Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Here Goes. Of Hurricanes, and Such.





























I thought, how beautiful, how lucky we were.







"Other people weren't so lucky," he says.

"Yes, but...."



hokgardner said...

THank you for sharing the account. Here in Austin we had some wind and nothing else.

thi said...

Thanks for sharing the account. Here in Round Rock we got some wind and ... hey! hokgardner's in Austin? Did I know this?

Back in May we had thunderstorms with a tornado warning - we hunkered down in the downstairs hallway for a few hours, tops, after I set aside some water bottles, put on my shoes and stayed dressed. Not the same duration or intensity, or prep time, as a hurricane, but the same pounding heart.

Again, thank you for sharing.

Melissa said...

Thanks for reading, everyone. It was an amazing experience. One many in a near by community went out during the height of the storm to investigage a tree that fell on his garage--and was hit by another tree. He's paralyzed from the waist down now. He pushed his wife out of the way but was slammed down and had to be rescued by the National Guard in a humvee. Tragic story.

I asked my husband about it, and he thought it was somewhat reasonable to want to go check. It's as if some part of the common sense brain just checks out during these situations.

We lived in Austin for awhile, and we spent more than one hour in the inner room bathroom waiting out a tornado alert (we moved there just before the Jarrell tornado.)

We're all grateful for the semi-normal routines we're back in (traffic is horrendous for commuters due to non-working traffic lights at major intersections, some stores are not fully stocked) although both daughters came home yesterday with tremendous amounts of homework from teachers anxious to make up time and get grades in on time.

The brush and tree limbs are piled up in front of our houses waiting for FEMA to pick them up. We're predicting that will be around, on, December. We're still lucky, though, for some people it took up to 30 hours post storm to get ice and water to certain areas around Houston.

Epiphany said...

Missy - Another thanks for your report. I, too, am in Austin, and we got some wind, no rain. (We had a pretty nasty storm here in mid-May, but it was neither as bad or as long-lasting. We did lose part of a tree, which fortunately did not hit our house.)

Where exactly are you? Your story sounds much like the story of a woman we had dinner with the other night who lives east of Houston, especially the part about the chunk being taken out of the trees.

Mother Nature is a bad-ass bitch, no doubt about it. I'm glad to hear you and your family are okay...

Melissa said...

We're on the west side of Houston--Fort Bend County. I always thought we'd get a harder hit from any hurricanes, but we came off much better because we didn't have nearly as many downed trees.

On Sunday, a big truck came around and one of those mini bulldozer truck-things, and they picked up....all the bags of lawn debris. They picked up everything the normal trash does on Monday. The big tree branches? FEMA will be around someday to pick them up. Can't say when.

Jennifer said...

i love your blog


Melissa said...

Update, they're starting to recover bodies. It's a sad, sad story--people who thought they could ride out the storm. I remember hearing on the radio accounts of people who were calling in for help and being told "We can't help you now, try to hang on" and just being horrified at the mental images. There's about 350 people still unaccounted for--some in shelters that can't connect with relatives, but of that number, the larger portion will be those who refused to leave and paid with their lives.

hughman said...

thank you for this post. however i have to admit i couldn't read through all of it as it brought back my own memories of struggling through a disaster where friends were dying around me. in my case, it was AIDS in the late 80s and early 90s. still, i worried and watched as those i love succumbed to a disaster out of control.

i wish you the best. remember those you knew and loved who were lost. keep driving on because there is not much else to do.


Melissa said...

Hughman, you're a peach. I know only a little of how you feel, but my heart goes out to you. I always wondered why Holocaust victims and others such as AIDS survivors and loved ones, don't want to talk--and I realized after Katrina that sometimes just surviving is enough.

It takes everything you have to get up and go past that.

It amazed that me when I started to write a blog entry I simply could not finish the one about Katrina/Rita. For the first time I understood why Holocaust survivors never talked about their experiences to their children.

There's no tragedy or tough time suffered, that doesn't teach us something about other people, is there?

Hugs (())) Missy

Anonymous said...

Thank you, Missy, for posting. You're right -- when I lost my DH just saying "he died" made it real. Sounds stupid now, but saying it out out made it real -- so I didn't want to say it. So it goes with any tragedy, I think.

One would think Houston wouldn't take a direct hit from Hurricanes -- your post just proves how wrong that thought can be. I have relatives in Houston who just got power back this past weekend.

Take care, and hugs to you all! (ya'all!) :)

/dawn (dfratzke)