning they realized that although the generator’s motor was running there was no electricity. After we realized nothing was fixing it, Dave and Doug decided they would drive toward Brenham and then toward San Antonio looking for a fuse a new generator. We also called Dave’s sister Lindsay and asked her to start looking for a generator in San Antonio.
When they were gone I talked to my brother Steve on the phone and we talked about ways to bypass the fuse to see if that was really the problem. Gary and Steve talked and after some testing of the generator it became clear that something else electrical was wrong with the generator that we couldn’t fix and we needed a whole new one. At that point we were talking to Lindsay and she told us the chances of getting generator didn’t look good. She kept looking and was lucky enough to get one of 4 generators at a store nearby. She made plans to meet up with the boys. Meanwhile D’Ann (Dave's mom) and I started working on getting some of the meat into her friend’s running freezer to keep it from spoiling and we decided to do some card stamping. It was a long day because it was pretty warm still and Dave and Doug had a hard time getting back due to heavy traffic. When they finally got back it was cooling off outside but we were very grateful that we had the generators running to keep the rest of the food in the freezer and fridges from spoiling.
After the hurricane was like any other storm recovery. I found out that the eye passed right over Conroe so we were likely close to the eye if not within it down at Dave's parents. The boys helped folks clean up trees that had come down and we did our best to work with gas to run stoves and some running water (not clean) in order to get through daily life. I came to be very grateful for power to make my life easier and more entertaining. We played games to keep ourselves entertained and hooked up Gary’s laptop in the evenings to watch a movie before bed. Mostly we were very blessed with nice cool weather and were able to enjoy being outside. Not having to run the AC much also made it easier to do things like laundry with the power that the generator gave us.
During all this we assessed damage at Dave’s parents. They had a few cracked windows in the game room. A tree almost down in the back yard and some water seepage in the dining room that was probably cause by some rotting in the front wall of the house. We considered ourselves lucky. One family near Dave’s parents had a roof that began leaking VERY badly. A family in our ward in Conroe had 3 trees come into their house and a pipe was broken that caused some severe water damage.
Power is slowly being restored to all of the areas in Houston. Dave and I got power in our apartment at the same time as most of Conroe, on Thursday, and came home to get ourselves ready for life to start again. Our apartment had no damage. We had lots of food we had to rebuy since it spoiled without power to keep our refrigerator going (luckily the management of our apartment came and cleaned it out for us). We also needed to clean up our apartment. It smelled very musty without airflow for almost a week.
Unfortunately Dave’s parents are still without power even though some areas near them do (We were able to go out to eat two times before we came back to Conroe). We are hoping for them to get power back soon.
That's all for us here. That was really lengthy and probably boring. Sorry . . . my first blog and I feel like I'm writing and English paper (poorly).
