Home Again…

…tired, but none the worse for wear. I’ve got a few Hurricane Ike vignettes I’ll share later, but right now I’m beat. Got home yesterday afternoon and slept for ten hours straight, which still leaves me with a sleep deficit measured in days, not hours.

For all who asked, the house made it through just fine – no damage, and only a four-hour power outage. Unfortunately, that outage occurred shortly after I went home for a few hours after the winds had died down Saturday morning. I woke to the sound of my cell phone ringing, my supervisor calling me back to work.

Southwest Louisiana got lots of rain and a major storm surge, worse than that recorded during Hurricane Rita. Winds weren’t so terrible, although they were clocked at hurricane force near my station during a couple of the rain bands. Fortunately, I didn’t have to venture out into those winds in my ‘bolance more than a handful of times. During Ike’s fiercest, I holed up at the station and listened to the wind howl and watched the trees sway, and marveled at how, during a hurricane, such a maelstrom of wind and water can be possible without even a lick of thunder or lightning. It was a bit eerie, actually.

The city in which I work got some major flooding, but nothing compared to southeast Texas. Those folks need some prayers and support. Spent most of my time Saturday and Sunday morning evacuating very sick people from small hospital ICUs that had flooded or lost power, transporting a diehard or two that had to be plucked from the waters by boat or helicopter, and saying, “there but for the grace of God, go I.”

Anyhoo, the ambulance station and its occupants survived relatively unscathed, save for the tree that fell on my partner’s truck. When I parked my truck, I took care to position it as far out in the open parking lot as possible, well away from the trees and utility poles. Partner was not so cautious, however.

That truck is my own beloved Dodge Dakota, Frankenhoopty. Partner, being the kind and generous soul that he is, chose to park between Frankenhoopty and the trees, and thus it was his Chevy Silverado that got crunched, and my own horseless carriage only got brushed by the uppermost branches you see here. There was one big limb that would have stove in my hood, but the aforementioned Silverado took one for the AD team instead.

One side-effect from the storm surge is that, with the Gulf and major estuaries swollen with big storm surges, the smaller rivers well inland have nowhere to drain. They just back up and spill over their banks, and wind up flooding homes well away from Ike’s path.

Heck, the closest I came to personal disaster was Sunday night, driving north to pick up KatyBeth. Two of the three main roads that lead to her Grandma’s house were impassable due to high water – a fact I did not grasp until I found myself plowing into a foot of standing water near one particular creek bottom.

They replaced the old, decrepit bridge over that particular creek bottom with a nice, sturdy concrete one just a few months back, and resurfaced a mile or so of the road along with it, so I waded tentatively down the road until I reached dry ground again. The water never got over my knees, with very little current, so I waded back to my truck, locked Frankenhoopty into 4-Low and crept on through.

It was either that, or add another 90 miles to my round trip.

Anyhoo, I just got back from taking KatyBeth to school, and still can’t keep my eyes open, so I’m going back to bed. I’ll try to post something coherent in a few hours.