To all who are checking this site out for Hurricane Ike info, I’ll be live-blogging the storm. My wife and I live in The Heights neighborhood of Houston (map here). That’s quite a distance from Galveston and the coast, but right in the path of this monster. I plan to blog until I lose power or need sleep.
Friday 5:31 PM: First live-blog post. It is definitely getting very windy on our street; trees are whipping around nicely and the chimney is starting to whistle at us. No rainfall, yet. Estimate winds at 10-15 mph with 30 mph gusts.
Friday 5:39 PM: My friend Phil is also going to be blogging about the hurricane here.
Friday 6:10 PM: First power outage (for a few seconds) at 6:01, about 8 hours before landfall. This brought to mind two things: our router wasn’t on a surge protector yet (remedied), and I’m not sure where our power lines run; it dawns on me they may be the lines nearby that run through lots of branches, in which case this little experiment in live blogging will be little, indeed.
Friday 6:16 PM: First signs of wind damage; a few huge limbs broke off of a tall (~45 feet) tree at the end of our driveway, taking out part of a fence and falling at least partly in a neighbor’s garage. I think it dinged his SUV (the door was open for some reason).
Friday 6:33 PM: This is what neighbors are for! A bunch of people (myself included) went out and removed debris from the common driveway, so no logs become window-smashing projectiles, at least not on our windows… Sarah and I haven’t even met all of our neighbors, yet, but these seem really nice: good folk, just waiting out a storm. (Oh, and their SUV is fine. Don’t think the fence is gonna last the night, though…)
Friday 6:46 PM: Two more mini-power outages. This is either going to get cut off abruptly by the power going for good or it’s going to get long quickly. So, if you want to keep reading, click the link below.