As most of you know by now, we fared well. I had to finish to some work from home and by 8 pm Thursday night, we were ready to evacuate as we were in the mandatory evacuation zone. 😮 So we headed west to Pastor Shawn’s place not realizing that there were already some evacuees already!
At least it was a good time to meet Pastor Luke and his family, as well as Shelly, who is new to our church. We avoided driving in the daytime because of heat and too much traffic on the road. Surely enough, by the time we left in the evening, traffic was almost at normal speeds.
Staying at Pastor Shawn’s is always a joy as there’s no stress. However, power went out on Friday late afternoon and humidity began to settle in. 🙁 So it was a great excuse to cook up all the Korean BBQ stuff in his freezer!! 😀 Whoot! Then came the Ike later that night. It was rather loud as expected… lots of gusts of wind and cracking sounds… but you know me, I slept like a baby.
On Saturday morning, it was evident that this storm was rather a powerful one. We had anticipated that knowing that this hurricane’s diameter was about 300 to 400 miles wide! However, upon visual inspection, it was even more so. Trees had fallen everywhere and fell everywhere. Power went out in 90+% of the Houston area. And surge had caused most of coastal areas to be flooded. We drove to Mike’s place in order to drop off Pastor Shawn’s freezer goods and noticed that damage was even bigger than we had thought. Here’s our ride in video…
Once the humidity was killing us, we decided to head over to John & Joanne’s place for shelter as they had power as well. We had originally planned to evacuate to Chung & Celeste’s home but they also had lost power. John & Joanne are another very hospitable family. Later on, Pastor Shawn’s family, Luke’s family, and Shelly came over for dinner and hung out. With TV, we had learned that the Houston downtown had suffered quite a bit of casualty as well and that due to more rains that followed, Houston was in flash flood warning!
So Sunday’s service was canceled due to flash flooding. Then Min & Daniel’s family came over for lunch. I had left our answering machine on so that we could find out easily & quickly if we had power or not. Well, power at our place had gone out Friday but came back on Sunday!
So after buying some more food and such from Komart (gotta give it to the Koreans for being open!), we headed home. Traffic and roads were fine. But at least 80% or more of the traffic lights were out due to power and/or damage.
Then I had found out that my work was closed for Monday. Anna’s school was canceled through Wednesday. Eventually, my work place closed for the entire week, and so was Soojin’s school, and Anna’s school! So we are having our unexpected week-long break. We had checked out Target the other day and still milk and dairy, as well as fresh produce were pretty much out. Gas was still in a bit of tight squeeze but we hope the conditions will fare better.
But in overall, we are thankful that all of our friends and family in Christ are well. We wanted to take this time to thank Pastor Shawn’s family and John’s family for always leaving us an open and welcome doors, and for everyone else for checking up on how we are doing.
None of our properties or cars were damaged but if you had, be sure to head over to FEMA website to register for possible reimbursements and repair costs. Be safe everyone!
