Hurricane Ike
It feels like Ike has been a part of our lives for a long time. We have been watching Ike, preparing for Ike, living through Ike, or recovering from Ike [see photos]. Following on the trail of Hurricane Gustav, I first heard of Tropical Depression Ike on September 1st from the Houston Chronicle’s Eric Berger, known as the SciGuy. The SciGuy was calling out what will come after Gustav. Given that Gustav nearly derailed our preparation for the global workshop at the office, I wanted to see what was next and whether the workshops themselves would get disrupted or not.
Tracking Hurricane Ike
As soon as I started reading, I was hooked on Eric Berger’s analysis. He had a beautiful graph of the probability density of tropical depressions that “hit” the US based on their starting location. Notice that the then-named Tropical Depression Nine (T.D. Nine) was outside of even a 2% chance of hitting the US. But with this said, the SciGuy made an analogy to the only storm to come from so far out and hit the US – this was a Category 5 hit to Galveston in 1915. Re-reading this now (after Ike) was eerie. NEED MORE TEXT HERE. NEED MORE TEXT HERE. NEED MORE TEXT HERE. NEED MORE TEXT HERE. NEED MORE TEXT HERE. NEED MORE TEXT HERE. NEED MORE TEXT HERE. NEED MORE TEXT HERE. NEED MORE TEXT HERE. NEED MORE TEXT HERE. NEED MORE TEXT HERE. NEED MORE TEXT HERE. NEED MORE TEXT HERE. NEED MORE TEXT HERE. NEED MORE TEXT HERE. NEED MORE TEXT HERE. NEED MORE TEXT HERE. NEED MORE TEXT HERE. NEED MORE TEXT HERE. NEED MORE TEXT HERE.
Evacuating from Hurricane Ike
As we watched Ike develop, we debated whether or not to evacuate. Tayyba suggested that we leave Wednesday night to San Antonio. I could not go because of the workshop at work, so we decided to leave on Thursday. By then, Harris County was asking people not in the coastal mandatory-evacuation areas to stay put – to allow the coastal folks to evacuate (the yellow and green colors in the picture). We live just to the west of the orange near downtown – so there was no question of us blocking the highway. And by Thursday evening it seemed that Ike was not going to be as strong or as close to Houston as people initially thought. So we decided to stay put.
On Friday morning, we checked on Ike first thing in the morning. Now the warnings for Houston seemed dire. On the radio, we heard that Houston was asked to stay put because ‘they will stay alive through the storm’. We thought that was a pretty low threshold for staying put. Our main concerns were the aftermath – food would be scarce, long lines, potential flooding because we are two minutes away from Brays Bayou, and security issues with all of the above. We quickly packed up and drove to the Woodlands. The traffic to San Antonio still seemed very bad. We took the long route to the Woodlands to avoid the evacuation traffic on I-45 North. We took all our supplies with us – dry foods, water, birth certificates and passports. Once we got there, we taped the windows and monitored Ike on our laptops.
Before we went to bed, the alarm company for our house called and said that the burglar alarm in our house was going off. We called the police and asked them to look into it, but they said they would only handle life-threatening emergencies. We resigned ourselves to not knowing what set off the alarm. We set up mattresses in areas of the house where there are no windows and no walls exposed to the outside – laundry room, inside corridor, closet, and bathroom. We slept in pairs – one kid and one grown-up in each bed. When we went to our respective beds, we kept our shoes (in case windows blew out) and our bottled water next to each of us. Even though we were in bed as the storm started around us, I could hardy sleep. It was a massive and very noisy storm. The house creaked and heaved under the storm’s assault. I also kept the laptop next to my bed to continue to watch the news. By morning, we had lost power in the Woodlands (at 6:20 am) and shortly thereafter we lost cell phone connectivity – some cell towers probably got blown over.
