The Big Storm

Is everybody OK?

The power here at the Brazosport News was just restored. Hurray for electricity! Hurray for air conditioning!

Tropical Storm Fay blew down a lot of trees, knocked out power and dumped, by our measure, more than 7 inches of rain in a short amount of time. (We can’t be more precise with our precipitation measurement because the backyard rain gauge was full and overflowing by the time we got home around 10 p.m.)

In our neighborhood, a tree fell into a house and punctured a water line. The homeowner wasn’t there, but a friend who noticed water pouring out of the home cut off the water. Hurray for vigilant neighbors!

Other neighbors who have lived here longer than us say they never saw water so high in the streets.

We drove through the the height of the storm back from Houston in a blinding rain. We were going about 20 mph by the time we hit Angleton. The water was too high at the low end of our street to get home, so we parked in a neighbor’s driveway and sloshed into the front door. We watched another neighbor in his Cadillac plow through the bumper-high water and make it to his driveway.

Scooter, my wife and assistant, happened to notice the basketball goal at our across-the-street neighbor’s was about to be blown over into one of their vehicles. She called and warned him. He ventured out into the deluge and moved his car. Then, sometime later, a tree was uprooted and landed right where his car had been parked.

“I owe you a big thank-you,” he said the next morning.

We lent him our rinky dink chain saw this morning to chop up the tree, but when a post-storm entreprenuer with a chain saw about twice as big as ours happened by and offered to cut the fallen tree for $45, he opted for the hired hand.

Good call.

Hurray for chain saws!

After the power went out on Friday night, we turned on the police scanner to hear what we could learn.

“Boy, those cops earn their money at times like this,” I told Scooter.

Listening to the scanner traffic, we eavesdropped on a series of puzzling transmissions involving a Jack-in-the-Box restaurant that went on for something like 30 minutes.

There was a report of a broken window at Jack (we think the one in Clute).

One cop arrived and described the breakage.

“It’s about a foot long,” the officer said.

He drove on.

Then, minutes later, another cop showed up to investigate the report.

“It looks like it might have been caused by flying debris,” he said.

Where’s the key holder?

On his way.

It must have taken a long while for the keyholder to show because the cops kept talking about the broken window at Jack-in-the-Box for an inordinate amount of time.

We surmised the damage report that went out over the police radio kept getting answered by different officers who arrived at different times because no one seemed to be satisfied after the first investigation that the Jack-in-the-Box wasn’t in grave peril.

But maybe we’re wrong since relying on police scanner transmissions for accurate information can be tricky.

In Lake Jackson, Burger King and McDonald’s was closed due to the power outage, but Chick Fil-A and Whataburger were doing a land office business today.

Wal-Mart was open but Randall’s was closed.

Wal-Mart was kinda stuffy, though, cause talk among the clientele was that the store lost power about 11 p.m. last night, cutting off the air conditioning for a time, leading us to forego the purchase of anything that, well, might prove to have salmonella-like consequences later.

Anyway, we bought a Weber grill to cook some chicken that we figured was about to go bad in our electricity-less refrigerator.

After more than 7 years in Lake Jackson, I never had bought a barbecue grill. Yeah, yeah, that’s downright unAmerican, I know, but I have one now. Right about the time I finished the chicken grilling, the power came back on.

Hurray for power!