I have to record the events around Hurricane Ike in my blog, even though everyone I know who would want to know how my family fared has gotten phone or email updates from me.
But, for the record, Hurricane Ike struck the Houston/Galveston area the night of Friday, September 12 into Saturday, September 13. The downtown Houston office I work at was closed down at noon on Thursday, September 11. My daughters' last day of school before the storm was that Thursday, too.
Thursday was a wasted morning at work. No one could do anything but talk about the hurricane. Several people on my floor were long-term visitors from India, and they did not understand much about hurricanes. I spent some time explaining them so they could make good decisions about their family. It quickly became apparent as Ike's projected course inched eastward that it would hit this area and the office would be closing shortly. When it did, I was fortunate to learn that Houston Metro had reinstated the commuter bus service which normally only runs in the mornings and evenings.
I also whipped up a PHP program that would save images to my web server from a few live radar sites every 15 minutes so that after Ike passed, I'd have an archive of radar images that I could assemble into a smooth animation of Ike. [Alas, something caused interruptions in that process so that I had lots of gaps in my series of images.]
I had a good stockpile of plywood and Plylox that I got when I thought Gustav was going to hit Houston a few weeks before. So I spent some of Thursday afternoon and most all of Friday morning cutting and installing the plywood on all of our windows. Once I got the hang of how the Plylox worked, I got better at fitting the plywood correctly in the windows; a few of the first ones I installed were not fully secured with all 4 Plylox clips in.
I also spray painted each piece of plywood with a code that showed me what window it fit into. I thought this was an obvious thing to do, even though I saw no one else's plywood so labeled. In fact, each of my neighbors commented on this practice. I still am not sure why everyone doesn't do this. All I can think is that hurricanes come by infrequently enough that the plywood cut from the previous storm might be degraded to the point of not being usable. Or perhaps the plywood gets so damaged in a storm that it can't be used again? All I knew is that I didn't want to have to cut all those darn pieces of plywood again. I think I could install all 21 pieces of plywood in all of our windows in about 90 minutes now that they are all cut.
So we cleaned up the yard and patio of anything that could become an airborne projectile and either threw it away or stuffed it into the garage. That was all done before 1:00 PM, so we just had the rest of the day to wait in our unusually dark house (the plywood blocked a lot of light).
We watched the weather reports throughout the day, occasionally venturing outside to sample the weather. As the day progressed, the gusts became increasingly stronger, but sustained winds were still fairly low. The odd thing about the weather is that we got hardly any rain before nightfall. Ike was a very large storm with large wind fields, but the rain only got to us a few hours before landfall.
The girls went to sleep with no problems. Donna and I were both tired, so we were in bed by 11:00. Originally, Donna mentioned that she was going to stay up during the storm, but I said I was going to sleep and I thought she should do the same. As it turned out, she slept fairly well whereas I only slept fitfully.
to be continued in part 2...