I woke up this morning to a radio broadcast of a press conference by Mayor White and Judge Emmett about Ike’s progress and the city’s plans. The gist was that yes, it looks like it’s coming straight for us, but everyone without special needs who does not live in one of the few zip codes under mandatory evacuation should shelter in place, dear God, SHELTER IN PLACE. By the way, we’ve been telling you for months to get your hurricane supplies ready, so it’s not our fault if you get to the store and there’s no bottled water left.

All indications are that this will be the worst direct hit on Houston since 1983′s Alicia, though it’s likely to cause less damage than piddly little Tropical Storm Allison, which stalled and dumped rain until people started drowning in elevators and parking garages, and keeping your hospital’s generators in the basement suddenly didn’t seem like a good idea any more.

UH is closing at 5:00 this afternoon, which gets me out of CivPro tomorrow morning*. I could evacuate to College Station, I suppose, but I’m sticking around. It’s John’s turn to visit, and I’m not sure that driving 90 miles in evacuation traffic would be any more fun than hunkering down here, especially since the storm’s projected to head straight up that direction after it’s done here.

I fully expect the power to go out at some point on Saturday and stay out for a while. Even during Rita, which missed us to the east (the better option in terms of wind speed), my parents’ house lost power for the better part of a day, and they live on the NW side of town. We might be making peanut butter sandwiches by candlelight for a while.

What would be much worse is if the water goes out—keeping my fingers crossed against that possibility.

Last night I tried to fill up at the gas station near my apartment, but the whole place was full. The next two I tried were packed, too, with one or two cars waiting for each pump. A gas crunch, it turns out, is not a good time to have your little gas door** in the less-common passenger side position. If a left-sider’s already at the pump, you have to line up nose-to-nose, which makes it tough for them to get out and makes it hard to figure out who’s in line if there are cars already waiting on the other side. I saw a couple people resolve this dilemma by backing into the line, but I waited instead at the one pump that had been chosen by chance to have a line of right-siders behind it.

Also a non-traditional gas-door-sider? Channel 2 news anchor Jerome Gray, two cars ahead of me in line. He was dressed casually, so that I gave it a fifty-fifty shot of being either that guy from the news or a construction foreman, at least until the guy at the next pump over asked if he was here “getting the inside scoop.”

Looks like everybody remembers the blocks-long lines that cropped up before Rita. I imagine, even with the orders NOT to evacuate if you can help it, that the lines’ll be at least out of the parking lots today. Last night I spent half an hour at the gas station, so if you’re looking to get gas in Houston, I think your best bet is to go at 3:00 in the morning.

For comparison, here’s my “coverage” of Rita in 2005, and here are the very few pictures I took.

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* Did you know that law school requires missed class time to be made up, even if the professor goes out of town or is in the hospital (as one of mine was on the first day of class)? Surprised me, too, though I appreciate it.

** Surely this has a name.

Tags: Houston, Hurricane Ike

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