Those who attended the Indiana Solo & Small Firm Conference will remember Craig Ball and his outstanding presentations on PowerPoint, e-discovery and computer forensics. Craig lives outside Houston, and recently battled up close and personal with Hurrican Rita. Here is his very personal account of dealing with the fury of a hurricane.
______________
Rita blew through last night and thankfully the bitch turned out to be all bark and little bite. I was in Los Angeles chairing an e-discovery conference when the reports became so dire, I handed off my duties and headed home Thursday night. Arriving at 11:00pm Thursday at Houston Bush Intercontinental Airport was eerie because the airport was almost deserted.
The folks from TSA simply failed to report for duty that day and so you were pretty much free to come and go by that hour. I live about 75 minutes from the airport on Lake Conroe to the northwest. I steeled myself for a five hour drive home based on the reports of gridlock going north, so imagine my surprise when I get on our toll road and find that I have the road almost entirely to myself. Even the gates were up and the ride was free, under clear skies. Each mile that I drove, I kept expecting to hit a wall of waiting motorists, but mile-after mile, nothing but the post-apocalyptic sight of dozens of abandoned vehicles along the shoulders. After about 25 miles, I finally joined Interstate 45 and a 100-mile long traffic jam heading to Dallas. As the toll road dumps onto I-45, I enter the fray for one exit, and that 300 yards took about 45 minutes.
What impressed me was how well people were bearing up after being in their cars for 10-12 hours or more traversing a stretch that shouldn't take much more than 90 minutes on a bad day. Local residents of The Woodlands were walking between cars offering water and people were pretty nice about letting others cut in and change lanes. None of the road rage (or gunfire) you'd imagine might occur. When I finally got off and headed to the back roads to get home, I found every store closed and every gas station without fuel. Not a drop to be had. The only motorists I saw away from the freeway were people on a futile search for gas or lodging. Many were more-or-less camped out at the gas stations waiting for the Exxon cavalry to arrive.
They're still waiting, or have been taken to local shelters. Here again, people pretty stoic about it all.
I was one of the lucky ones and, thanks to back roads, made it home in only about ninety minutes. That was a miracle. Away from the main highway, roads were deserted, so I'm amazed at how few elected to take alternate routes north. I, for one, would rather take a circuitous route that takes twice as long than take the direct route going nowhere. I'm sure fuel concerns (and lack of good map or nav system) played a role. I was sure pleased to have my GPS-Nav system and I'll never buy another car without one.
My better half and kids had done a splendid job preparing for the onslaught, pulling everything into the garage and lashing down everything else.
Unfortunately, one of my boats was on a borrowed trailer, so I had to put it into the water so the owner could protect his boat. I tied it off to posts and dock with dozens of sturdy lines in hopes it might make it through.
You'd have had to pull the boat in two to free it from all the ropes. More on that later.
The winds started to pick up at dinnertime as we made our own Hurricanes (the Pat O'Brien's variety) with the neighbors. The wind freshened through 9:00pm when light rains started. By 2:00am, the winds were blowing fiercely and the house was creaking, but the windows and trees were holding. The lake looked liked the North Sea with huge swells. The power went out at 2:44 in the morning, but thanks to the UPS, we still had DSL on the laptops so we could track the storm (and do the New York Times crossword puzzle, for we do know our priorities down here in the hinterlands).
Power stayed off for about four hours, but I awoke to find that the wave action proved too much for the boat moored in the water and it had literally been ripped in half. The rear transom was torn from the rest of the hull and it was sunk in such a way that it looked like one of the cars buried noseward at the Cadillac Ranch. She was a good ol' boat and I hate to lose her, but we were so lucky that was all we lost. The neighbors were fishing cushions and other detritus out of the cove and the gasoline slick bodes poorly for salvage. I'm looking to Ross Kodner to form BoatAid. (kidding, Ross!).
But the main point is that Houston, Galveston and pretty much all of Texas was spared anything like the promised Armageddon. The news media are rushing around this morning trying to find much worth filming. The old Yaga's Café on the Strand in Galveston fell down, so you'll surely see that on the national news. It's also a good time to be in the sign business.
Some 600,000 in the area are without power as I write this, but will likely get that back this weekend. Gas stations and all Wal-Marts are either closed or stripped bare, so it will take a few days for things to return to normal around the Houston metro area. Hopefully, we can do a better job bringing people back to town that getting them out, but I, for one, am going to stay off of I-45 south and away from downtown Houston for a few days. As I write this at noon on Saturday, the wind and rain have passed and all the effort seems to have been much ado about nothing. But, it was the right thing to do and I'm proud of the community for doing it as well as they did.
The Indiana Judicial System website has been rated the best in the nation, stem at the ninth biennial Court Technology Conference in Seattle, Washington. California placed second, and Florida was rated as third.
