A week ago today, the boys and I spent the night at my mom's house to ride out Hurricane Ike. She has brand-new hurricane windows and a generator, and her street does not tend to flood, so staying at her house was a more logical choice than staying at home. Jeff decided to stay home and "hold down the fort." We had prepared well and had all of the necessary provisions of food, ice, water, flashlights and lanterns, batteries...the list goes on and on. You may be wondering why we did not evacuate. Simple. Our zip code was not a mandatory evacuation zone. We live right on the edge - as close as you can get. BUT all of the authorities firmly stated that if you were not in a mandatory evacuation zone that you needed to shelter in place at home. To get out on the roads would be to cause traffic problems for those who were under evacuation orders. (Remember Hurricane Rita evacuations three years ago? A nightmare! It took us 22 hours to make a 6-hour trip!)
Ike blew in as a strong category 2 hurricane with a larger-than-normal storm surge. They say that the surge and the upper-level winds were more like a category 4 storm. The eye of the storm came right over our town in the wee hours of the morning. Our neighborhood and town sustained heavy damage, but our house and my mom's house were spared major damage, but the water came too close for comfort.
The pictures I've posted below show views of our house and neighbors' houses several hours after the water began to recede. Jeff took these photos using his cell phone. He could not cross the street to get a shot of the front of the house. In the shot of our driveway, you can see the end of the sidewalk running across the front of our house. The water covered that sidewalk. You can see a line of debris in the driveway where the water was. Truthfully, you all have probably seen more pictures of the damage than I have. We couldn't see the aftermath on TV.
Our end of the street was a river. In cleaning up, we found live fish still flopping in the street gutters and swimming in the storm drain! We have trees down, large limbs down, and fences down. Cleaning up our yards has been challenging because of the millions of rock-hard pinecones that are deeply imbedded in the grass. Picking up limbs is the easy part.
Ike continues to "squat" in our community, he just won't pick up and leave! We are still without electricity. There are no estimates of how long we'll be without power, but much of the town is regaining power over the past few days. Communication is difficult because cell phone service is spotty, at best. As of yesterday, we no longer have to boil water before we use it. The city finally picked up our week-old trash (containing foods that we had to clean out of our refrigerators before they spoiled - ugh!!!) A curfew is still in effect. We rely on good-old radio as our main source of information. There are still long lines for ice, water, food and gas. Our schools remain closed "indefinitely," which sounds a little scary to me!
On Wednesday, the boys and I decided that we would take this unexpected school holiday to visit our family in the Texarkana area. On the entire 6-hour drive up we saw evidence of the storm. Electricity was still off in places 4 hours north of us! Even here, there are trees and limbs down. Power was lost here, too, for over a day. Another interesting note - across southern Indiana, where our extended family lives, they also had storm damage from the remnants of Ike. High wind caused trees and branches to fall and power outages. The damage was extensive enough that even they had school closings! We are so thankful that we had family to come to - they are wonderful company - not to mention the air conditioning and good food! We hope they let us stay "indefinitely!"
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