We're all fine. No house damage, modest leaks (e.g., one windowpane needs better caulking). The back fence was blown over. That will need to be rebuilt. During the hurricane, power bounced up and down from 2:00am - 3:30am then went out for good and hasn't come back yet. We've eaten up most of the perishable food and are now staring at canned tuna, canned ravioli, etc. We have low-pressure water. Flush the toilet and it fills in ten minutes. You can take a shower, but it's a drizzle (or, it's a standard California low-flow useless shower). We have natural gas. We've been doing all the cooking on the gas grill outside to attempt to not overheat the inside of the house. Our hardwired phone has been up non-stop, save for a brief mid-afternoon outage. Cell phone service has sucked. AT&T's 3G crapped out completely. AT&T's normal GSM/EDGE service has been unreliable. You'll have a signal for one minute and then "no service" for two. Very, very frustrating.

Rice University, on the other hand, has Internet, power, and air conditioning, but no water pressure. I'm sitting in my office typing this. My office smelled damp and mildew-ish, mainly due to a bunch of water that leaked in through a balcony door around the corner. The building also has the distinct odor of urine, probably from the lack of working toilets plus all the grad students who decided to say "screw it" and crash out here rather than in their homes. (Can't say I blame them.)

So, riddle it out. You can sit comfortably at work, but you've got to go home to poop. Sure, sign me up. My wife and daughter are downstairs, in my wife's office. We're plugging our kid into a DVD. Air conditioning never felt so nice.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to get all my disaster photos onto the web. I wandered around for hours yesterday taking pictures. Some amazing stuff. More on that when they're live.

Our campus honcos, for reasons that defy sanity, have decided (so far) that class starts on Tuesday. That's almost reasonable, given that the campus itself seems to be functional. The city around us, however, is quite dysfunctional. No restaurants open. Only a handful of supermarkets open. No daycare. Houston public schools are closed for the whole week. Many professors live further out, or closer to the coast, and may well have significant home damage to deal with. And they're supposed to come back on Tuesday and teach calculus? Madness.

Power is slowly coming back to the city. One friend a few miles away has power. We haven't yet decided whether to stick around and, umm, teach classes on Tuesday, or to say hell with it and drive to Dallas. We've got a full tank of gas in the Acura, which can easily get to Dallas without refilling. Right now, we're going around in the Audi, which has convenient AWD. Once that's empty, we're not doing any more driving.

Photos: http://www.cs.rice.edu/~dwallach/photo/ike2008/

Well, it's good to hear everyone's okay, despite all of the broken stuff. Good luck getting things back to normal over the coming days.

Damn. I feel your pain man. At least it's only mainly inconvenient. Poor food, poor living conditions. I definitely empathize. I have yet to take all my furniture off blocks from Gustav. Any word on when to expect power? That'll be the kicker that drives everything else. With water pressure low, are you on a boil order? Is it safe to use sewage? One of the main concerns here after Gustav was that only 1/10th of the lift stations were working for several days. You could use the bathroom, but only flush if you NEEDED to. Ahem. Gross. As to power, is it the main grid? Or lots of downed lines. Obviously, the main grid is less of a problem. Fix a few lines, masses of houses come online. If it's the individual lines, it could take significantly more time. Fix a few lines, a few houses come online.

As far as classes go, expect skeleton crews at best. I doubt much, if any, teaching will be going on. I think the main reason to start classes earlier rather than later is to restore some semblance of normalcy. The faster you get back to life, the less time you have to spend thinking about what's going on around you. That's a good thing. After Katrina I had to take nerve pills for the first, and hopefully last, time in my life. I didn't FEEL stressed out, but for some weird reason my mouth would simply refuse to cooperate when talking. It was like my tongue was turning into a solid and my lips would pull into an uncontrollable snarl. Weird stuff. After a couple weeks on an SSRI (Lexapro) I was back to normal.

It'll get back to normal. I promise. Stores will reopen as soon as they get power and the people needed to operate. Restaurants will do the same. For the people that live in more coastal areas, things are going to be a lot tougher. They too, will get back to normal, but it'll take a lot more time and a lot more work.

Dude, whoever parked in that parking lot at Rice is screwed unless that's the absolute highest the water ever got. Once it touches the wires, you almost have to start over. You know the weirdest thing I saw during Katrina? When water gets to the computer in a car, all the lights come on. Underwater. Really strange stuff. Watching the storm pass by in the wee hours of the morning, watching the water in the parking lot behind the hotel I rode the storm out in, one by one the cars that were flooding were turning their lights on. By themselves. At 4 AM. It was like watching them die one at a time. Thankfully, mine was parked atop the airport parking garage. I got REALLY lucky. I drive a mustang, and everything around me was city trucks much larger. All 3 cars around me had all the glass shattered by those little rocks they put on roofs. My car was low enough, and facing the perfect direction, so that all the city trucks completely protected it. Nary a scratch. Had I parked it at home, where I had intended to, I'd be driving something different right now. It would have been under 3 feet of water where I park it.

Oh, man. I'd forgotten you were back in Houston. Sorry you got hit by the hurricane. Glad it wasn't worse.

Comparison shot of part of Galveston.


It sounds like even after today, rescue workers are still having a hard time checking up on everyone out on that island.

It's been interesting seeing the effects here in Austin. The overall storm did nothing to the area beyond trace amounts of rain, and a tiny bit of wind Saturday morning. Beyond that, about the only sign of something having happened down the road is the increased traffic, and back on Friday night, semi after semi labeled "First Responders" heading towards Houston. Currently, all the highway signs advise against traveling to Houston, as gas supply is a problem. Quite a few people are getting stuck on they way back due to gas stations either being empty from the evacuation, or still closed down.

Sometime later in the week I'll be entertaining an evacuee along with someone else to give them something to do while they wait to go back home.

Good luck with the recovery Dan, thankfully it doesn't look like you have a ton to worry about.

We got a piece of the storm formerly known as Ike way up here in Pittsburgh, Pennsyltucky. Parts of the area got gusts to 70mph. My drive home from my girlfriend's place was quite interesting, with branches and small limbs blowing around, and construction signs (we've got a lot of them here lately) scattered all around the highways. Power at my house was out from 10pm Sunday night until about half an hour ago, though the power company has said it might take until Tuesday morning to get everyone back on the grid.

I was really surprised how strong the storm was here after being over land for so long. Good luck to anyone who was hit harder.

One of my friends in Houston considered himself really really lucky. His fence has some damage that will have to be repaired, but that was it. His biggest problem is the eight power lines that were down outside his house. Since he is still without power, his family moved in with his mother. She is just a few miles from the power station has power. He did say that there were a lot of families sleeping in cars to get AC since the power was out for something like 2M people.

Status update:

We've managed to have working telephony the whole time. This is good and bad. Good because you can call out to people with Internet and ask them to figure stuff out for you. My wife's parents are giving us updates from the power restoration maps put out by CenterPoint Energy. My dad's doing assorted other odd jobs for me (e.g., download instructions for reassembling our swingset, which I partly took apart prior to the storm). The bad part of working phones is that everybody is calling you. All the time. And they want to have long, cathartic conversations when you're trying to fix lunch.

We had low water pressure up until this morning. The official word was "we don't think it's contaminated, but boil it anyway if you're going to drink it." This morning, the water pressure came back. Ahh, beautiful hot shower. Also this morning, the weather was just stunning, with a cool breeze. We opened all the windows and aired out the house.

Electricity: one of our friends got it back yesterday afternoon, so we went over for dinner. Very nice. Driving home, after dark, is really a trick. On one hand, you're looking left and right to see who's got power and who doesn't. It's on a block-by-block basis. The media is saying 25% of us have power, but that wasn't consistent with my drive home last night, where I'd say it was more like 10%. They've hooked up several of the larger condo buildings, but all but a handful of houses are dark. (My understanding is that they're going for a strategy of maximizing their bang for the buck. If you can plug in one building and get a hundred people up, then that's high priority.) We, meanwhile, continue to have zero power.

Today, we ate the absolute last of our perishables (quesadillas with room-temperature cheese and previously-cooked bacon, cooked over our gas grill). Our fridge is now completely empty and anything from here on out is either non-perishables from the pantry, or the handful of mangos and bananas that we've got left. (I bought green bananas before this all started. They're now yellow/brown.)

Meanwhile, at Rice, they got the water pressure back on today. Still, daycare and other schools aren't necessarily ready. Our daughter's daycare won't be open until Thursday, minimum. I may end up teaching class tomorrow with my daughter in a corner. I hope I can keep her distracted enough to maintain a meaningful discussion with the students. No way I'm going to do "real" material. We'll talk more about disasters and I'll see if I can get any of the campus honchos to come give a talk.

lectric: I still want to get you out here at some point. I think I want to put together a panel discussion with emergency management people, to talk about how everybody recovers from and deals with all this crap. I wish I had more detail about exactly what's up with the power. Given the large number of mature trees in my neighborhood, and with all the wires on telephone poles, it's highly likely that a tree took out our power. A neighbor across the street says she saw a transformer behind her house fall off its pole. Still, there's a shiny new, still under construction, office building two blocks from our house, and all of its lights are on.

drakino: I'm very happy we don't live in Galveston. Those satellite photos are staggering. I still can't believe that some of those people were seriously planning to "ride out" the storm. Not like that you don't.

Amusement:

The following SMS just showed up on my iPhone: "Text from 604-4. From AT&T on behalf of the CDC - Urgent info 4 those in Ike area. Don't use generators indoors, near open windows or in garage. Drink bottled water only."

Well, alright then. Cellular service has been sucking less than it did right after the storm came through. I've discovered that, if I stand in the kitchen window, I get a decent 3G signal (enabling me to watch the splitting funny Palin-Clinton skit from Saturday Night Live). On the other side of the house, I'm lucky if I get one bar of service.

I'm going to wander around more this afternoon and shoot more pictures. Yeah, I've got real work to do, but there's just zero ability for me to sit down and focus on serious technical writing and editing for a research paper. My brain is somewhere else entirely.

Hehe, Cell phone reception is almost parallel to power. Almost none of those towers have generators. When whatever site has the tower gets power back, the cell comes back to life. Most backhaul is using microwave at this point. The exception being At&T. T1's were part of our problem during Katrina and if you had AT&T, were again for Gustav. For Katrina, the main Bellsouth switch for the 504 area code was under water. That was our real problem. Even after we got cell signal, you still couldn't make calls. Someone had the bright idea to try a SIM from a phone that was based in a different area code. Guess what? They all worked. This year, we had a box of 10 Atlanta-based cell phones delivered, but we never actually had to use them, as most of our cell phones worked. I was primarily using the state-wide radio system though, so I really didn't care much if they worked or not. I even got a GETS card, but never had to use it.

That meeting tomorrow will sure be fun...