Today, we checked out the house, again, and lo and behold, it finally has power again!  Huzzah!

All in all, it hasn’t been that bad for us.  We crashed with friends, ate out all the time, and (thankfully) had daycare for our daughter as of Thursday last week.  Indeed, I’m seeing fewer people’s kids around the office this week and more people seem to be getting back into the groove.

Even though Rice wanted classes to restart on Tuesday of last week, the unstated unofficial everybody-get-back-to-work day was really yesterday, Monday, just over a week after the hurricane.  What’s the status of the city?

Many people are still without power, and the power crews are now dealing with harder cases, individually damaged lines, and so forth.  Getting the rest of the city online may well take a good long time.  Another interesting effect is that the rush-hour traffic is beyond insane.  Luckily, our daily commute is short enough that we’re largely immute to this, but traffic lights which reset to blinking red are slowing down everything, to the point that remote freeway exits are backing up into the freeways due to the malfunctioning traffic lights at the intersections below.  The Chron estimates it could be until November until all the traffic lights are repaired.  Ouch.

Naturally, one of the tempting purchases for us is some kind of natural gas powered, permanently installed generator.  I’m sure if I shop around for one now, I’d pay a mint to get it.  Maybe in the off season… Needless to say, I don’t see the city investing to bury all the power lines that run above ground.  They have legitimately higher priorities.  As to me, I sure would have been happy to have had power all the way through this thing, brought to us by the one utility that never had any downtime: our natural gas line.

[Sidebar: it takes a major power outage for you to really appreciate how people got by in the days before electrical power.  Pickling, preserving, and other techniques suddenly seem awfully clever.  Some candles put out an awful lot more light than others.  You can also see why it was a standard architectural feature of old Southern homes to have big outdoor porches — so you’d have somewhere slightly cooler to sleep than indoors.]

Many people have been emailing me to send their best wishes. I thought it would be helpful to post a brief note on what happened and where we’re all at.

As you know, Hurricane Ike hit shore early Saturday morning. The wind, combined with a massive storm surge, caused staggering devastation along the Texas coast. Houston is further inland, so the big issue for us was and still is fallen trees and downed power lines. Rice University, as a result of what must have been a huge amount of advance effort, came through with flying colors. They had power and a working network pretty much the whole time. They didn’t have any water pressure for a while, but that came online Monday. Our main data center, built recently with an explicit goal of surviving events like this, apparently lost power for a while, at least in part. (I don’t have the full story yet. I do know that a failed DNS server caused our email server to experience problems.)

Our own house had no particular damage, although the back fence came down. We still have no power, but we’ve had water pressure (initially low, now fine) and natural gas the whole time. The hardwired telephone had a few outages, but continues to work reliably. Cellular phones were initially dicey but are now working great.

Luckily, the weather has been unseasonably cool, so we and all our neighbors have been leaving windows open. Over the weekend, the highs are in the mid 80’s (28-30C), with cooler weather at night, so we’ll do okay on that front. At this point, many restaurants are open, so the lack of power doesn’t mean living off canned food. Likewise, some gas stations and supermarkets are coming online again. Life, at least in this part of the city, is starting to resemble normality.

A looming concern is mosquitos. After Tropical Storm Allison in 2001 (see my photos), the big issue was clearly mosquitos. Lots of rain means lots of standing water, and that means mosquitos are on their way. Back then, few people lost power. This time, it’s going to get ugly.

Rice had a full faculty meeting on Tuesday morning. Our president announced that we would be resuming classes on Tuesday afternoon, but we could not have any assignments due or exams given this week. Last night, we got an email saying that everybody has made assignments due Monday next week, and that we needed do something else (without saying what). Apparently, there’s been an outpouring, among our students, of interest in volunteering to help the community (a good thing!), and I’d certainly like our students to get out and help. But if we’re supposed to get back to teaching, then that means work. I’m not sure how we’ll ultimately resolve this.

Unscientific data: our president asked for a show of hands at the meeting. How many faculty had no power? Maybe 90%. How many faculty had no daycare for their kids? Maybe 80%. How many faculty had significant damage to their homes? Maybe 20%.

For any of you who want to see what I saw, I took a bunch of pictures.

Meanwhile, I need to get back to work myself. We’ve got a research paper due Friday. Life goes on.

As Tinker readers may know, I live in Houston, Texas, and we’ve got Hurricane Ike bearing down on us.  Twenty-four hours ago, I was busy with everything else and hadn’t even stopped to think about it.  Earlier this week, the forecasts had Ike going far south of here.  That all changed and now it appears likely that Ike will hit the Texas coast not to far away.  The eye of the storm is probably not going anywhere near us, but we’ll be on the “dirty” side of the storm, and that means lots of rain and possible power outages.

Yesterday, I went to the supermarket and stocked up on assorted non-perishable goods, waters, batteries, and all that.  The lines were entirely reasonable.  The supermarket was clearly more prepared than I was, bringing in several shipping palettes of bottled water.  (Today, I’d bet the supermarket is crazier, but I’m not heading there to find out.)

My house is 51 feet above sea level and is outside the statutory flood plain.  At least in theory, I don’t have to worry much about flooding.  The most likely concern would be wind-driven rain getting through the not-terribly-well-sealed front door or some of the “French doors” that our builder overused on the house.  (“French doors”, which I doubt have much to do with France, are double doors, hinged on the side, and meeting in the middle where they latch to one another.)  My plan is to run a seam of duct tape around around the outside of the doors and windows on the first floor.  We’ll get in and out via the garage (which we tend to do, anyway).  I’m not going to try climbing up a ladder to the second story, since those “casement” windows seem to be more solid.

To evacuate or not to evacuate?  That’s the question.  When Hurricane Rita came through three years ago, we spent a thoroughly unpleasant 17 hours driving from Houston to Dallas (normally a four hour drive), where my parents live.  This time, our plan is to ride out the storm and then evaluate what we’re doing next.  Assuming the house is intact and we have power, we’ll be fine.  If we lose power and it appears unlikely to come back any time soon, or if our house is thrashed, then we’ll worry about evacuating.

Of course, I have to worry about more than just my family.  I also have to worry about my research group, the students in my classes, and so forth.  My security class meets this afternoon.  We’ll be talking about disasters.  (I tried to get some people from our university’s IT department to come talk about their disaster preparation, but unsurprisingly they’re busy preparing.  I’ll try to get some of them after it’s all over.)

For our research group, I’ve got a paper in the works for NDSS ’09, whose submission deadline is basically the same as when the hurricane is due.  The chair was nice enough to give us an extension, so now we just have to work out how we can keep doing the writing, even if there’s no power around.  (Felten has graciously offered to host our subversion server.  Luckily, the experimental work is all done, so it’s just a matter of getting it written up properly.)

Who knew disaster preparation could be so much fun?