<p>Here are some incredible pictures someone sent me.</p>
<p>[The</a> short - but eventful - life of Ike - The Big Picture - Boston.com](<a href=“http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/09/the_short_but_eventful_life_of.html]The”>http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/09/the_short_but_eventful_life_of.html)</p>
<p>YAY!!! My cable is now working (one week after the hurricane) – so I have internet again. Lots of people (and my younger son’s school) are still without electricity, though.</p>
<p>toledo: Those photos are amazing. Thank you for the link.</p>
<p>they ARE some incredible photos</p>
<p>Two of my law partners just got their power back on at home on Sunday. I would be in a *very *cranky mood if I didn’t have power for two weeks.</p>
<p>There is an amazng letter floating around the Texas legal community. It seems some lawyers had depositions scheduled a few days after Ike hit. One lawyer was in the Houston area and one was in Dallas. The home and yard of the Houston area lawyer was filled with raw sewage and he had to be at home while he got folks to deal with it, on the day the deposition was scheduled. The Dallas lawyer did not want to agree to delay the deposition and wanted the court to compel him to attend. The Houston lawyer emailed a scathing letter to the disagreable Dallas lawyer, copying about 8 other lawyers, who have each copied other lawyers, etc. I wonder if the Dallas lawyer will be able to show his face in public again.</p>
<p>Unbelievable, Missyepie!
My H has some friends in Houston who were without power for almost 2 weeks. I cannot imagine what that would be like. And as for the attorneys… where was the deposition supposed to be held? If it was in Houston, you have to wonder if some of the judges weren’t also dealing with personal after effects of the storm. They could have relocated the site of the deposition to be held at the home of the Houston atty and had the Dallas atty sit downwind from the sewage… Sounds like he deserved it.</p>
<p>Yeah, I don’t think the Dallas lawyer was helping his client out in the judge’s eyes. Everyone else I know has bent over backwards to be accomodating…offering office space in their conference rooms to attorneys from other firms, etc.</p>
<p>Okay, those of you who went through Ike should appreciate this…</p>
<p><em><em>Things Ike taught me</em></em></p>
<p>Coffee and frozen pizzas can be made on a BBQ grill.</p>
<p>Hot pockets taste pretty good deep fried on the outdoor cooker!</p>
<p>My car gets 23.21675 miles per gallon, EXACTLY (you can ask the people
in line who helped me push it).</p>
<p><em>He who has the biggest generator wins.</em></p>
<p>There are a lot more stars in the sky than most people thought.</p>
<p><em>TV is an addiction and the withdrawal symptoms are painful.</em></p>
<p>A 7 lb bag of ice will chill 6-12 oz Budweiser’s to a drinkable
temperature in 11 minutes, and still keep a 14 lb. turkey frozen for 8
more hours.</p>
<p><em>There are a lot of dang trees around here.</em></p>
<p>Flood plain drawings on some mortgage documents were seriously wrong…</p>
<p><em>People will get into a line that has already formed without having any
idea what the line is for.</em></p>
<p>Cell phones work when land lines are down, but only as long as the
battery remains charged.</p>
<p>Hampers were not made to contain such a volume.</p>
<p>If my store sold only ice, chainsaws, gas and generators…I’d be rich.</p>
<p>Waterfront property can quickly become someone else’s fishing hole.</p>
<p>Tree service companies are underappreciated.</p>
<p>I learned what happens when you make fun of another states’ blackout.</p>
<p>MATH 101: 30 days in month, minus 6 days without power equals 30% higher
electric bill ???</p>
<p><em>Drywall is a compound word, take away the ‘dry’ part and it’s worthless.</em></p>
<p>I can walk a lot farther than I thought.</p>
<p>A MUST for all blackouts with kids… GLOWSTICKS! Cheap, fun, no mess!</p>
<p>A skateboard and a sheet make a great “sailboat” before the rain starts.</p>
<p>It is a great time to teach the children the fine art of gambling (penny
ante poker).</p>
<p>You can never have too many gas cans!</p>
<p><em>If you fill the bathtubs with water, the water will not go off.</em> </p>
<p>7 dogs that do not normally live together still do not get along during
a hurricane. They have no comprehension of sharing. </p>
<p>5 gallons of sweetened iced tea a day is not enough for 9 teenagers.</p>
<p><em>Neighbors are much more sociable when they are sharing a generator.</em></p>
<p>Two-year-old canned beets taste better than you’d think.</p>
<p>Just because it is dark and you are in the privacy of your bedroom
doesn’t mean we can’t hear what you are doing in there because our
windows are open too.</p>
<p><em>What looks acceptable by candlelight in your bathroom will scare you
when you look at yourself in the mirror at the office.</em></p>
<p>Coffee is possible without Starbucks.</p>
<p><em>Rather than campfires, you find families huddled about tiny
battery-operated televisions to watch The Simpsons.</em></p>
<p>Peanut butter and jelly is a perfectly acceptable meal for breakfast,
lunch and dinner in the same day.</p>
<p><em>Don’t shun those who use Tylenol PM or Advil PM to get through 11-hour
nights.</em></p>
<p><em>That neighbor who knows how to use a chainsaw is your new best friend.</em></p>
<p>Ice is a form of currency.</p>
<p>It’s OK to let the kids keep their stick fort until the debris-pickup
crews start rolling in.</p>
<p>Coming home from work with a pizza and a charged-up laptop so the kids
can watch a DVD makes you a hero.</p>
<p>You run out of things to barbecue after Day 2.</p>
<p>We don’t want to hear rehashes of ball games we missed or be reminded
that we may miss the season premiere of Dexter at 8 p.m. Sunday on
Showtime.</p>
<p>Hair can dry without a blow dryer, but it may not look the way you planned.</p>
<p>The storm treasures your kids are finding really belong to your neighbors.</p>
<p>When George Noory’s Coast to Coast AM returns to KTRH’s late-night
lineup, we sleep better.</p>
<p><em>Baseball caps go with any post-hurricane ensemble.</em></p>
<p><em>You can’t train yourself not to flip on light switches when entering a
room.</em></p>
<p>Lukewarm is the new cold.</p>
<p>You have neighbors.</p>
<p>It’s easier to ignore a dirty floor when you can’t see it.</p>
<p><em>A new opening phrase when seeing someone: “Got lights yet?”</em></p>
<p>That picture of the lone house standing in Galveston ought to compel the federal flood insurance program to charge properly for their premiums. Its obvious that the people who owned that house should have been paying a lot less than anyone else. Also, since we have building codes, all the rebuilding ought to be to the standard that they followed. </p>
<p>Its interesting that I’ve seen that picture a couple of places, but haven’t heard much news coverage about it…just a little bit.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>As a structural engineer here in Houston (and a former grad student in disaster research and statistics-based seismic retrofit prioritization), building codes are being improved to account for lessons learned all the time. You can bet that SOMETHING from Ike will be factored into the next round.</p>
<p>Buildings are grandfathered into the building code in effect at the time that design and construction started. You don’t have to upgrade your structure until you start messing with the structure enough that you need to get permits to do the work, and then it’s possible that you have to upgrade certain things to bring them up to code. If you don’t mess around with your old buildings and remodel them, they can remain as they were when they were designed in the first place.</p>
<p>That being said, you never know which ones are gonna go. There’s a lot of uncertainty in design, and there’s a lot of uncertainty in disaster events. The wind effects may have been a certain way for that one house. The contractor may have messed up and used twice as many nails in one unforeseen critical section, and that may have been what saved it. It may just have been the particular shape of that one house that gave it enough strength to withstand the winds. There could’ve been tornados spawned by the hurricane that landed on all the houses except for that one. In other words, this may not be a code issue at all, and there are more complex things at play here… it’s not quite so cut-and-dry.</p>
<p>You can also bet that the flood insurance program will be taking this into account. With determining hazard, you have to go with the probability that an event will take place. If the return period of the disaster event is low, then you’ll charge less. If the return period of the disaster is higher, you’ll charge higher premiums. The problem with rare disasters is that we only have reliable data from about two hundred years’ worth of time here in the States, and we only have highly <em>detailed</em> data from about the past seventy-five to 100 years (less for seismic). One storm in the past cleaned Galveston’s clock, in 1900. Now we have two catastrophic data points, and that’ll change the model pretty significantly.</p>
<p>Things were fine for over 100 years, though. I’m not sure how much you can fault someone for living by the ocean if things had been only occasionally inconvenient for the majority of your lifespan, with only a few bad storms causing some flooding for as long as you can remember…</p>
<p>Things I learned:
How to McGyver a small air conditioner from a battery, an extension cord, a fan, a turkey roaster, towels, ice, and a few history textbooks.</p>
<p>Timely, thanks for the hilarious post! I didn’t experience Ike, but I live in south Florida and lost power for 14 days after Wilma in 2005. I can totally relate!</p>
<p>We live in a coastal county, and though we are 40 miles inland, we had to build our home to “windstorm specifications” in order to purchase windstorm insurance. Windstorm is not covered under Homeowner’s insurance. It’s expensive, too. We pay about $1,200/year in addition to our homeowner’s insurance, and our deductible is 3% of the value of our home. So, as aibarr said, the building codes are being adjusted over time.</p>
<p>Aibarr, as to the data points…would they not include Alicia in that? I’m not sure where it came in (Matagorda maybe?), but I think I remember that Galveston sustained quite a lot of damage in that one.</p>
<p>They include everything; there are a lot of experts and organizations watching it (after all, they stand to lose a lot of money if they don’t have accurate models!). IIRC, Galveston got slammed with mainly wind damage in Alicia, and only about the same amount of flooding as they got with TS Allison… Wind can do a lot of damage, but storm surge is really awful. We’re in a third-floor apartment because we knew we could get through high winds and roof leaks (and I don’t say this lightly… there’s still dust over everything we own because they’re still replacing our ceiling), but if there’s massive flooding, it’ll ruin everything.</p>