Ike and its effects

Hurricane Ike struck the Galveston/Houston area very early Saturday morning, September 13. Actually, the storm surge was already coming onto Galveston Island and the Bolivar Peninsula on Friday, under cloudless blue skies!

On Sunday, it was still raining (with thunder and lightning in the early morning), and on Sunday afternoon some of the clean-up was begun. Below is the large branch that was ripped off one of my backyard trees, and you can also see one of my flattened baby pine trees just to the right of the branch. (Anne and Parker had dragged the branch from the back yard to the front.)


These two photos show Ken in the process of restaking two of my baby pine trees.



Ken and Anne went out and got a big generator and lots of gasoline to power most of their house - not the air-conditioner or the dryer or the oven, of course, but fans and other things run from outlets were able to function with the generator, including laptops and the charging of cell phones! (Use of hair dryers required turning off everything else!)


And here is the Linehans' yard clean-up pile, just waiting for the special trucks to come along and turn all this into mulch.


All the kids found different ways to entertain themselves, before and after the generator was installed. Among other things, they rode their bikes and scooters around the neighborhood and to and from the nearby playground. Kira and Abbi decided to have a picnic one day!



The following two photos show one instance of damage in my neighborhood. The very tall pine tree was blown straight east -- through these folks' own fence, across the street, and through a neighbor's fence and into their back yard. Clearly, some neighborhood guys with chainsaws cleared the road so the rest of us could drive safely through this. This was taken care of long before any tree service crews ever showed up around here.



Down the street from my front yard, you can see at least one large pile of yard debris in front of one house and a large red trash hauler in another neighbor's driveway. I think they lost an entire tree in their back yard, and the back end of their house sustained major damage when the tree came down.