September 13, 2008

Houston and Ike

Ike is inland now and losing energy. The center is past Houston, where as I post this the winds should be declining and the rain mostly over.

It didn't turn out to be as bad as I feared it would be. Initial estimates were for a 21-foot storm surge, but it turned out to be about 9 feet, which is a "whew!" feeling.

Still bad, though. Galveston got flooded, and with all the people who decided to stay on in that area, I won't be surprised at all if a thousand people died.

But with our friend Ubu Roi's house at elevation 23 feet, a 9 foot surge allows something of a margin of safety. It means that the only flooding where he is should be due to rain run-off. I've been having nightmare images of his house being chest deep in storm surge, and now I think that probably didn't happen. I certainly hope it didn't.

I haven't seen any reports yet of how much rain the area got. Hurricanes usually dump a lot of rain, but this one has been atypical in a lot of ways.

Ubu stopped updating his blog around 1 AM CDT, presumably because electric power went out or his net connection went down, or more likely both. They're talking about it maybe being weeks before all power is restored in the region, because of all the lines that are down and because of all the transformers that blew up, so at best he probably won't be online again for days, and it could be a month or more.

Paging Dr. Heinous: if you hear from Ubu by phone, could you offer us an update, here or on one of Ubu's own blogs? It seems that's probably the only way the rest of us are going to find out how things are going for him, and I'm still really worried.

UPDATE: How fast does a gas-powered generator drink gasoline? Ubu has an 1800 watt generator and laid in 60 gallons of gas before the storm hit. I just tried chewing some numbers and came up with that being enough to last 170 days, running 24 hours per day, and I don't believe that. No way it's that much, so I must have fouled up my calculation somewhere.

If he can get through on a couple of gallons a day, however, then he should have plenty to hold until things normalize more, and at the very least he'd be able to buy more gasoline by then even if his power isn't back on.

UPDATE: OK, I did it again from scratch and came up with his gas lasting 15 days, which I believe a whole lot more. How's this look?

Energy in gasoline 35000000 joules/liter
liters/gallon 3.79 l/gallon
Ubu's gasoline supply 60 gallons
Total energy available 7959000000 joules
     
Energy produced by generator 1800 joules/sec
Conversion efficiency 0.3
seconds/hour 3600 sec/hour
Gasoline energy used per hour 21600000 joules
     
Total hours 368.47 hours
Total days 15.35 days

So about two weeks, more or less, assuming his generator is running full out. Since the largest load is an air conditioner, which won't be running 100% of the time, it should last even longer.

(This is what engineers do when they're worried. Absent any real information, I'm trying to convince myself that Ubu is OK.)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Daily Life at 10:19 AM | Comments (12) | Add Comment
Post contains 558 words, total size 4 kb.

1 I am more concerned with drinking water. Cannot find anything on the blog, too many updates.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at September 13, 2008 10:58 AM (/ppBw)

2

He laid in 30 gallons of bottled water for three people. That should last a long time if they don't waste it. (And I wouldn't be surprised if he filled his bathtub, too, and every pot and pan and tub in the kitchen.)

I figure that's at least two weeks worth, and I'm sure Houston will have the water works back online before then.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at September 13, 2008 11:03 AM (+rSRq)

3 Gotta say, the power company in Houston is -top-notch- when it comes to getting the lights back on. I'd be surprised if it was more than a few days for most people, myself.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at September 13, 2008 11:57 AM (pfysU)

4 Avatar, this is the most recent thing I've seen on the state of the grid: "...only under ground power lines in Down Town Houston and the Texas Medical center survived the storm. All above ground electrical power lines are heavily damaged and inoperative in the Houston Area".

-j

Posted by: J Greely at September 13, 2008 12:05 PM (2XtN5)

5 I talked to Ubu... I've been having trouble here in Dallas with the phones, it seems the lines are busy (I'm having to work with people in NYC today and I've been in a conference call all day because if I hang up I might not get back in).

Anyway, he said there was some minor flooding, a nearby house took a falling tree, but other than that it seemed the damage was minor. The storm has really passed, so basically everthing is calming down.


The Stainless Steel Brat finally got through to me as well (she is on Conroe, maybe 60 miles north of Houston. She was somewhat underwhelmed, though is also not looking foward to being without power for an extended time.

I've not been able to get my parents, but they are only a few miles from Ubu so I am certain they are fine.

So as far as non-downtown/Clear Lake/Galveston, things don't seem to be too bad other than the power situation.

Given that the wind damage doesn't seem to have qutie been as bad as expected, I suspect power will be back sooner than anticipated to the greater Houston metro area.


Posted by: DrHeinous at September 13, 2008 12:33 PM (j/ozv)

6 Thank you very much. And that is really a very great relief.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at September 13, 2008 12:47 PM (+rSRq)

7 All good news.  Thank god he was smart enough to be prepared.  When the '89 earthquake hit in SF, I had almost nothing in the way of emergency supplies (that I was wretchedly poor at the time and obsessed with running SP offers some excuse).  It was just pure luck we were in an area that didn't lose gas (some people lost it for months) and our electricity and water was out only a few days.  As you can imagine, I'm much better equipped now.

Posted by: Toren at September 13, 2008 01:56 PM (cDT96)

8 "He laid in 30 gallons of bottled water for three people."

Unless he has an instantaneous hot water heater, there maybe 30-40 gals in the hot water heater

Posted by: engdre at September 13, 2008 04:00 PM (L4gtU)

9 Yeah, but it's kind of hard to get it out, and I don't think he'll need it. Anyway, he can't read these comments to find your unsolicited advice.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at September 13, 2008 05:15 PM (+rSRq)

10 I've got one set of friends on the SW side of town who are back up and running, power-wise, though they've been instructed to boil water until the city can check it for contamination. Folks are still down, phone and power both, though ironically they can send text messages.

An awful lot of the power infrastructure in Houston is buried rather than strung from telephone poles. It's a trade-off - your transformers are more vulnerable to flood damage, but it's a lot easier coming back up after one of these. Helps that most of the city is "new" by urban standards, and that underground in Houston is completely worthless except for running utility lines - the water table's too high for basements and the like.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at September 13, 2008 08:07 PM (pfysU)

11

Folks are still down, phone and power both, though ironically they can send text messages.

I assume you're talking about text messages via their cell phones. I think that's a pretty common response these days by cell companies to this kind of situation, because text messaging uses a lot less bandwidth than voice calls do. In order to allow the greatest number of people to communicate at one time, they shut voice calls down.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at September 13, 2008 08:14 PM (+rSRq)

12 Thanks for worrying everyone, but we're all fine. No water in the house, not even close.  Storm surge was around 12 feet.  Lots of areas along the bay are flooded.  Unconfirmed reports of deaths from Galveston, but we're in SAR mode right now, recovery will be later.  The storm appears to have slid just far enough east to spare Houston the worst, but it was picking back up and becoming organized again; another 24 hours and it would have been as bad as feared. 

The eye passed right over my house which took over an hour, because it was so huge. Then the backside hit, which had really picked up in strength; it was worse than the leading edge.

Gas supply was not as good as we'd thought; it was a 6750 watt generator, not 1800, and it was drinking fuel at a pretty good clip.  We had maybe another two days in the ready cans,  then another day or so in the barrel.  Then we'd be siphoning vehicles.  We were seriously looking at evacuating my elderly mother as soon as the roads were clear.  We were rotating power supply to the freezer and kitchen refrigerator, keeping her portable A/C running, and had natural gas to cook with.  Water pressure got really minimal for a while but is coming back up; haven't even touched most of our bottled reserve.  Every tub and sink was full; we even got to bathe yesterday.  Power came back up about 9:30 AM.  Still cleaning up.  Will post more at Houblog tonight; will probably be busy all afternoon.

Posted by: ubu at September 14, 2008 08:54 AM (CbMBO)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

Enclose all spoilers in spoiler tags:
      [spoiler]your spoiler here[/spoiler]
Spoilers which are not properly tagged will be ruthlessly deleted on sight.
Also, I hate unsolicited suggestions and advice. (Even when you think you're being funny.)

At Chizumatic, we take pride in being incomplete, incorrect, inconsistent, and unfair. We do all of them deliberately.

How to put links in your comment

Comments are disabled. Post is locked.
16kb generated in CPU 0.0072, elapsed 0.0175 seconds.
21 queries taking 0.0122 seconds, 29 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.