Thursday: Been watching Stormpulse.com all day to stay current on the storm. We weren't really afraid of the wind, but being so close to the water was a major concern. My house is 20 ft above sea level and the surge was predicted to be around 15 ft. We didn't really want to mess around with 5 ft of wiggle room. Start boarding up the house around noon and leave by that night. Now, being us, yankees, we didn't really know how to board up the windows. We had some ideas, and the finished product, yet not perfect was fairly fast and easy. We only boarded up the back side because we felt it was fairly vulnerable. Got done around 5 p.m.
After admiring our job well done my sister and I walked down to the dock in our neighberhood that flows out into Clearlake. Already the water was RIGHT below the dock. Sometimes when the water is low enough we can get a row boat under this dock just to give you an idea that this wasn't all that common. We had 5 cars to fill up to make sure that we had enough gasoline to get through the week. 3 cars came on the convoy to North Houston and 2 stayed in the garage.
Left for the Sheraton just down the street from Bush international thinking we would be a huge distance from the surge, but would have to deal with wind, and subsequent power loss.
Left my house at 8 p.m arrived at the hotel at 10 p.m.

Friday:
Woke up after a long night of drinking at the hotel bar. Watched the news all day. When Galveston started flooding so early, we knew that our house may be in a bit of trouble. Our power went out way early around 10 p.m. The eye wallwas just coming onshore 60 MILES away! Decided I should fall asleep when the room was still cool. Sister wakes me up during the storm just to hear the wind. The sound was amazing. Like nothing I have ever heard.

**************Now we get into the really interesting stuff*****************

Saturday: Very early in the morning; 3 a.m. My sister wakes me up says she smells a strange smell. I smell it also as I am kinda of lathargic. Open up the room door and hear an alarm. My sister starts freaking out, and I know that I can't panic. I go to the stairwells, even though the elevators were working on generator power. I open the door to the stairwell and am immediately greeted with tropical storm force winds. I am telling to my self, "this isn't good, this is really bad." Then the alarm is much louder. It's a fire alarm. My knees start shaking. Monica goes to back to the room. I grab a flashlight to investigate. I find that the fire alarm is on the second floor down to the lobby. It doesn't smell like smoke, but natural gas. I go with caution, but if the building is in danger I need some info. Go to the floor above the lobby and look down at the front desk from above. You can tell something is wrong. I hear bits and peices about something collapsing. I try to imagine some water getting into a room and the cieling collapsing on a bed. I couldn't imagine what I actually found out happened. I go down to the lobby grab some glowsticks to light up the room, to what I am sure is going to be an eventful night.
5 a.m: Hotel employees start knocking on doors saying grab what you can, the building isn't safe. Throw computer in bag with cell phone and rain jacket and head to hotel restaurant adjacent to the lobby with the rest of the family. The lobby is VERY windy. The sliding doors to the outisde are open, but the wind is coming from somewhere else. We learn that they are going to bus us across the street to a different hotel. This is the right when the storm is directly above us!!!! Needless to say a few hotel patrons needed some convincing that they needed to leave. Get bussed accross to the other hotel with police escort. Firetrucks start arriving at the old hotel. New hotel is a Double Tree. All the Sheraton patrons get forcced into confrence rooms with no lights. I pass out and wake up around noon.

Sunday:
Wake up really early because of no a/c. Couldn’t fall back asleep so went to the lobby in search of coffee. Found some coffee and charged up the phone. This day is pretty much wasted because of not having power. Spent the day outside because we got in a cold front that lowered the temperature to 85 degrees. Around 6 we started seeing a lot of bucket trucks around and was wondering if we were going to get power soon. At 8 p.m we got power. Probably one of the happiest moments of my life so far.

Monday (today):
Made the hour long journey to my house. The damage was pretty much the same the whole way down to my place. A few shingles missing to whole roofs missing. Some limbs down to Huge oak trees down. Power out everywhere. Got to my neighborhood and saw the water line. Thankfully the water didn’t make it up as far as they thought it may. It looked to be about an 8 ft surge by me. Started the clean up in my yard after checking the damage to my house. The chimney leaked a little so my parents got some water in their bedroom, but thankfully that was all. It could have been much worse. Walked down to the neighborhood dock after seeing all the dead fish in the streets.
The destruction just a mile closer to the water is astounding. The Hilton and Kemah are only parts of the problems, the whole area is a mess. And my job got 5 ft of work in it. And you had to drive UP a hill into the parking lot.

I am now at a friends house about ten minutes from my place and will hopefully get power soon.

Now, there are two other pelicans all within a couple of miles of me JMZ and Helmethead. Keep those guys in your thoughts because I have yet to get in touch with them.

Let me get the pictures up now.

Woah...SWEET! You rode out the hurricane in a hotel that was collapsing around you! Any others after this will be cake :D

Yes, the sound of a 'cane in full tilt is...impressive. This is the second one I've watched from an apartment window hitting us basically dead on.

Now...you want a sound that will make your now 'cane proofed blood freeze? Wait till a tornado drives by your front door. It doesn't sound like a freight train, despite what the movies say. Freight trains sound like something simple and controlled, something man made. Tornadoes sound like someone opened a rift to hell and the forces of the Universe are scratching at your eardrums, trying to dig right through your skull.

Before:
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1221535931.jpg

The inside of the collapse:
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1221536018.jpg

Looking down from my room:
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1221536374.jpg

...btw, that 3800 sq ft that colllapsed we later learned

And a picture today looking at my house today:
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1221536929.jpg
....see that pile of leaves on the sidewalk? Thats how close the gulf of mexico came to my house!
and the debri pile so far:
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1221537008.jpg

Glad your house was safe. Also glad the hotel didn't get ya.

The really messed up thing is that I read that as the storm made land fall, the winds weren't nearly as strong as they'd been when the storm was offshore.

As bad as this storm was, and it was bad, it could have been much, much worse.

Some of the stuff that I saw on the news tonight, was pretty amazing. Small coastal towns are gone.

I landed yesterday about 1:30 PM. House has power, came on in the morning. Not sure how many homes are still without power, but it was 1.5 million yesterday.

2 sections of fence at my house fell over. Looks like an easy fix. Otherwise survived OK. I spent the afternoon getting the crap out of the pool and starting to move thing back to normal places.

Lucky, my father in law said the winds were much worse than Alicia, but it had not been raining all week, so the trees did not blow over as much at his place in Cut 'n' Shoot, up by Conroe

Ike blew through W. PA Sunday night with wind speeds actually above hurricane force in small area's (79mph). Power is still out in some areas possible until Thursday.

Yeah it sure did. Roared through here in W. PA. with a vengence. The wind was coming through the huge woods behind me so every leaf that blew off ended up in my yard or on my house. You could not even see the ground in the morning. All night we heard trees snapping in the woods. I went out with the dog in the morning and he found about a dozen baby squirrels blown out of their nests. The woods was filled with babies crying for mom. About a half dozen trees in the 300 sg. yrds we searched were just snapped in two about 6 ft. up. LOTS of firewood for me, all I have to do is drag it in with the tractor. HUGE mess, it took me 8 hrs to clean it all up with machines. The tractor ran for 5 hours straight.

I finally got power this evening. Woo Hoo.

Still 1.3 million homes without Power. They were saying on the news that it will be a week before 3/4's have power...

We're in the Woodlands. Got power last night (finally). Still many downed trees all over, but most of the main streets have been cleared. Our big adventure occurred two nights ago while in a gas line on a very dark fwy feeder street. My Infinity just died, no warning, no nuthin. Transmission LOCKS in Park and can't remove key from ignition! Trying to read the Owner's Manual in the dark! And the cop sends a message via one of the wreckers, he wants me to move the vehicle to a parking lot before we try and jump cuz we'd block traffic (we're doing a good job of that already)! In his defense he later became as helpful as he could. But cops and wreckers aren't carrying jumper cables anymore cuz of all their electronics so no help there. Finally a good Samaratin braved the traffic and tried to jump, but no luck. An hour later our AAA wrecker rolled in (now 11:30PM and pretty dark) and he couldn't jump it either. Finally made it home aboard the rollback wrecker around midnight. The damn thing was ... it's my birthday! BTW got a few nice Porsche-based presents -- a cool LeMans Movie 917 print with all the drivers signatures who worked in the movie LeMans (Chad McQueen signed for his Dad), plus a couple of 1:18 models ---> a 908/3 and the 917 "Hippie". Two beautiful models well worth the adventure.

Hope everyone is starting the recovery process. Sounds like Tom gets the prize for best story. Hey Tom, I'm saving those tires for you!

I've gone to work the past two days. Driving to/from work, I've gotten to see a lot of the damage. There are lots of houses in my buddy's neighborhood that have roof and water damage. There are still lots of folks without power. There are streets that are blocked off because of power poles/lines across the streets.

Even with all of that, I think we still made out pretty good.

my exgirlfriend and her husband emailed me. she is down to granola and bananas...damn. worst part is her in-laws are with her. i guess their home is underwater.

i wish all of you in the region a fast recovery time.

We're back home, but still no power.

The only damage was it thinned out our trees.

It's a little funny driving down the streets, it looks like everyone's yard guy showed up on the same day for the annual tree trimming. There's a big pile of tree limbs in front of EVERY house. I bet mulch will be very cheap in Houston for a while.

Still no power :rolleyes:

I had to come up to work this morning to check on a fire alarm, so I thought I'd do a little net surfing.

I bought a generator on Thursday and hooked it up to the breaker box, so it's kind of like we have power except we can't run the A/C or the pool pumps and there's this obnoxiously loud engine running behind the garage. Anyone who thinks electricity is expensive should try making it home from gas at $3.60 a gallon!

The school district site is now showing school won't start until Monday the 29th! No early summer vacation for my son.

Hope everyone else around here is doing OK!