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Two weeks after Hurricane Ike took out the power to 97% of CenterPoint Energy’s customers in Houston we returned home to find electric lights on at last.
Without power blog updates were tricky here so I’ll recap with the following picture:
As you can see the last two weeks was divided into four distinct phases:
-The “water, crisps and donuts” phase - with no supplies in the house (as we had just moved in that day) and only a handful of gas stations open food was strictly limited to these new food groups.
-The “Quizno’s subs” phase - with power restored to a gas station nearby the stores in the same block came back on and one was a sandwich shop chain. After a few days on crisps and donuts this was a big step forward.
-The “life on a generator” phase - a week in and still no sign of power, there was nothing for it to buy a generator. With this we could at least run a light or two, power a TV (which had two or three stations available in special “snowy resolution” via its old-fashioned aerial). The good news was that we had no fans and couldn’t power the air-con so at night, with high temperature and humidity, we enjoy a nice sauna.
-The “optimism fading” phase - As the number of customers without power was down to 20% or so we were beginning to think we would have get used to no power.
With nothing better to do whilst the power was out I tracked our feelings in a new so-called misery index, which ranged from 1 to 10 (with 10 being the most miserable). In addition, and to practice my Six-Sigma statistical analysis skills, I plotted the misery index against the number of customers without power, which gave the following result:
Now those of you familiar with statistics will recognise a close correlation (or relationship) between these two variables. Furthermore if we calculation the correlation coefficient (r) using the following equation:
we get -0.992 which is very close to 1 (positive or negative) and further proves the close correlation....
...Look, you’d be struggling to find something useful to do without electricity for two weeks!
Anyway, on Friday 26th of September CenterPoint trucks arrived in our neighbourhood to remove tree limbs from the lines and restore power (as shown in picture above) so things were promising but we’d been disappointed before.
The visit that night Minute Maid Park in Downtown Houston was a big morale boost for us (thanks Dave) and many Houstonians who saw the Astros beat the Atlanta Braves 5-4. I had so much popcorn I started to look like it:
Fireworks marked the end of the game, and official end of the season for the Astros since they hadn’t done quite enough to make it through to the playoffs and the available wildcard went to The Milwaukee Brewers that night:
But not as good as getting home to find your electricity is back on and the place is lit up like Blackpool in October...
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As Hurricane Ike left us just over a week ago, its no surprise that it is no longer big news here.
However, tell that to the 1 million customers still without power or those people in Galveston who can’t move back to their homes yet (or worse, those whose homes disappeared in the storm last week).
Anyway, it is still in the news but now features below such stories as “Is Britney’s label pushing her too hard” after news that her 6th studio album in 10 years is due out soon (by comparison the finest band of musicians ever, Rush, released their first 6 studio albums in only 4 years and also squeezed in a live album in the same period just for good measure).
But my favourite story to push Ike off the top of the news was the one yesterday about demand for Kazuo Kawasaki eyeglasses has quadrupled since Sarah Palin (Governor of Alaska and Republican vice-presidential nominee) wore them at the Republican National Convention a couple of weeks ago. Its hard to decide now whether it was better when we didn’t have any access to news.
Anyway, it seems I’m not the only person to notice that Sarah Palin shows a striking resemblance to Peggy Hill from the animated comedy show “King of the Hill” (who is supposed to be based on Lady Bird Johnson, the wife of US President Lyndon B Johnson).
“King of the Hill” is set in Arlen, Texas. This is a fictional place but it is, according to its creator Mike Judge, a town like Humble, which we were discussing only a few days ago.
As you may remember Humble, Texas is pronounced “umble”, apparently because Pleasant Smith Humble, who it was named after, came from England. Now I don’t know many people from England who would pronounce it that way however I do recall the 1970 debut of Uriah Heep was called “Very ‘eavy...Very ‘umble” (although not in the USA, where it was called simply “Uriah Heep”)...
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Another Ike and Tina Turner track reminds us that Hurricane Ike is long gone from Houston now.
So more and more shops and businesses are getting back on line now. Sadly, as the picture above shows, this doesn’t really help if the shelves are empty. It also doesn’t help if, like us, you’re waiting for deliveries of things like furniture and the store is either still closed or the delivery has been rescheduled to next week.
Schools are closed here in Spring until next week now, but are opening in some areas of the Houston area day by day.
CenterPoint Energy has restored power to 750,000 customers now, but that still leaves still has to restore power to 1.25 million customers to restore and this still includes us.
A battery-powered radio is our close friend now...
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The turning point in the aftermath of Hurricane Ike came today, when George Bush arrived in Houston. Surely all will return to normal now that the ex Texas Governor (1995-2000) raised in Houston is back?
Well maybe not, but things are still slowly returning to normal. The airports (Bush International and Hobby) both have power and are open again which means a lot of stuff around them has power again.
Some nice men turned up today to cut up our fallen tree. As you can see above they had to engage the power of their truck to remove the last stubborn bit, so there’s room now to plant another tree just in time for the next storm).
So as there’s power (and therefore life) near the airport it means we can have our first proper meal since Friday in Humble.
Humble (pronounced “umble”) was founded in 1828 and is named after an Englishman named Pleasant Smith Humble who opened the first post office there.
Anyhow, we had a mighty fine chicken fried steak (more on this fine Texas speciality later) at the Humble City Cafe (www.humblecitycafe.com), which included a free rendition (by Tom Ott, the owner) of those kind of rousing patriotic songs that only Americans can get away with performing in public.
Things are definitely returning to normal...
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Rick Wright, keyboard player and songwriter with Pink Floyd, died today.
Sadly the Live8 reunion was to be the last time that the four members of the definitive line up (unless you are a Syd Barrett fan) would ever play together again:
It was too easy to choose “Great Gig In The Sky” as the title for this entry (as did Neil McCormick of the Daily Telegraph), although this was one of Rick’s most famous pieces of songwriting (there’s also “Wish You Were Here” that could be used although he didn’t write that). Instead I chose a song from Dave Gilmour’s 2006 album “On An Island” which was the last thing I (and many fans) saw him play live with DG at Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall in May 2006.
Things are starting to slowly return to normal here. Center Point Energy have restored power to around 500,000 customers as of this morning, so 1.5 million or so to go, including us.
The one good bit of news is that the evening weather is cool here so there’s no need to worry about lack of air-conditioning.
Power is being restored to key places first, such as emergency services, hospitals and gas stations. This means that if a shop or restaurant is near a gas station it gets power back too. However there’s not much to choose from - the local donut shop has run out of stuff already.
Back to potato chips and water then...
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ke has long gone now but the aftermath is going to be felt for a while yet.
CenterPoint Energy are working to fix all the faults and have drafted in 7,000 extra people (on top of the regular 3,000) to do this as quickly as possible. This doesn’t affect the worst case estimate of being without power for 4 weeks.
Here are some things to do if you don’t have power:
-Try new diets. We have been trying the water-donut-potato chip diet, which is ideal if you haven’t tried scurvy
-Play dodgems on roads without traffic lights, which is most of them
-Watch hyper-inflation in action. For instance see gas prices go from $3.5 to $5 overnight at the few gas stations that are open (this was reported on the radio by a caller but it may have been untrue)
-Play “Russian-gasoline-roulette”, a game of chance which involves driving around looking for gas whilst using up what gas you have left in your vehicle
Today’s title is once again suggested by RM-B (probably read it off one of his old 78s) and is an Ike and Tina Turner single from 1965 containing the lines:
Goodbye, Baby, You're drivin' me crazy.
You thought you had me baby, but I was infatuated,
things ain't what they used to be and you can't do a
darn thing for me.
Couldn’t have said it better.