Update on Hurricane Ike and the Texas disaster response.
By Doug
Many of my friends & their familes are involved in rebuilding houstons infrastructure.
Things are still bad in places. lots of folks still crapping in buckets & sitting around candles at night.
Things are improving rapidly. everyone is very optimistic 60% of houston will be electrified by thursday night.
Power crews working night and day.
The water has just been announced that it is clean to drink from the tap.
Gas is a problem though. most gas lines are still long, but it is a lot better than yesterday.
So its good to hear that even though it is still bad. things are improving rapidly.
Give it 2-3 more weeks and most things will be back to almost normal.
Though it will take months to clean up all the debris
100+ ships lined up in many mile long queue.
Almost all marker buoys for houston ship channel are damaged, misplaced or destroyed.
It will take a long time to get things going again.
The city of my town 40 miles north of houston and all surrounding tows are all out of power and have week long curfew 7-7.
They are saying it will be at least 2 weeks.
Saw convoy of tree trimmer trucks with cherry pickers go by last night.
All the stuff im reading online confirms what friends are telling me. Most folks still have no power, where there is power there are long lines, and very very short supplies.
Tempers are starting to flare.
Everyone asks the same questions.
When is the electricity coming back on.
When is the gas station going to be open
When is my phone going to be back on.
Saw a video of grocery store in Summerville today. store was closed, tossed out all dairy, but was selling stuff in parking lot for cash only.
Get this. 90% of all things for sale were cookies & coke’s. Very few canned goods left.
This thing is a real mess.
Post office did get a truck in today. The office is closed but did put mail in the boxes.
There is a line of almost 100 ships waiting to get into she ship channel to offload supplies. Ship channel is too filled with debris for them to get in. So only things getting in are being trucked ..mostly from Dallas.
Some guy who rode out storm in galveston got medivaced with estimate of 1000 mosquito bites.
I found a lot of mosquito larve in standing water yesterday. Im sure it is the same for all this area. Give those things a few more days and this area will be one giant hell hole.
West nile viris season is still in effect. It is like having the flu for 3 months.
My two phone company buddies went to work yesterday anticipating repair work. They were told to spend all day calling customers to see if they wanted their regurarly scheduled instalations and they had unlimited overtime.
When they told their bosses, almost none of the cutomers did not have phone service and that they needed to be out in the field putting generators on phone huts to get service back on..they were told NO. Just do what we told you to do.
So dozens of phone repair trucks spent all day parked in parkling lot with the phone repair guys sitting in trucks reading books & listening to the radio.
Galveston is toast. It will never 100% recover.
Every place near the water took hard hits.
All of Houston still has a Boil Water Order.
700,000 customers have power back on.
1.56 Million customers still without power in City of Houston
Total customers in Houston & surrounding Citys is approx 2.5 Million.
THESE ARE ACCOUNTS OF HOMES & BUSINESSES-NOT PEOPLE. If you want to know the number of people i would guess multiply this by 2x or 3x.
All my buddies still in houston & surrounding area have their water back on now.
They are giving most information out via TV, which does no good if most folks dont have power.
This thing is a real mess.
My recommendation–stay the hell away from this place.