Ike - day of 9/13/08

After seeing the pictures of the water come over the seawall in Galveston long before the storm hit we knew Ike was going to be bad. If you google our address you see we’re very close to a source of water, that is Cotton Lake a cooling pond for Reliant, we walked down there yesterday and it sits below about a 20-30’ bluff, in a distance you can see the barrier of the lake and beyond that Trinity Bay. So unless the bay breached the lake it still had quite a ways to go.
We lost power right after the news started at 1005, and with boarded up windows you know how dark that is! We all went to sleep but woke up when it hit, and it seemed to go on forever! Sam stayed awake and watched his weather station. His wind meter stopped working at about 70mph, thankfully when we checked 2 days later it stopped because it had a leaf in it.
The roof make this banging noise, and about 2:30-3 it all stopped, we found a few leaks in my pretty painted ceiling, we didn’t know if we had lost roofing or not at that time. No furniture was harmed, and we were still safe. We walked the dogs at 3am during the eye of the storm, which was really strange, and Sam took a flashlight and took a look around the house.
The back side of the storm seemed much worse than the front side! You could hear the wind come up around the boarded windows, and howling around the house. As it seem to go on forever, dawn broke, and it was raining sideways.
The pond wasn’t at it’s max, the storm had only brought about 6-7” of rain (sorry I don’t stare at the weather station). It finally started clearing so we could go out. The dripping from the ceilings was caused by the flashing on the side of the house being blown off, about 10 trees down, up rooted or snapped off, and 4 panels of the privacy fence down so not to bad. But praise the Lord it was over!
We pulled out the generator, started the fridge running and a couple of fans. Met with neighbors and looked around. We ventured out that afternoon to check Mom’s house out and she had 1 BIG pine tree down, up rooted and of course limbs and pine needles (you don’t want pine trees), but house only missing shingles so good news there. We drove over to my Mckinney street house and almost couldn’t park in the drive way due to the pecan trees, limbs everywhere and on the roof but as best I could tell they didn’t come thru.
Sam’s old house where his daughter lives did take on the water surge, so Mary will be living in my McKinney street house until she has something else.
Our nice marina, well the boats were sitting on the edge of Hwy 146. Really glad I don’t have a boat!
Hot sticky day is over, but the Lord came out with a beautiful sunset!