Tuesday, September 16, 2008 by
Colin Woon
, under
Houston
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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Friday, September 12, 2008 by
Colin Woon
, under
Houston
The sky is still kind of calm as of this morning, nothing unusual just yet. Wind started to pick up a little but nothing much to it. Still doesn't look like a hurricane is coming ashore. Forecast said that wind should reach tropical storm force(30~40mph) starting 6pm tonight and get worst as the evening progress we should expect hurricane force wind(60~85mph) after midnight. We'll see.
I know our house were designed to withstand 110mph wind(sustain with 3 second gust) based on the building code for Sugar Land. Our house is probably going to be ok, maybe some broken windows or damage roof(hopefully none!). My worry is the possible tornado spawned by the hurricane and maybe the power outage afterward. We won't see the worst compare to Galveston and the coastal area.
Taken on our way to Faye's work place to shut down servers and remove backup drive, it's her job being an IT Administrator. Most companies had shut down for Friday, yet there are still many cars on the road, maybe to take advantage of the "FREE" toll road.
Most, if not all, stores are closed for the day except New Chinatown where most stores are still open and the parking lot is full as usual, amazing isn't it.
Uh oh, really?!
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Thursday, September 11, 2008 by
Colin Woon
, under
Houston
If you live in Houston or somewhere in Texas, you probably know by now that a huge Hurricane Ike is heading our way and it will make landfall sometime on early Saturday morning local time. Unless you don't watch TV, listen to radio and never leave your house, then you possibly won't have notice the difference.
I took the photo above at about 4pm this afternoon(Thursday) roughly 34 hours before the hurricane make landfall. Does it even look like a hurricane is coming our way? Is it the calm before the storm?! Possibly. Who knows. If it turns out like Hurricane Rita back in 2004, we might not even see a drop of rain where we live.
If you believe the media, specifically all the local TV news, the sky will fall and we're all going to die! Sometime I think the TV guys drum up the situation so we all will stick to the TV to watch up to the minute update. They might be doing the right thing, making you think of the worst case scenario and prepare for it. At least if the worst case scenario occurred, most of us will be readied.
As for me, I stop watching the hurricane update on TV hours ago. I do check the National Hurricane Center from time to time to see if the hurricane deviate from it's projected path and make it a better situation for us here in
Houston/
Sugar Land(roughly 60 miles from
Galveston).
As far as I know, we're prepared and we're staying since no evacuation order are given for our city. There's nothing much we can do now other than to relax and hope for the best.
Here's a satellite picture of Hurricane Ike taken from
abc13.com. Yeah it's huge, distance wise. It's a category 2 hurricane now, and it will probably make landfall as a category 2 hurricane, according to the hurricane center prediction. Finger crossed!
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This is the delicious dessert we enjoyed at Karen's Baby Shower last weekend.
Slices of mangoes cover the cake and more mangoes chunk inside the cake too! Mango goodness!
Yeah, it's store bought.
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Unintentionally tested the padding of my camera bag a few weeks ago. Well, the pavement win and my favorite prime lens disintegrated into 2 pieces.
I'm thinking of getting the Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 to replace it. What do you think?
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