Brian Dusablon

So I’m in Kingwood, Texas – northeast of Houston. We’re about 45 miles from Galveston, as a bird flies. Our area was hit pretty hard by Hurricane Ike, but, luckily, we sustained no damage to the house. In fact, of all the people I know in the area, friends, family, coworkers, all were safe from harm and only a few had house damage, which is amazing to me.

At 06:00 Saturday morning, the eye was over us. The center of the eye was only 7 miles away, and eye was HUGE. At that point, the stats were: Wind Speed: 99 (sustained) 132 (gusts) mph. When they eye passed, we started getting the back side of the storm, with stronger gusts and that’s what did a lot of damage in our area, with trees all over the place (like below, at my brother’s house):

Luckily, we didn’t see any damage, just a ton of small branches, pine needles and small debris, and one small (and already dead) tree:

My lot has about 30 trees on it, mostly pines, and we didn’t lose but one crappy small tree that was already dead – so we consider ourselves very lucky.

On the flip-side, we had a tough time with power. We were one of the last neighborhoods on the northeast side to get power, 13 days after Ike. The first week was like an extended camp out and we managed very well. The cool weather that came in behind Ike helped a lot.

Week two was a little more rough. Temps started to creep up, getting to sleep at night was more annoying, but a battery-operated fan helped us make it through, and as I mentioned above, we were still so very lucky to escape harm and damage, that we had nothing to complain about.

All in all, we are very thankful to not be homeless, injured, or worse after this storm. Here are some more pictures – I’ll add a video soon.