[Written Monday Sept. 15, 12:45 PM. Posted who knows when.]

As expected, we lost power early Saturday morning. My building was one of the lucky ones—we got it back midday Sunday. Even now, on Monday afternoon, much of Houston is still blacked out. Downtown is closed, a few major roads and freeways are underwater, and most businesses have yet to reopen. I drove around for half an hour this morning before I found an open Einstein’s Bagels*. I’m still on the hunt for that elusive combination of an open business that also has wireless internet access. My home internet is still down; the post I wrote early Saturday was the last bit of internet I’ve seen.

Ice is the hottest commodity in the city right now. Very few of the grocery stores that reopened yesterday afternoon had any, and the ones that got an overnight shipment are quickly running out. I went and stood in line at Kroger partly for kicks, and partly because I was out of cookies. They were on generator power, so they let about fifty people into the store at a time and lined everyone else up outside. When I got there the line was about a hundred people long, but it moved quickly, so that I only had to wait twenty minutes to get inside.

As announced on signs all over the outside of the building, they were out of ice, propane, and “perishables,” which apparently included peanut butter, standard brands of chips (plenty of fruit and organic chips left) and yogurt, but not bread or produce. Cookies were half off, hooray! They didn’t have my favorite kind of icing, but I bought a couple anyway. Can’t pass up those prices, right?

They had plenty of milk, but the doors were tied shut, presumably because the coolers had been off all day Saturday. Bummer. My cooler was also off all day Saturday, so there’ll be no cereal for a while around here.

But that comes pretty close to the worst of my misfortunes, for which I am extremely grateful. Walking and driving around the neighborhood during the tail end of the storm Saturday morning, we saw many, many people who had fared much worse. Roofs, awnings, signs, fences, and trees were down everywhere. If I had to guess based on my somewhat limited observations, I’d say that five percent of the trees in Houston have either been uprooted entirely or had major limbs torn off.

Many of these trees, of course, have fallen onto power lines, across roads, or onto houses, and it’s just made a big old mess. The cleanup will take weeks, at least. Near my apartment there are three uprooted trees and a power pole leaning into the street, all held up by the still-attached power lines, so that half the road is blocked. No one’s been out to fix it yet; I’m sure there are still higher-priority repairs elsewhere.

Another building in my apartment complex lost sections of its roof in the middle of the storm. The rain flooded apartments on all three floors, completely destroying them.

Half of a pine tree snapped off, flew a hundred feet, and smashed through half of John’s brother’s house. Fortunately he and his family were out of town. They’ll put the insurance settlement toward the new house they were planning to build anyway.

Yesterday we drove through River Oaks to see how all the rich people had fared. There we saw some of the most impressive storm damage, not to the giant houses, but to the giant trees surrounding them. Oak after majestic oak lay on the ground, pulling up sidewalks and blocking streets. None of the mansions we saw suffered any major damage, luckily, just a few shingles and rain gutters ripped off here and there as the tips of tree branches brushed by on their way down.

The weather today, to change the subject, is gorgeous. It rained most of yesterday, to Sam’s chagrin, but today the clouds have cleared and the temperature has dropped all the way down into the seventies. It feels like fall. Yum.

But yes, about the storm. We were lucky. Lucky lucky lucky.

Tags: Houston, Hurricane Ike

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