Since Hurricane's never hit Houston we weren't too worried about another one in the Gulf. However, on Thursday when Kent's work let him off at lunch and I found out that the schools would be closed the next day, I wondered if we were really prepared. Since I was substituting at the elementary school that day I couldn't do anything until after school. So, Kent went shopping and bought a lot of nonperishable foods and filled his car with gas. I called him on my break and asked him to get the van and fill it up, which he did. What a good husband to wait in another long line. It's amazing how scarce gas becomes just before and after a hurricane.
Later that night in order to get our plane out of harms way Kent took two kids and flew to San Marcus (between San Antonio and Austin), while I took the other two kids in the van to pick them up. Since we live off the evacuation route the highways were very slow. Kara, who rode in the car both ways, was very upset that she had to sit in the car for 7 hours and we didn't even go somewhere fun. We would have left the kids home while we did the drive, but we were afraid of something happening and being unable to make it back.
Friday morning I did my weekly grocery shopping and quickly headed home. I made sure all the laundry and dishes were done in case we would be without electricity and/or water. We took down the trampoline, put all toys in the garage and threw everything else away. We didn't want any flying projectiles. Sometimes it's nice to just get rid of stuff. Then we all played outside with the whole neighborhood since no one had work or school. It was a great vacation day.
Hurricane Ike hit Galveston Texas as a category 2 hurricane and unfortunately it was still a category 2 when it went over our house. The storm was scheduled to hit our house at midnight so Kent and I had planned on staying up because we didn't want to miss it. We were saddened when it turned to the north and the eye of the storm was going to miss us by 5miles. We thought if we were going to go through a hurricane we wanted to see the eye.
The winds started picking up around midnight. Then about 3:30am the rain was coming down and we lost our electricity. Since we couldn't watch TV or work on our computers we decided to go to bed. That's when Kent heard a dripping noise in our bedroom. It's a good thing it was in our room, otherwise we would have just gone to bed. We got a couple of pots and strategically placed them on the carpet. Before we went to sleep Kent thought it would be a good idea to see where the leak was coming from. We went in the attic and it sounded like a waterfall. We had lost a bunch of shingles above our bedroom and all the rain was coming in.
Luckily the attic was easily accessible through Kipp's closet. We quickly emptied it, dumping all the Halloween costumes, dress-up clothes and other toys that had been stored there, out in Kipp's room and used the plastic buckets to catch water. Just when we thought all the drips were covered a couple more would pop up. I continued to check our bedroom for drips then would tell Kent and he would figure out a way to catch the water before it went through the ceiling. It started getting more difficult when the water would run down the big air conditioning tubes. It was hard to find where it was coming from and we couldn't divert the water to the buckets. Then we came up with a brilliant idea. We used our staple gun to tack towels to the underside of the roof to help guide the water in the buckets. That worked rather well. As the 60 gallon buckets would fill up Kent would drag them too Kipp's bathtub and empty them out.
Half way through the storm I called the insurance company to report damage. I had hoped by calling before the morning we would be first on the list. However, it was a little hard to answer all the questions since we had the other half of the storm yet to come.
After being almost ankle deep while in the living room, having water poor out of the light switch, smoke alarm and through the ceiling, my goal was to save the furniture. Kent moved everything away from the walls and we covered the areas that were being splashed on. Kent had to move the dresser several times as the water in the carpet moved across the room.
At 6:30am the smoke alarm shorted out and every alarm in the house went off. It is very loud to have them all going off at once. It took nearly 20 minutes to figure out which one to pull out of the wall to get them all to stop. Since Kent and I were both drenched head to toe it was difficult to get the alarm opened up and the battery pulled out so it would stop.
We had run outside to the garage so many times for nails, a hammer, staple gun, more buckets, etc...that we were very wet. Because of the direction of the wind it made it difficult to go out the back door under the breezeway (which does no good when the rain it falling horizontally) to the garage. So, we had to go out the front door and around the house. We can definitely say we've been in a hurricane now.
By 7:00am I was wet, cold, tired of sloshing through the water inside my house, over tired, had heard enough screeching from the smoke alarm to last me awhile and felt defeated since we ran out of buckets and still had drips. Then I cried and went to bed because there wasn't anything else we could do.
These are pictures of our attic
This is a picture of the entry way into our bedroom before it got really bad. Unfortunately the camera battery died. By the end of the storm all the carpet was under water. The other one is the water dripping from our ceiling.
These are of the outside after the storm and one of the areas of our roof that is missing shingles.
