River Front Property

While the power is out in Houston I get to play secretary. Marjorie, Jason and Debby will be telling me what to type and I will TRY to do in right. Here goes:

We lost power shortly after midnight on Friday. We didn’t get much sleep because of the high winds and this “banging sound” on the roof much of the night – not to mention tornado warnings. The worst of the storm was probably between 1:30 AM and 4:00 AM.

Jason and Debby woke up Saturday morning to see a river outside their second floor window – going the wrong way. A frontage road closest to them was OK. The road was about twenty feet below the surface. On the other side the 288 freeway and its onramp were flooded. Debby said we’d been upgraded to river front property.

By Saturday morning, the winds died down a bit and the rain had pretty much stopped. Jason and Debby ventured out to find batteries for a radio, and coffee – pretty optimistic weren’t they! Nothing was open. They saw trees down, some street lights and power lines down, carports blown down on cars, and in one nearby complex chimneys were gone.

Since we didn’t have the internet and use of our cell phones was erratic, for us Saturday was a pretty quiet day.

Late afternoon we went out again for a drive and to listen to some news on the car radio. The “river” behind us had gone down and the freeway was clear. Thanks to Joe and Terry, they have kept us updated on what they could find out about what’s happening around us, and that has helped. And Debby could listen for short periods to radio broadcasts on her iPhone.

Down town Houston was hit pretty hard. The Chase building, the tallest building, had a lot of windows blown out. Chairs were flying out of the open of these windows and hitting neighboring buildings.

The power company is bringing 7,000 additional electrical workers to speed up restoration of the grid. They are working around the clock, 16 hour shifts. This should help us all. MD Anderson didn’t loose power as their lines are underground. Estimates for getting power back have been anywhere from 2 to 3 days to 2weeks.

Debby called Holiday Inn to see if we could get in anywhere and the closest hotel with available rooms was 100 miles away.

It’s Sunday and still no power - light rains off and on – but that’s good – its keeping the temperature down. We found a Taco Cabana that was open for lunch today and Super Target grocery shelves were pretty empty. No one had D batteries and a child’s radio we bought didn’t work – having a radio just wasn’t meant to be!

I talked to my sister Carol tonight. Ike has hit more of our family. Carol is without power Columbus and Brian and Amy are in the dark in Dover, Ohio.

Jason’s hanging in there. His nausea comes and goes, he is still tired a lot and his chest congestion never quite went completely away. Debby said she will post again when we get the internet.

Marjorie