My Houston apartment lies about 35 miles west of the northwest corner of Galveston Bay and almost 50 miles from the open waters of the Gulf of Mexico, many miles outside the mandatory evacuation zone. It is built on a relatively high patch of ground between two large flood control reservoirs, and the city finished rebuilding the water/sewer infrastructure on this street just a few months ago. Nevertheless, the approach of Ike filled me with trepidation because of the storm's size and the way the near-hourly updates to its projected path were zeroing in on the Houston/Galveston area.

Friday morning, 12-Sep-2008 ~10:30

Friday morning, 12-Sep-2008 ~10:30

Friday evening, 12-Sep-2008 ~8:00

After AC power failed a little after 2:00 last night, I went to sleep around 2:30. The last forecasts I saw on wunderground.com, before the outage, put me at the western edge of the cone of probability, with the Navy's NGDFL the only model predicting it coming remotely this far west. So I was confused to wake up at 4:00 to the sound of the brass handle rings on the drawers of my bedroom furniture rattling incessantly. This was in an interior room and the only thing that could make them do that was the three-story building vibrating slightly in the wind.

Going out to my living room, I saw a nearby treetop (I'm on the top floor) whipping back and forth violently, and taller palm trees a little further away in the complex rocking to a different savage rhythm, all of their fronds sweeping through an arc pointed in my general direction. If a tree became uprooted, or an upper branch came off, it could batter its way through one of my windows, letting in the horizontal rain and possibly splashing me with broken glass. With the storm moving only 10 to 13 miles an hour, it was not due this far inland for hours. If it was this bad when it had covered less than half the distance from the coast, what would the full force be like if the center came all the way here? The trees were leaning to the southeast, indicating a northwesterly wind. I became puzzled trying to figure out how a cyclonic storm southeast of me could produce winds from the northwest.

(If Ike was where it had been at bedtime, or anywhere near where the weathermen said it would be, the winds should be coming from the north or northeast. Had the storm gone somewhere radically off the projected path? Without TV or Internet, I could only guess what was happening. If it had acted in accordance with most of the models, moving north along Galveston Bay to my east, the winds would shift to the east before it reached my latitude - i.e. before it made it as far north as I was. Since my apartment faces west, I had counted on being able to handle strong east winds as it neared, then being subjected to westerly winds only much later, as the storm was retreating and had had hours more to lose strength over land. This business of winds from the northwest, coming only two hours after the last weather report, was not only intellectually confusing to my tired brain, but frightening in its implication of my three picture windows being downwind from all that tall foliage, in a monster storm that I had lost track of.)

I was still acting on the assumption that Ike was, as yet, a long ways off, but now closer than it had been. Much closer.

After a while, as the trees continued to whip around without breaking, I gained some confidence that they would hold. Looking at the air flow situation logically, I realized that the northwestern winds were local to my little patch of my apartment complex, from an aerodynamic "slot" effect between my building and two adjacent ones. The overall wind in west Houston was probably from the north or northeast, indicating that the storm was more or less where expected. Looking towards the horizon, with rain stretching distance to make the nearby seem far and the familiar alien, I became aware of strange glowing points. Focusing on them, I realized that they were not points after all, but rectangles, being in fact the windows of the complex across the street. This wonder was probably made possible only by an emergency generator, the complex in question being an assisted-living facility. It was nice to know there were still electric lights in the world, even if I didn't have any.

I also noticed something new. Small puddles were forming on my windowsills and, as a random gust of air sounded outside, cool droplets of water were sprayed on my face. The wind was injecting water through the joins of my tightly shut windows. The fact that the puddles had not been there when I awoke indicated that the storm had not been at this fever pitch for long, which I found reassuring. I wiped up the stray water with paper towels, and left more of them on my sills and carpet to allow for future intrusion.

A lull in the wind came after two hours, with the first glimmer of dawn, and at 6:00 I went back to sleep.

Waking about 8:00, I was surprised to find that there was still city water on tap, albeit at abnormally low pressure. I vowed to drink only the water that I had bottled Friday before the storm hit.

A quick visual check in my bathroom showed that the water level in the plastic-lined white tub had not dropped from the brim, to which I had filled it Friday night. Left to itself, the tub would allow the water to run out the drain overnight, even with the metal stopper set. But with a plastic sheet in place, I would have plenty of saved water for washing or flushing for the duration of the city water shortage. This led me to declare Operation Safed Saagar a victory.*

The trees were still dancing their wild dance, but at a much less alarming tempo, and with much less amplitude to their sway. Their roots and trunks had held through the night. And now there was enough light for photography.

The following are MPEG 4 movies that you can watch by clicking the links. I don't know how to embed them properly for viewing in place.

Saturday morning, 13-Sep-2008 ~8:00

the morning after, clip 1

Saturday morning, 13-Sep-2008 ~8:00

the morning after, clip 2

Both cell and landline service were up, despite the lack of power, though they were subject to sporadic dropped calls and/or weird distortion of voices. I called my loved ones to reassure them I had survived. No one had heard the fate of Galveston, whose demise at the hands of Ike's storm surge had been confidently predicted the previous night.

Walking to check on my car, I noticed roofing shingles strewn over the complex grounds, especially in the "slot" between the two buildings next to mine. There was also debris from vegetation everywhere.

the "slot" 13-Sep-2008 ~10:30

the pool (note sunken plant debris in center)

The car was fine, and I pulled out from my covered space so that the rain could rinse leaves and dirt off while I listened to the radio and charged my cellphone. Some cars were already on the road, but I stuck to the parking lot which, as expected, had not flooded. Mayor White was telling everyone what I had already figured out - not to drink tap water without boiling it first, until further notice. Also, to keep the pressure as high as possible by conserving it, thus reducing the chance of contamination from ambient inflow to the mains.

Returning to the apartment, I noticed damp patches on parts of my ceiling, and the smell of wet plaster in my library. With a flashlight, I examined the ceilings of the interior rooms and closets, but the damp was confined to the dining room and, especially, the library.

Getting a camera, I took pictures of the roof of my building from several vantage points around the grounds and from the upper stairways of the nearby buildings. Mine looked intact, but there was a bald spot missing all shingles on the roof of the next building. A young lady from the second floor apartment beneath that spot said water had already leaked into hers from the one above. There were also shingles along the crest of the roof that were bizarrely twisted upwards, like scales on a fish who had been scraped the wrong way. I zoomed in tight with my camera to record the irregularities.

postmodern roofing materials, Saturday ~11:30

Entering the apartment again about 11:40, I noticed that the air was cooler than expected. After a moment, I realized the air conditioning was back on! I got back online and also turned on the TV to check on what had happened.

The good news was that Galveston had been largely saved. This was by its famous seawall, which was high enough, just barely, to resist the waves coming on top of the storm surge on the Gulf side. The city still flooded from the Bay side, but without the force of hurricane-driven waves arriving from open water. This must have saved thousands of lives, and prevented the biggest catastrophe in American history, since it had earlier been reported that as many as 40% of the population had not obeyed the evacuation orders. (At one point, a reporter commented that those intending to stay behind help out the authorities by at least doing them one last favor: namely, taking a magic marker and writing their respective Social Security numbers on their arms, to assist in the identification of their bodies.) All the hotels, clubs, bars, and other structures on piers outside the seawall, however, are now gutted or missing.

There was limited damage to the refineries along the Houston Ship Channel, which did not receive the storm surge that was feared. More data will come in later, but right now it appears that our nation's Gulf coast refining and chemical capacity is not crippled.

Also, the downtown and medical center had reliable power, and damage downtown was reported to be light. During one broadcast downtown showing the limited damage, I thought I recognized my building in the distance. If it had no damage, I can go back to work Monday. Yay! Mom told me, though, that there was a building that was ravished with many of its windows broken and the office furniture sucked out. My brother Pete later confirmed this, and said it was the Chase bank building. Reported on the news to be the tallest building in Texas, it had had its exterior below a certain floor wrecked because a neighboring building had inadequate tarring to hold down its own roof gravel. So the wind had whipped the gravel off the roof, smashing open Chase Bank like a rain of hail hurled down by some mad Bolshevik god. The interiors of the Chase offices had in turn smashed other buildings further downwind in a cascade that, thankfully, did not become general. Downtown is about half as far from the closest approach of the storm center as I am, so the winds must have been much worse. Plus, wind speeds are always higher at upper altitudes, so the tops of skyscrapers have much higher exposure than do low rise buildings.

police officer pulling broken branch from roadway Saturday afternoon

Now armed with data on the movement of the storm, I reckoned that the nerve-wracking time for me, from 4:00 the 6:00, probably corresponded to Ike's closest approach to my location. So the slowdown in the wind at 6:00, which I had thought was a temporary lull, actually represented the passage of the most dangerous phase of the storm.

With air conditioning and a ceiling fan turned on, the patches of moisture on my ceiling seem to be drying up. I photographed them for comparison, to monitor if they grew over time. It seems they do not represent any large puddles of water sitting on the plaster, but just a few errant drops. With the roof appearing intact from all the angles I could see, there is probably not a any major leak from roof damage. Rather, the water probably came in through vents or under shingles, injected dynamically by the intense wind, analogously to the water that came through my windows at the same time. If so, this is much less inconvenient than my neighbor's situation of a static hole in the shingles, which can continue to leak throughout the lightest rainfall, of which we are still experiencing sporadic episodes.

On the negative side, an estimated two million people were left without AC power, and some may be without power for up to four weeks. So I am fortunate to be one of the 112,000 on the west side who has already been reconnected. Since coming back on, it has only failed briefly once this afternoon. The digital channels on cable were on at least since the power came on, but failed briefly just a few minutes ago. Even then, the analog channels mostly remained on. Water pressure has continued to deteriorate throughout the day, failing entirely a couple of hours ago, at least on the third floor. There was a pumping station that lost power due to the storm, and if nothing else has gone wrong since then, I'm sure the situation will soon be corrected.

All in all, I am one lucky dude to pull though this like I did.

Saturday evening, 13-Sep-2008 ~7:45

Cheers,

-Bill

*In late spring of 1999, with the peaks of the Zanskar Range of the Himalayas still locked in ice, and Indian military positions still abandoned since the onset of winter, in accordance with an unwritten tradition mutually consented to by Indian Army commanders and their Pakistani counterparts, Pakistani special forces crossed the Line of Control and seized the unmanned posts by stealth. In many cases, they were disguised as terroristic Islamist mujahideen irregulars and, apparently, in some cases assisted by actual mujahideen. This was in the Kargil district of Ladakh, Ladakh being the northeastern corner of India's northernmost state of Jammu and Kashmir. If members of Pakistan's then-government are to be believed, they did not know about this action and, according to them, it constituted an act of mutiny on the part of the Chief of Army Staff.

Caught by surprise, the Indian Army responded by rushing troops to the area and beginning a ground counteroffensive called Operation Vijay ("victory" in Hindi.) Fighting in the highest battlefields in the history of modern warfare, where the air is so thin soldiers from the plains required days of acclimatization before undertaking even light physical exertion, the Indian warriors were unfairly handicapped by their own civilian leaders. In an unmitigated display of appeasement and worshipping the whims of the UN, India's government decreed that none of its troops would cross the Line of Control into the portion of Kashmir seized by Pakistan in an earlier war. The lay of the mountains made such a crossing the logical way to get behind the Pakistani front and cut its supply lines at low cost in effort and lives. Instead, the Indian army was forced to throw away the lives of its infantrymen by launching them on counter-attacks using the hardest and bloodiest of military maneuvers, direct frontal assault. And these assaults were made up the shear sides of towering peaks that were denuded of vegetation by altitude, aridity, and cold, against elite enemy forces holed up in fortifications built by the Indians themselves. The Indians also had difficulty mobilizing sufficient artillery support in this remote corner of their nation.

The stalwart warriors of Operation Vijay eventually made it a success. During the summer, Pakistan's leaders negotiated a return to the status quo antebellum, after their own force, mountain by mountain, glacier by glacier, had slowly been expelled from the region, . But the Chief of Army Staff who, according to them, had launched the whole adventure, turned it into a public relations victory for himself. He took full credit for the successful original infiltration, but managed to blame the entire unpopular ceasefire agreement on his own head of state. Winning the adulation of the Pakistani Muslim population, he undermined the existing regime to the point that he was then able to launch a successful coup d'etat against it. That is how Pervez Musharraf became the ruler of Pakistan.

In order to assist its beleaguered countrymen on the ground, the Indian Air Force launched the largest military evolution in its recent history, Operation Safed Sagar. Flying ground support missions over the icy Himalayan peaks, IAF attack helicopters and fighter planes helped drive out the Pakistani troops. ("Safed saagar" means "white sea" or "white reservoir" in Hindi.)

-B.