Latest Ike Update

I'll put up more pictures later, but here's the latest news. I'm back at work today. Not everything's up and running yet, but we're slowly putting the pieces back together.

I spent most of the past two days helping clean up a few places. After Katrina and Rita many of us in our ward went on work trips to Louisiana to help clean up. On those trips, we noticed that after a month or more, most of the time was spent helping members, and often it was the ward leaders who needed the help (because they had put others needs before their own). Our leaders here decided that rather than have that situation occur, they'd get groups of available people together on our own to go help each other out.

A group turned up at our house around 10:30 on Tuesday. They got a big branch down out of one of the trees in the front, and then left to get lunch. They came back after an hour or so, with a couple of additional people, and we really set to work. Aside from our own yard, we also ended up helping our next-door neighbor, who had massive amounts of branches in his front yard and a very large section of tree in his back. He mentioned that he didn't know how he'd take care of the tree in the back yard, and so I told him I thought we could handle it. I was right. As the day went on, more and more people ended up at our house, and we kept working until 6:30ish.

There were still a few branches up higher in both our yards, so we arranged to meet at our house on Wednesday morning with a bigger ladder to take care of those, and then go on to other places. So that's what happened, and once our two yards were finished I went to help at some of the other places. One of those places had a very large tree fall on the roof of their garage, but it didn't do too much damage. It was a bit tricky to get off the roof, though. Oh, I should mention that there were a couple of loose branches that were proving very difficult to get out of my neighbor's tree. In the end, we looped some rope around it and tied it to the back of a truck and pulled it out. Jessie and Brennan thought that was one of the coolest things they'd ever seen. In the end, the current official tally is that the barricade of trees and branches in front of our house is the second biggest in the ward.

Oh, and during the cleanup I talked to the neighbor behind us (the one whose tree landed on our fence). He had already filed a claim with his insurance, and they will replace the fence. Between that and the help with the trees, I don't even know that we have any repair costs at all.

We're still supposed to boil water (but we just use bottled water instead). Gas is easier to find, although it can still run out quickly. Stores are re-opening, although milk, dairy, and other refrigerated things can be tricky to locate as well. The latest information is that Jessie's and Brennan's school will reopen on Tuesday. It took a lot of water damage, but I guess they think it will be OK (although by the last report it still didn't have power). A couple of other schools were very badly damaged and won't be useable any time soon, so we imagine that there might be a lot of extra students in our school for awhile. At least two of the teachers (including Brennan's kindergarten teacher from last year) have badly damaged houses, and one of the first grade teachers I guess lived on a houseboat, and it sank. She was stranded on Galveston Island for three days without food or water, but is fine now.

Traffic lights, I've learned, don't do well in hurricanes. Most signals are still either not working at all, flashing red lights, or no longer actually present (sometimes a combination of those). I think the only light I've seen that is working is one near our house, but the only problem is that you can't really see the light from the appropriate direction, because the lights have all rotated on their poles...

It will be a long time before things are really back to normal, and even longer before all traces of the impact are gone. Still, we are amazed and grateful that with the vast number of trees downed that fewer houses weren't badly damaged.

Tonight I'll try to add some more pictures as well.