TheBanyanTree: Ike's Moon - 2008/09/13

[Dale M. Parish]

20080913T1000S

It was a long night- noisy-- limbs falling against the house and the
occasional tree falling.  No major damage here, but listening to the
little hand-crank/battery radio, I'm continaully amazed at the
stupidity-- or maybe it's ignorance-- of people.  They were predicting
a 15-20 foot storm surge along our portion of the coast.  I live north
of Interstate 10, which functions as an east/west dam at about 25 feet
elevation.  But the radio is reporting on people who lived south of
the interstate in low-lying areas and who ignored the evacuation
orders because they had a generator.  After Rita, generators were very
hard to come by for nearly a week-- it took two weeks to get power
restored in many places.  We listed to one poor soul who cried on the
radio for someone to come rescue his family because the live only a
few hundred meters from the marsh between the Sabine River and Adams
Bayou in one of the lower areas of the county-- his generator went
under water last night with the storm surge.  Another family and their
dogs are stranded on their roof in Bridge Ciy, which is severely
flooded by storm surge.  I'm sure my brother-in-law got water in his
house-- whether all the way to the roof or not, we won't know for a
while, but he was on a peninsula into the marsh off Sabine Lake.  

I've had contact with my sole employee-- my boss called from Dallas to
check on me; my girl Friday told me on the phone that she was at her
sisters in Cleveland TX because one of her daughters had called the
police to come make her evacuate.  The other daughter didn't evacuate
and was stuck in Nederland but was OK.  Port Arthur elected in the 70s
to pay for a structural barrier against hurricane protection when the
Federal Flood Insurance program started-- Port Arthur built a levee
completely around their city at 18 feet elevation and installed pumps
to pump out rain water.  The rest of this area didn't want to pay for
that solution, so adopted "soft solutions"-- regulations requiring new
construction to have the foundation/floor level greater than 16 feet
elevation.  This did nothing to help all those people living in houses
already constructed in low areas.  Now, these are the people least
able to afford remediation and least able to afford evacuation.  We've
heard a lot of people on the radio state that evacuating last week for
Hurricane Gustav took all their money and they just didn't have the
resources to evacuate a second time.  
 
It's still too windy and rainy to go out and set up the generator.  I
snuck some milk out of the refrigerator and Cindy and I will have
breakfast cereal with it.  I'm hoping by afternoon I can get the
generator running and re-freeze the freezers, which we won't open yet.


20080912T19:49

It's dark now; I feel like a fool.  I spent a nice sum having a
professional electrician wire up our pumphouse so that I could simply
disconnect ourselves from the grid and plug in the 17.5KW generator I
bought during Hurricane Rita and have full power in the house.  

In June, I had the generator stored at our shop and we were hit by
burglars who stole all our tools and my generator.  I recently saw one
just like (I thought) the one I had stolen on a pallet, unassembled,
at the new Tractor Supply in Orange.  After a little dickering, I
bought it from them and took it to the shop, but didn't have time then
to assemble it.  Just prior to Hurricane Gustav, I ran down and
assembled it and hauled it up here, but never needed to connect it.  I
never noticed that this one, while it looks just like the one I had
stolen, lacks a 50A recepticle.  I have no way to plug it into the
house's circuit.  So I'm running a 17.5KW generator to power the
refrigerator and freezer and a fan off an extension cord run through
the window, wasting all that fuel and still sweating up a storm in
here.  All our local TV stations have been knocked off the air- we can
get a ghost image and good audio from the Lake Charles station, but
their news is all local to Calcasieu and Cameron Parish, as you'd
expect.  The Orange AM station was loud and clear today telling people
to stay out of town.  There are hundreds of people in Bridge City
trapped in their houses or on their roofs, downtown Orange is flooded
by the stormsurge, and likewise West Orange and Rose City.  

One of my sons called from Beaumont to advise they are safe, but he
thinks he and his girlfriend will go to Arkansas to a quartz mine for
a week, about the time they expect that Beaumont will be without
power.  

About 10ish this morning, we realized that our cell phones all lost
signal-- I guess Verizon's infrastructure went underwater somewhere.
There's a cell tower about a 500m south of here running a generator,
but it must not be Verizon's.  About the same time, the land line went
dead-- no outside communications.  I walked out to the road and found
that the power lines coming into our transformer were lying on the
ground-- the reason being that two of my larger trees that survivied
Rita were blown down on the right of way.  One was a white oak, so at
least we'll have some firewood this winter without sacrificing any
more live trees.  The other was a big pine- it broke off just above
the ground and they fell together with the white oak landing on top.

I drug out the generator and discovered the snafu with the missing
receptical, then wired up the frig and freezer.  After lunch, I got
the chainsaw and begin cutting up the trees on the lines.  The power
comes in on uninsulated aluminum cables-- the top is called "the
shield" and is grounded throughout the system.  This protects the
'hot' line below it from lightning.  Both cables had snapped when the
trees fell across them and the ends were lying in the water.  I knew
they were dead-- the other end was drapped across my neighbors metal
building awning which had been ripped up somewhat by the wind.  South
of that was another tree that had blown down across the same lines.
There are only ten residences on this circuit-- it will be one of the
last to be energized.  During the ice storm in 1997, it took eight
days.  After Hurricane Rita, I think it was ten days.  I'm not
optimistic that it'll be any sooner this time. 

Cindy and I had dinner on the patio-- eating the National Geographic
stuff in the refrigerator out where it was cooler.  She reminded me
that my clothes were in the washer when we lost power last night and
we needed to do something about them.  I unplugged the TV and plugged
in the washer and it resumed washing, but when it got to the rinse
cycle, after it drained the tank, it stopped again, so I guess I'll
have to fish them out and hang them up until I get the little well
working tomorrow-- I hope.

After our late lunch, we decided o go for a walk-- I got the camera
and leashed up the schnauzer and we walked down to the highway.  Cow
Bayou was up out of its banks-- not surprising with the storm surge
stopping all the rain runoff from having any place to go.  After some
picures, we headed back, stopping to talk to neighbors, then I traded
chainsaw for shovel and started a new ditch to get rid of a low spot
I've been wanting to do something about for years.  Every time that we
loose power like this, the power crews try to drive down the right of
way and bury their trucks, make a big mess of pulling them out and
then leave me with the ruts.  I've thought about planting a briar
patch there, but it's too low and doesn't drain- or didn't until this
afternoon.  It's a rough ditch, but after the water goes down, I can
dress it up. 

About dark, my cell phone rang-- Verizon has come back on-line, but
the signal is very low.  I had three voice mails- the first was an
automated call advising me to call the automated attendant from work
and report that I was safe and whether or not I could report to work.
The second was from my step-daughter worried about her mother since we
couldn't get any calls.  The last was from my cousin near Chicago
calling to say that they knew it was a long way from here, but that
Meredith Acres, the family homestead was available for us if we needed
to evacuate.  They had heard on the news of the flooding in Beaumont
and Port Arthur and thought of us.

We spent the next hour calling and checking in with family and friends
and I finally got through to my electrician's voice mail to tell him I
need help wiring up this generator, but I don't know if he evacuated
to God-knows-where or not.  Maybe I'll hear from him in a day or two.

20080913T2300 Well, I feel like a double dumbass.  I should have known
there *had* to be a 50A receptical on that generator-- got to thinking
about it and went back out with a light and got down on my knees and
there it is-- black, under the yellow panel, upside down, but there!
Makes you feel stupid.  But I unplugged the load, shut down the
generator, and plugged in the cable to the distribution panel.   After
it had cooled off enough, I refueled and recranked the generator, went
into the pumphouse and closed the breaker to the external generator
circuit and Voila!  Power to the house.  Air conditioning, water
wells, lights, washing machine, all back in service.  We took a
breather while the AC cooled the house down to 25C, then shut down the
AC to warm a frozen pizza and then we'll restart the AC and bring the
house on down to a good sleeping temperature.  

Still no cable/broad band connection, so TV and internet are not
available, and I don't know when I'll get this posted, but I can take
it with me on a thumb drive and maybe when I get to work, I'll have
network access.

Pizza's ready!  
Hugs,
Dale
--
Dale M. Parish
628 Parish Rd
Orange TX 77632
(409) 745-3899