The Aftermath of Hurricane Ike

Houston -- We've had limited access to power recently, so we've not been able to bring you all the news stories we would normally publish. But here is the latest on Hurricane Ike.

The hurricane hit Galveston, Texas late Friday night and early Saturday morning, wiping out homes and knocking down power lines but causing few casualties.

Ike rushed through the Houston metropolitan area early Saturday but the size of the "monster storm" left rain in the area throughout the day.

As of publication time, more than a million residents of the area are without electrical power and the city of Houston is under a curfew order that restricts travel at night.

A Personal Reflection on Ike

On a personal note, my mom and I stayed in Austin, Texas Friday night at the downtown Hilton, along with dozens of other families from the Houston area who had fled the city for a safer location. I counted about 20 dogs in the hotel on Saturday, as I assume the hotel loosened its pet policy to allow hurricane evacuees to spend the weekend.

My mom called home and found that power was knocked out at her home in Houston during the storm. But the sky was clear and the weather was nice in Austin, so despite the power outage, we decided to drive back to Houston Saturday at noon, assuming the power would be back on in Houston by the time we returned.

The trip was comfortable for the first two hours, but h alfway through the drive across 290, the skies darkened and the rains poured down as the last vestiges of Ike cleared out of the area. We started to wonder if we had made the right decision to return and worried if we could still find a hotel if we needed a place to stay for the night. The cell phone lines were jammed and we couldn't make phone calls during much of the trip, so there was no way for us to reach the people in my mom's neighborhood to see if the power was back on or if the roads were passable.

As we got closer to Houston, we could see the damage left behind, especially on Highway 6. Power lines were knocked down, traffic lights were left hanging off their wires, billboards were tipped over, street lights were blown over and left on the ground and dozens of trees were uprooted.

As of 5 p.m. Saturday, nearly all the businesses in the area were closed, most without electricity and some with significant storm damage. Local radio broadcasters announced that 3 to 5 million residents in the area were without electricity.

By 6 p.m., we found an H.E.B. grocery store that was open, the only open grocery store we had seen in dozens of miles of travel, but many other people had made the same discovery and the checkout lines were clogged to the back of the store.

Shortly after we entered the grocery store, the rain came pouring down again. And inside the store we discovered the entire meat section was completely empty and roped off, but a small freezer section of frozen products remained open. Water and bread were the first products to disappear. (Some of the photos I took are posted on this article.) 

As we made our way to the front of the checkout line, the power went out in the store, causing a brief moment of panic in the crowd before it came back on. People around us kept talking about getting through the checkout line before another power outage hit that could stop the registers from working. But everyone seemed to make it through and the power never went off again. 

Fortunately, we had plenty of gas in our tank, and despite the fears of gas runs, we saw no examples of price gouging in the highway drive to Houston or in the city area itself. By the time we got back home around 7, the lights had come back on in our area.

We listened to the radio for a few hours and residents were told not to drink the water in some areas, to stay off the roads and to limit cell phone use. We were very fortunate, but I was particularly sorry to see that millions of Houstonians were (and are) still without power, and thousands of people in nearby Galveston have been particularly hard hit by the storm.