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September 16, 2008
Hurricane Ike says hello to Cobden
Well, it is official. When I moved here, it was because I wanted to get away from bugs, heat, hurricanes and we wanted to have some snow to play in. So far, we have had almost no snow, bugs on biblical proportions (you should see the chiggers we got into a few weeks ago!), 100+ degree August days and now Hurricane Ike.
I have been a good American and have ignored the news pretty much lately, choosing to live in my own little bubble impervious to the Palins of the world State of Alaska (I forgot, she’s never been out of Alaska). This means that I missed the fact that Hurricane Ike was beating a path right towards Southern Illinois. My work’s headquarters are in Houston and they evacuated on Thursday, so I was feeling sympathy for the folks about to be hammered.
Saturday night we started to get a bit windy, but I love a good storm and my bedroom has five foot tall windows for the best night time watching, so I was ready. Three am, the screen door started banging back and forth like we were in Kansas, Toto. It was simply amazing by eight am, so I got out of bed and turned on the weather radio for the first time. They kindly reassured me that we were currently experiencing winds up to 40mph and, not to worry; it would be gone by lunch. LIARS. It was more like 60-70mph and while it was gone by lunch, we will be dealing with it for quite some time.
Immediately after checking the weather radio, the power went out. No problem. Oh, wait, I have about $500 worth of meat and stuff between two freezers. And no generator. Chad convinced me to go to Lowes and buy a 3,500 watt generator. On our way there, we stopped at McDonalds where we learned that half of the area towns were also out of power. We got to Lowes and bought the last small generator they had.
Now, prior to leaving, small branches and a few limbs were down. When we came BACK though – holy crap. My neighbor at the beginning of the street had an entire tree down across his little truck. I came back to see that the post oak in my back yard had lost its entire top – about 20 feet worth. (click here for the before storm picture)
Chad, being the workaholic he is, decided we needed to clean it up right then. Unfortunately, the tree fell against a granite wall with about six huge limbs propping it up in between. It also slid backwards a bit into the V of the tree meaning it wouldn’t just fall down if cut. Did I mention the three other trees it took down along the way?
So, Chad with pole saw and chain saw, cut and cut and cut. Four hours later, it barely looked touched. We kept expecting the limb to roll and fall with each supporting branch cut. No such luck. At the very end, we got a little satisfaction when it fell and replanted itself half way down.
We discovered that the whole tree was hollow which is probably why it broke. What we did not anticipate was that it was a snake nesting site. Chad found a few snake skins hanging from the branches which is not unusual at my house. A little ooky but okay considering they are generally king snakes which keep the rodent population under control. Imagine Chad’s surprise when he cut a limb and two LIVE king snakes fell out from inside! One was about four foot long and the other was about two foot long. They acted stunned for a minute and then slithered away. The biggest one simply crawled into a hole in the bottom of the tree! We were amazed that Chad had not accidently cut them up with the chainsaw. Chunk of the branch can be seen below:
So anyway. We ended up getting power back on at about 8pm. The generator worked like a charm and I am glad to have it in my emergency supplies. We will be doing clean up for the next few weeks. I understand that my Dad’s property looks like a bomb went off as well but I haven’t been over to see it yet. Here is an article from our local paper
Compared to the folks in Texas who were truly devastated by Hurricane Ike, we came out pretty well.
How did everyone else do?
Posted by DebC at September 16, 2008 2:00 PM
Comments
Amazingly it just missed us here in Iraq. We did get some strong winds and a sand storm or two.
Posted by: Michael at September 17, 2008 2:34 AM