Hurricane Ike

I thought that I would make a quick post on the Hurricane situation. I have gotten a lot of questions from people asking how we are doing and where we are in relation to Ike. So...

Here is a map of the great state of Texas. Lubbock is on the West side of the state, NW of the Houston/Galveston area. It is funny that more people know where Amarillo is when Lubbock is bigger and has a major university...

Anyway, back to Ike. As you probably know, Ike hit Galveston directly. And Houston got it with the Hurricane downgraded to a 1. It is expected to Turn to the northeast so we shouldn't get hit by Ike at all.

It is nice that we won't even get any of the water that falls as it passes Texas. I think we tend to miss most of the storms from the Gulf.

We do not however miss the remnants of hurricanes/tropical storms out of the pacific. On Thursday we received 8 inches of rain in 24 hours that fell following Tropical Storm Lowell. The storm was really bad. The biggest problem with the flooding is that Lubbock is filled with lakes. These lakes are usually in the parks and they flood and take their level up over the side walks, the parks and into the housing surrounding them. We also have really bad drainage problems on roads. The roads don't drain, I don't know if there just isn't any sort of sewers or something under the road, but the roads flood really bad and you can't drive through them. So you get rain like we had this week, and you are trapped in your house because the road in front of your house is so flooded your car will get washed away. The canceled school on Friday for Jaicie. The Walmart parking lot was so flooded there were hardly any parking spots left.I saw a picture of a stop sign that had only about a foot of metal below the sign.I drove through an intersection Thursday around 3, before the worst of the rain. The intersection was completely flooded and water was up covering the sidewalk on the edges. It was crazy!

Anyway, we wanted to let everyone know that our family is doing fine despite the storms all around us. We are greatful for the fact that the rain expected to continue to fall through Sunday stopped. We have been very fortunate. We have many friends down in Houston and surrounding areas. And we will continue to keep them in our prayers in hopes that they are safe and their homes are okay. Lubbock is set to take evacuees from the Areas hit by Ike, so it is a good thing that a lot of the water here has subsided.