Hurricane Ike

As you may know, Hurricane Ike swept through Texas this last weekend, devasting the area. Well, we also got hit by it, just not as bad. We got no rain, but we did get wind. Lots of wind. The wind was 50 mph, with gusts up to 74 mph. This went on for about 4 hours! The news people said the wind was at tropical storm strength and the gusts where Hurricane strength. It knocked down thousands of trees and 3 people were killed by trees falling on them. There was a few fires that started, which were a blast for the firefighters to fight, I'm sure. It also knocked out power to over 600,00 customers. The power company said that at one point, they had over 90% of their customers without power. Luckily, neither our power nor the in-laws power went out. Schools were canceled on Monday and many were canceled today due to power outages. I heard a handful of people this morning say they were still without power and somebody said it would be a week until they had power! Here's some pictures I took of the area around our apartment.

This is our "backyard" the next morning. Luckily, no trees fell, but it was mess! Still is, as a matter of fact. It's just littered with leaves and tree branches.

Another view of our backyard. I think the people next to us had a rake and kind of cleaned their part up. Can you tell?

This is the building in our community which probably had the most damage. Many houses in the area, including Colleen's and Arlyn's, are missing shingles. You could tell which way the wind was blowing. Does anybody know a good roofer?

I think this is the building across from us. You can barely see the shingles pulling up on the side. If you click on the picture, it'll be better.

This is the edge of our pond. All that mushed down stuff? It used to be standing straight up, about 3 feet tall.
And this is what is now inside our pond, along with the goldfish, the occasional duck, and who knows what else. Yes, those would be garbage cans. Lots of garbage cans. There was more, but you can't see them in the reflection.
This is one of the trees that fell at the entrance to the apartments. I think that at one point, it was blocking the road, but they moved it. Which is good, because it's the only road in and out of the apartments.
This is what's left of that tree. It's a good thing that it feel the way it did, because there are some power lines nearby. Also, this is just a cool picture.
We actually saw this broken flagpole before the winds got really bad.
The trees on either side of this one were perfectly fine, but the wind just snapped this one right in half. As you can see, huge branches fell off.
I know this isn't a good picture, but the traffic light was out and the drivers were having a hard enough time trying to figure out a 4-way stop without having me try to cross the street.
This is at Thomas More University. It's a Catholic school right by our house. It's a good thing I got this picture, because they cut this down not to long afterwards.

I have some more pictures, but on Aryln's camera. We went for a drive after the storm passed to see what had happened. There's a street(Oakbrook) by their house that was just beautiful; it's lined with flowered pears for a few miles and I loved it. I counted all the trees that were destroyed and came up with 44 destroyed trees and 37 good trees. When Carl and I left their house, it was really eerie. Nobody had power. Carl made the comment that it was a good thing he knew the roads so well, because he didn't recognize anything. We left at about 11:30 at night and didn't see any lights from the time we left Colleen's house until the time we reached our house. Colleen warned us to gas up that night because a lot of the gas stations wouldn't have power and it would be horribly to try and find an open gas station. We went a little bit out of our way to find a gas station that has electricty. We passed 11 gas stations that didn't have power and finally found one that had power.


Well, sorry this post was so long. It was a fun storm, although it did a lot of damage. I'm glad that we are all safe and that we have power and that not too many people got hurt.