September 16th, 2008 
Vijaianand Hurricane IKE showed it’s wild act by devastating Texas coast – Galveston and Houston on Saturday – Sept 13th, 2008. After a week long speculation of whereh and when IKE will be headed, it finally made the landfall on Texas coastal line with the eye just brushing Houston on Saturday inking his footprints in the history of Space city. It will be talked for years to come as one of the hurricane which devastated the city like Hurricane Alisha and Carla.
Houston, the fourth biggest city was totally devastated and halted from it regular busy schedule for the few days because of IKE’s horrifying act. It was big storm labeled as Category 2 Hurricane with 110 mph wind speed when it hits Galveston and inland it was like 60-80 mph hitting us pretty hard. I never heard a wind gust like that ever in my life. It was that bad and fast. I can see out of my window, the trees were torched and many couldn’t withstand breaking into pieces. As of Sept 16th, the death toll was 40 and expected to increase as the rescue teams move into more destructed areas of the Galveston coast.
Due to well planned Preparedness by the city officials both in Houston and Galveston compared to the never came Hurricane RITA few years ago, loss of life was reduced. Traffic Jam wasn’t bad for people who tried to evacuate the day before the storm. It was very well managed except some hicupps in getting the help for the aftermath.
There were lot of damages outside our neighborhood, horrible scenes like tree falling on top of house roofs and cars, water all over the place, fence knocked out. It was like a war zone.
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Power outages for almost 1-2 days minimum in many places.
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Street lights and signals were out in all most every street and still yet to be fixed.
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Almost every gas station was closed without gas supply. Just started seeing some opened up with people waiting in line for hours to get gas all over the city even with gas prices at around $5 gallon.
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Many grocery shops were closed and people were looking for food as there is no place to eat out. Few grocery stores opened on Sunday with only left over stock supply. There were long lines to get in since they only have limited number of counters opened.-
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Land line and cell phone network were out in many places. I couldn’t even able to call anybody or recieve any calls from outside.
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Medical facilities had limited access due to power outages.
FEMA is still trying to reach many remote places which are still under water and no access to reach them. The loss is excepted to reach hundreds of million after all get sorted out.
On the economy front, IKE missed the largest concentrations of oil and gas refineries. But at least 14 Texas refineries closed before the storm made landfall, removing more than 20 percent of the nation’s petroleum refining capacity. Ike also destroyed at least a dozen production platforms and drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico — though only a tiny fraction of those there — and production is still shut down in the critical region.
Two major pipelines are up and running again, and power has been restored to a number of massive refineries. But it may be several weeks before the nation’s refining capacity is restored.
Overall picture is really bad but not bad as compared to Katrina in New Orleans but it did make a big impact in the Houston’s thriving economy. I never seen Houston or any other city for that matter in my life to be in the war zone type situation. But Houston is already in the right path to recovery and slowly getting back to normal with all the help from City officials, FEMA and most importantly friendly neighbors and Houstonians who is helping each other.
That’s the spirit, WAY TO GO HOUSTON!! We will soon be back with full throttle in no time.
Check out this link http://blogs.chron.com/closings/openings/ for store openings.
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