The Big Blow

I’ve lived in the same place (to within a mile) for the last nineteen years, almost exactly. I moved to Texas in mid-September 1989. During that time, we’ve had a few hurricane threats, a couple of near misses, and one devastating tropical storm that flooded major portions of Houston.

Hurricane Ike is the worst threat to this region since I moved here. Rita is a runner up. We went to bed three years ago expecting a dry-side pass (i.e. the hurricane would go east of us, which means we’d get the dry winds from the north rather than the wet winds off the gulf) and awoke to a few gusts of wind and no rain because the storm zigged farther east at the last minute.

Ike is a different cup of tea. He’s currently bound for the Freeport area south of Galveston. Rita gave that area a glancing blow on its way to landfall, but this one is looking like a direct hit, which puts Houston and Galveston on the dirty side of the storm. People are taking it very seriously. Gas stations 100 miles inland are starting to run out. Batteries and bottled water are hot commodities at the grocery stores. People were lining up outside the hardware store waiting for it to open this morning. The place where I work is closing down at 2 p.m. today and will remain closed tomorrow.

We’re far enough inland that we don’t have to worry about flooding, and the winds should diminish before they reach us, too. That doesn’t mean there won’t be tornados or trees falling down. In the aftermath of Rita, we had sporadic power outages for most of the following week, including brownouts and total blackouts that lasted hours at a time. We never had to worry about food spoiling, but power outages are a very real possibility with Ike.

On Sept 8, 1900, a huge hurricane (unnamed, because they didn’t name them back then) devastated Galveston. Pretty much wiped it off the map. At that time, Houston was only a cow town, far secondary as a port and a center of commerce to the island city of Galveston. Galveston never recovered from that blow. A ship channel was dredged inland and Houston became the city that is now fourth largest in the nation. Galveston is a resort town. If you want to read about it, pick up Joe Landsdale’s novella “The Big Blow,” a tale about a boxing match that takes place in the midst of the worst natural disaster in US history.