Cleaning up the mess in the streets. The clean up truck spent over an hour at our house and they filled the truck up twice. That's a lot of debris. School is in. The adjuster on our house will be out here October 10 and the adjuster for Craig's office said they are going to Houston, then Galveston, then Beaumont, then us. It may be months before they get out here. All in all, life is as normal as can be.
Voluntary evacuation order lifted, mandatory burn ban lifted, and curfew lifted. Today there was only Sacrament meeting so that people could go out and help with disaster cleanup. I think we are slowly getting back to normal. Tomorrow it is back to business for Craig.
Another day of cleaning up. We got all the sheet rock off the wall, the ceilings down, the insulation out. OOOOOOHHH what a mess! Even the framing is wet and rotted.
But things are cleaned up enough so that Craig can be back to business on Monday.
Power is on at the office!!!! Time to go clean up and see what we can salvage. The insurance adjusters were supposed to contact us today. Where are they?????
Still no power at the office. Got to go grocery shopping. The stores still have a limited stock on hand but it is getting better every time you go. We finally heard that school will resume next Wednesday. The missionaries called and asked Craig to go to Houston to pick up some brand new elders. So we went for a ride. Power is out all over Houston also. Had a hard time finding somewhere to eat while we waited for the elders. That's quite the welcome to your Texas mission...being sent to the hurricane affected areas. One young man wanted to know if they would get to go tracting tomorrow. lol!!!!! He'll be lucky if he gets to do that at all the whole time he is here. It's all about service now. As we drove by the arena in Beaumont this was the line of semis bringing in supplies for the area.
Surprise! Look at this mess. Above the garage I have this walk in craft closet. I needed to get in there to find something and when I opened the door, this is what I found. The brackets were blown off the back wall and then I guess it made the shelving fall. Still no power at the office. Gas lines are back to normal now. Some stores and restaurants starting to open up.
Still no phone or internet. How can the insurance companies call???? Found out that only the businesses on the highway and our little loop have power. We are sooooo lucky. They say that by September 30, 80% of the power customers will have power restored. Thank goodness we have ours. Around noon the sister missionaries showed up to help clean up. Thank goodness for helping hands. We are tired and sore. We got most of the mess cleaned up. We look like we have a backyard again. Our debris pile out front is huge. Tonight the phone and internet finally came back on again. Yeah! Curfews are in place from 8pm to 6am. Also instituted a no burn policy starting today. Still no power at the office.
On the bright side...The tooth fairy managed to find AJ!
Started cleaning up the yard today. Walmart opened for a few short hours for emergency essentials (not sure what the lady looking at lacy lingerie was thinking) but we were able to buy a chain saw so we could start cleaning up the yard. They only let 20 people in the store at a time. Also had to wait in line for an hour and a half to fill our gas cans for the generator. Finally at 2pm we got power up. Yeah! We started making phone calls to the insurance companies. We should be contacted in 2-3 business days. A few hours later the phone and internet went out again. No power at the office.
By 1 pm the winds finally started to let up. We went out to go check on Craig's office. The business next door sells carports and one of them flew up on Craig's roof and on it's way back down, it took off about 1/3 of the roof. The ceiling came down, insulation down, sheetrock wet, and generally just a huge mess. We hurried home to get some tarps and get things dried in because another huge rain storm was coming our way. Luckily we were able to get the tarps on the roof before the rain hit. Our power was still out but they decided to make our town the staging area for all of the power restorations. All of the towns who got evacuated for storm surge, their fire and police all evacuated to our town and were staying at the high school. Luckily the high school, walmart, and one huge subdivision got power around 5 pm. A ward member who got power brought their generator over to us. What a huge blessing. We could keep our refrigerator running and have some electricity to at least run a fan, have a light, and run the tv and dvd player. Still no phone,internet, or power. Our cell phones even went down this afternoon. Yikes.
The winds started to blow and around 1:15 am the power went out. The wind blew pretty strongly all night long. Everyone was asleep but me. Every little bang, clatter had me jumping. The kids were sleeping in our room right in front of the window. I finally woke them all up around 4 am and made them move to the side of our bed, away from the window. At 4 am Craig went out to see what was going on. At this point we had no damage. Just really strong winds and some rain. Everyone went back to bed but me. From 4-6 am all heck broke loose. The winds started blowing very differently, and things were vibrating. I just lay there listening to it and prayed that the house would not get hit. Finally when daylight broke, I got up and looked out the window and all I can say is WOW! Our backyard looked like a war zone. About 6 (100 ft) oak and pine trees were down, all of our fences were down, and branches everywhere. Our shed doors were flying open so Craig decided to try to shut them but by time he got to the shed, one door flew off. Crazy! They say that hurricane force winds blew for 6 hrs and tropical storm winds blew for 13 hours. It's no wonder we had so much damage. On one hand I was thinking we should have evacuated but I was glad we had stayed here because there were more problems to come. Stay tuned...
At 4 am on Sat. Craig went out to see what all the fuss was about!
A mandatory evacuation was called for every county around but not us. Since it was only a cat 2 storm, we decided to stick this one out. Around 4pm the first rain bands hit us.
We got a few sprinkles and then later that night the wind started to blow. All the neighbors started to board up their windows. Since we are hurricane newbies, we did not.
