My First Hurricane...

(Hey it's Austin. Just for the record, I got the email from my dad at 3:27 AM. Something tells me that he didn't get a whole lot of sleep last night...)

Got about 90-minutes of sleep when the walkie-talkie I left on near my cot started crackling with life. “Call back Engineering.” “Call back Heart Tower.” “All hands to the Heart Tower.” “Brock is outside restarting the generator.” “We’ve got to get these chillers back online.” Our backup generator went down at 1:00am, so the A/C in the heart hospital was down, too. That had to be restored, so there was lots going on. Fully awake by the activity, and aware that there was probably plenty to do, I got up, threw on a cap and grabbed a flashlight.

Water is coming in from the roof of the main hospital from all over the place, and it is leaking into the heart hospital in a few places, too. Several trees in our parking lot are down, and a wooden fence behind our hospital was knocked all over the place. Everything is wet but there is no standing water anywhere. There is so much wind that the water if being pushed off the streets and hurled sideways through the air. There is a roar in the air that sounds a little like road noise when you are going 80+ mph in an old car, plus whistling, cracking and breaking noises mixed in for full effect.

The eye passed a little to our west, so we got only a 30-minute break from the winds, which was enough for the smokers to flock to the ER and burn off a couple of quick smokes. Someone suggested we should have brought a brisket with us - between the heat and the smoke it would have been done before the back eye-wall passed over.


Transformers are blowing all around us, lighting the entire sky with a teal blue flash that is both unexpected and highly unusual looking. The firefighters in the heart hospital lobby told us the Clear Lake Hilton has six feet of water in it, the front facing of the building has been torn off, the building is generally getting ripped to shreds and all the guests are gathered in the stairwells for safety. Water from the storm surge has come up as far as the road in front of the Hilton, which sits on the bay but is several miles inland. It is only a mile or so to NASA from there, which makes me wonder how they are faring.

Random images. A Midlothian police officer is guarding our ER Entrance with an AK-47. The Command Center had two huge pans of chicken tenders everyone was eating at 2:30 in the morning. A Nassau Bay firefighter told us their HQ had measured a wind gust of 112 miles per hour. A housing addition near Shelley’s work was reported to have all of its homes flooded.

It’s 5:30 and I had a shower just a little while ago, hoping it would make me feel more alert. Did. Not. Work.

I bet I can catch another hour’s sleep before sunrise, when we will – for the first time – be able to see just what Ike has been up to all night.