colinwoon

IKE finally made landfall last Saturday morning at around 2am as a strong category 2 hurricane.

Strong winds start battering our house in Sugar Land at around 10pm Friday night. Faye and FY(Faye's sister) went to sleep almost as soon as the power went out at around 11:30pm. I couldn't sleep, since it's our first hurricane encounter, I have no idea what to expect, so I tour the house from top to bottom, room to room every hour, checking windows and walls to make sure there are no water leaks. When I'm not walking around, I sit on the sofa, look out the windows wishing the wind gust will just stop. Occasionally, I could see blue flash near and far, I was told later those were power transformer exploding due to down power lines.

I think the most powerful wind gust reach our house at around 4am, at least that's how it sounds like to me. Water were sipping through the ventilation vent in the attic around that time but it wasn't bad as I had expected. It felt like ages before I sense the wind weaken, it's probably around 6 or 7 in the morning since I can see some sunlight at the distant horizon.

I survey the exterior of the house as soon as the rain stop. I have to say, we are the fortunate one, our roof was intact, no broken windows, and the fences are fine too. Beside that, our power was restored by noon on Saturday, we're really really lucky.

Some are not as fortunate, especially those people who live by the coast. My heart goes out to them. To hope that hurricane won't happen again is unrealistic, I just hope that destruction won't be as bad as IKE or KATRINA.

Some down fences in our neighborhood. Our neighborhood survived the hurricane well. Other than some down fences, torn roof, and broken windows, we didn't see any major damage, which is good.


The most damaged roof in our neighborhood (neighbor's house).


Glad to see that the few ducklings living in the duck pond behind our house are doing well too.


A rare sight at our backyard. Two UH-60 Black Hawk military helicopters refueling from a KC-130 Hercules Tanker. I think these two helicopters are heading towards the Galveston/Crystal Beach for SAR(Search And Rescue) Mission since we saw two similar helicopters on the TV news roughly an hour later.


It sure looks like street side parking, actually it's lines leading to the gas station. These pictures were taken on Monday, 2 days after the hurricane hit. Many gas stations remained out after they were drained before the hurricane hit. Since majority of the city are having power outage, more people are getting gas for their power generator than for their car. Power company expect to restore all electricity grid within 4 weeks, with million of customers, that's sure a lot of works.

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