Aftermath - Day One

It was still raining lightly, but I made my first venture out and this was the sight of the next courtyard over from me.

There's supposed to be a fence on the backside of the covered parking. You can see that some of it is still there, but a lot of the fence along the back of our property was knocked over.

A lot of the wonderful, old Live Oaks took a big hit. They're fairly quick growing and therefor fairly weak in comparison to other trees.

Michelle and I hopped in my car to go toodle around and assess some of the damage - and get some air conditioning. This was over at Memorial Park by my apartment. It looks like a Louisianna bayou. They said we got anywhere from 10 to 12 inches of rain - and you can see the tree completely uprooted.

This the Memorial Drive underpass under Shepherd. When the electricity went out, the pumps quit working. Go figure.

This is Buffalo Bayou at "high tide". It had overflowed it's banks, but not quite as bad as when Tropical Storm Allison parked on top of us in 2001 for a week and droped over 30 inches of rain, 28 of them in less than 24 hours.

"Do Not Enter" - I guess not! The Bank of America near my place - lying in pieces.

We ran into Mike and Pam on West Grey (also out assessing the damage) and they climbed into my car and we continued to drive around and take in the sights. This was a tree blocking the road to Jim and Susan's. We found a way around it and saw that Jim and Susan's place was fine as well.

A sad sight near downtown. We tried to get into downtown, but the cops had it all blocked off because several of the highrises lost a lot of windows. We also tried to check out the new Catholic cathedral that was built earlier this year with a huge stained glass window of Jesus. They put protective hurricane glass over the top of all the stained glass as part of the construction. They said that it was built to withstand a category 5 hurricane, but we couldn't get close enough to verify.

This is along Allen Parkway, on the other side of Buffalo Bayou from Memorial Drive. You can see the sign says "Clearance 14ft 3in".

This is a shot from that little driveway in the above picture of the dog park by the Bayou that is now underwater. Believe it or not, there is a small hill with trees on it there under all that water. Later on in the blog there is a shot of the water receding.

I love this shot. I think it says it all. This is again Allen Parkway, just the opposite direction from that first "Clearance" shot.

Another sad sight. This is my favorite pizza place. The globe is supposed to be sitting proudly on top.

End of day one and crews were out starting to restore power. This cherry picker was literally pushing the street light back into line. It had twisted around to an almost 45 degree angle from the street below.

And this last shot of day one was of a wonderful pine tree that just SNAPPED at the base of the trunk. Some trees were uprooted, some snapped off near the base and others snapped right at ground level. Wierd and random.