Gil's World

I live in Houston, Texas which was in the direct path of Hurricane Ike. I live in the zone where we were told to shelter in place or "hunker down". Storm surge was not expected in my area, just wind and rain.
The place I work closed early at noon on Thursday. I left about 10:45. On the way home, I noticed that the new 84 Lumber had a makeshift sign that said "We have hurricane supplies". I had planned to try and find some plywood if possible even though I figured it would be nearly impossible. The 84 Lumber location was a new store that was not even open yet. I got 6 pieces of 4'x8' OSB (cheap plywood).
I drove home slowly and unloaded the plywood into the garage. The only saw that I had was a hand saw. It was gonna take forever to cut this plywood to fit the windows. I cut one piece by hand. It took forever. Just before dusk I asked one of my neighbors if I could use his saw or get him to cut mine for me. John, who lives across the street, happily agreed to cut it for me. I was ecstatic. I went to bed Thursday night early with a plan to get up early and put up my plywood during the day.
I got up about 6 am on Friday. I needed to go to Home Depot to try and find some screws and a circular saw in case I needed to cut anymore wood. It was open when I got there at 6:45. There was a line, but most of them were in line for plywood. I was able to get in right away. There were almost out of saws except for the most expensive ones. I just grabbed it and went to find some screws. They were out of the ones I wanted, but I found some I think that would work. I checked out and drove home.
I put the plywood over my front windows. I put several screws in each one, but I wasn't happy with how they were attached. It was too late to try and get more wood to make then fit better. I used the leftover pieces of plywood to cover the top half of each of the 3 windows on the back of my house. I used some different screws that I had on these pieces of plywood.
A friend of mine who lives in Pasadena, Chad, asked if he could ride out the storm in my house. His house normally floods and he knew that my house normally doesn't flood. He got at my house around 1 pm. He brought several things like his Xbox 360 and his computer. He also brought some frozen pizzas that we cooked before the power went out. We played Rock Band and Guitar Hero Aerosmith for several hours. We also watched the movie Total Recall until the power started going on and off. We watched all of the movie (except the last couple of minutes) when the power started flickering. It went off for good about 12:30 am. It came back on briefly (10 seconds) about 4 am.

The hurricane winds started coming soon after around 1 am or so. At some point I heard a weird noise. I got up and looked at the front of the house. One of my plywood panels had come off. No window damage however. The rest of the ones on the front came off at various points through out the night. They all just fell straight down into my bushes. The back half of the hurricane was MUCH stronger than the front side. The winds were a lot stronger and came from what appeared to be from the west.

Whenever the storm had passed and it was light out, we went out to survey the damage. I had several shingles off of the roof on the west side (front side) of the house. Also, when the back half of the storm came through and the wind was coming from the west, water was blowing in the under my front door. I put towels there to stop it but a lot of it had already gotten in and got the carpet wet. None of my windows were broken. Overall, I was very blessed to not receive much damage.



Some others in my neighborhood were not as lucky but overall, this area did OK. Several fences were blown down. A few carports were turned over, as well as a few people who lost windows.

I also was very blessed to have my power restored around 5 pm on Sunday. It is very nice to have A/C again. It was very hot and hard to sleep.

The place I work will be closed on Monday and most likely until the latter part of this week. So I will have some extra time on my hand. I will try to drive over there and see what I can see tomorrow.