Winnie Service Project

My home ward has about 6 cities in it, and 2 of them were under water after the hurricane finally ended. Yesterday we had a 40 minute church service and then went out to help members from our ward. We split up between two houses for the most part. One family needed blue tarps put on their roof and another family needed the whole house mucked. My mom, my brother-in-law Adam, my fiancee Matt, 2 sisters from the ward, and I went to Winnie to muck out a house. We ripped out all the paneling and insulation from the house. We were there a couple hours. Matt and Adam attacked the walls, while the ladies carried it out to the street. It was hard work. Yesterday was a great day though. It has been so long since I've really been to church. We've had two evacuations in a month, so we've had church like every other week. That has been lame, but it was great to go to church and give thanks for all that we have been blessed with.

Before

After

















I also took pictures on the drive down there and the way home. There were several fences that you could only see the tops of because the water was so high. Those used to be open fields and pastures.


















These pictures are of a barge that got brought in during the hurricane and didn't float back out with the tides. It is stuck on HWY 73 and police are located just before it on the road. Every vehicle is stopped to see where they are going. The police are only letting people who live in that area go through, but the people in our crew were allowed to go in to help muck out the house. There were two barges on the highway, but they have already taken one off the road. I heard they are having to take them apart to get them off the road.

Aftermath 1 week after Ike

I went driving around to take some pictures of the aftermath on Saturday. That was one week since Ike hit and everything is still at a stand still. It's kind of annoying driving around town, with most of the stop lights out or blinking. It makes them a 4-way stop and in most cases the other driver's don't know how to use them properly. You may have to wait for your turn 4 times before you actually get to go. Pretty annoying.

These pictures are from the city of Groves. This city neighbors mine.

The tree covers the entire front yard.

The house with the tree that fell into the side of it is my high school teacher's house.

Here's the working crews that have been brought in to get the power back on in the Golden Triangle.

Bridge City was completely under water. Most of the homes had around 6 feet of water in them. My dad's co-worker just finished building his home at the beginning of this year, and he had 6 feet of water in it. These are just random pictures on the main street in Bridge City.

These pictures are taken between Orange and Mauriceville.

During Hurricane Ike

Southeast Texas was safe from the hurricane the week leading up to Ike making landfall. Unfortunately as most hurricanes do, Ike turned and headed straight for the Southeast coast line of Texas. That change put the Golden Triangle in the Northeast quandrant of the storm, the worst area to be in a hurricane. Thursday (9/11) we woke up with a message saying Jefferson County had a mandatory evacuation for the storm surge. Meterologists said the storm surge could get as high as 20 feet in our county. That was a little bit scary. That meant if the sea wall levees didn't hold the entire county would have flooding. My family spent the day doing laundry, packing, and playing Wii Fit. We let everyone else in the county leave the area so we wouldn't be stuck in traffic. The eye of Ike hit Saturday between 1 & 2 AM 1 mile short of being at Category 3.

We evacuated to Lufkin, TX and watched the weather channel all night long. One of the TV stations from Beaumont was streaming on the internet, so we left the laptop up and running to get the local news of our area. We lost the electricity about 7:30 AM and it did not come back on until Monday afternoon. When Ike hit Lufkin, it was only a Category 1. I took my phone outside and stood on the porch to take pictures with the camera on it and captured a couple videos. The debris wasn't too bad around my brother's house, but other parts of Lufkin had trees falling down. You can only imagine what the Golden Trinagle looked like and Galveston Bay where the eye hit. The worst part about being outside during the storm was a pine needle got picked up by the wind and hit me in the leg. It left a red mark for a few minutes. It hurt for a few minutes too. The pine needle came a pretty far distance because my brother didn't have any pine trees in his yard.

The storm lasted a while and then it was over. After that all we could do was wonder what home looked like since the national networks would only focus on Galveston and Houston and nothing about the Golden Triangle. We didn't have power, so we couldn't get online and watch the internet feed from home. My parents went back home Sunday to check on our home even though the evacuation order wasn't lifted. Several of the neighboring cities were under water, but thankfully our home was safe. Now the only problem was the massive power outage, and Entergy wouldn't say when the power would be back.

The videos don't give the wind speed and storm justice.