One of many fallen once-majestic trees: Snapped, not uprooted: The tree fell in their child's room. Fortunately, they had left before the storm: This garage is going to need a little more work: The guy in the maroon shirt with the chainsaw lost the front half of his house to a falling tree -- he and his 7-month pregnant wife were on the front porch when the

Driving down Yale St.

The wind and water are still blowing, but the worst appears to be past. The neighborhood is a mess. Trees are shattered or downed. The only areas in Houston with power are downtown and the medical center (per USA Today). Lower-lying areas might still see flooding from the rains. We're extraordinarily lucky.

1.6 million people are without power. Brennan's Restaurant in Houston reportedly burned down. There have been major fires in Galveston too. No emergency services there for the people who stuck around despite the mandatory evacuation ordered two days ago. We are very lucky.

An anonymous commenter (he calls himself "Scott") on Eric Berger's SciGuy blog wrote:You "experts" better HOPE it's as bad as your saying or your "chicken little" DRAMA will bite you from now on.You better HOPE it's another 25 years before the next one so people won't remember what DRAMA QUEEN MORONS you are!Those who attack others anonymously in blog comments are, as a general principle, colossal asshats,

I went to fetch Oma back here; there was hardly anyone on the road -- I passed maybe three other cars on I-10. There are lots of small branches in the streets; lots of people don't have power, probably as a result of transformers blowing when branches blow onto power lines. I guess it's not cost-effective for the utilities to keep trees cut away from lines, and

A nice breeze, with a few gusts. Few drops of rain. We heard a transformer blow in the neighborhood about 15 minutes ago, but we still have power. I relented and boarded up a few critical windows -- Jennifer can be very persuasive.Oma's power (she lives a few miles northwest of here) is out already. She had vowed, in the event of an outage, to get in

It turns out that storm tides were largely responsible for the 6,000-12,000 deaths in the Galveston Storm of 1900 (the deadliest natural disaster in the United States, even now). Those tides were 8 to 15 feet.Since then the elevation of the city has been raised, but with a storm surge up to 22 feet above sea level expected, it is foolhardy to remain on the island, as

Thank you to all who have expressed concern about how we'll fare in Hurricane Ike.Ike looks like it will come ashore somewhere on Galveston Island (50 miles to our southeast) with a huge (up to 22-foot) storm surge. Galveston has a seawall that is 17 feet high on the Gulf of Mexico side only. So Galveston is in a world of hurt. (Since I wrote that, I

Yes, that's plywood duct-taped to the windowframe.