Notes From Hurricane Harvey

For the sake of posterity, this is really a series of emails that I sent Khrys.

Aug 26

12:21 AM

I've spent the past 2-3 days hearing about it probably being a
Category 3 when it hit land. But I just got a notice that it upgraded
itself to a Category 4.

Most of the nastiness is supposed to stop 4-5 miles east of us. The
only thing we're supposed to have to worry about is flash flooding.
And we have this nifty canyon just behind our back yard that should be
great for dealing with that sort of thing, as long as we don't
actually try to go anywhere.

Things might get nasty for some of our neighbors who are closer to the
lake, and a lot of awful things are going to happen (starting a few
hours ago) to the southeast.

We should be completely fine. Laura's only concern is that she only
has a 2 day supply of soda.

I probably should have grabbed more booze on the way home.

But I just got an announcement from the NWS reminding me that this
*is* a serious, life-threatening storm (there's some chance it will
spawn a few tornadoes). So we're supposed to let someone know that
we're alive and doing fine.

I don't know how long we'll have internet. I don't really expect any
power outages, but I won't be surprised if they happen.

Love you!

 2:12 PM

So far so good. We're fine. We good a lot of rain this morning, then a
long break. It looks like another round is heading our way, but we
seem to be on the furthest outskirts.

Laura has a couple of friends in east Austin who don't have power. One
of them since 2 this morning. And we have a public works truck that
keeps driving past, probably keeping an eye on the low-water
crossings.

Laura said that it's downgraded to a Category 1, and is only expected
to last another day or so (as opposed to the week they were predicting
originally). Part of what made it so scary was that no one has been
able to predict anything about what it was going to do.

7:32 PM

It sounds like the really dangerous stuff is over...it's down to
"tropical storm" levels. Now we're going to get pounded with another
week of heavy rain.

So we could still get some flooding, especially as the ground gets saturated.

But that will still all be southeast of us. Now I'm almost certain
that we're out of danger.

Love you!

Aug 27

1:01 PM

Not a letter to Khrys. Just a note about a conversation.

After church, Laura was thinking of taking Mal shopping, or to get food, or something along those lines.

But the driveway into her church has a dip. She was a bit  nervous about all the water flowing across it when she arrived. It had gotten bad enough by the time church was over that she wouldn't have crossed it to get in. She was afraid that anywhere she went would have even worse problems.

Aug 28

5:43 PM

Follow-up letter to Khrys:

We're clear. It's blowing eastward, and we started getting blue skies this afternoon.

The radio said we have a 20% chance of more rain tonight, then 40% tomorrow. But we never got enough to even get a little waterfall going into our gorge out back.

Sep 02

Aftermath

The storm revealed a minor roof leak, in the vicinity of our back porch. Its roof had some water damage when we moved in. Now it's quite a bit worse.

The frame for our back door warped enough (or maybe hinges wiggled loose...something went wonky) that it no longer opens.

There's a strange warp in our hall floor that we haven't noticed before. Almost as though some of the foundation pillars settled a bit. Or maybe we just haven't been paying attention.

So, really, we got away incredibly lightly.