Hurricane Rita: a photo journal
 

i am going to post as much as possible over the next few days until i loose 1. power or 2. internet connection. the following photos were taken this morning just before 8 a.m. i do have to ferry several planes to mexia texas (near waco) and plan on taking pictures of the fleeing traffic. we'll see what happens.

the first two: 1. looking NNE from my driveway 2. East and 3. SSE

Stand in the middle of your home, take a picture. Turn, take a picture. Repeat until you've done a full circle, then repeat for each room in the entire house. Burn them to a CD and take them with you.

I know you're 50 miles inland, but this is a very impressive storm.

done. i am, however, flying back from mexia today. as the track is going, i'm now on the west side of the storm which is better.

another thing that sucks at present is EVERYONE is using their cell phones and it's phucking up the system. you can make land line calls but the cell phone? you might get through about every 10th or so attempt.

This link may make interesting companion piece - updates every 30 mins if you remember to refresh

Thanks for link, Cyc. Never found it before.

k, it was an interesting day. i requested to be picked up at a local airport to my house so i wouldn't have to worry about traffic. heh. i didn't realize it would be AIR traffic! the sugarland airport, a muni, was the bussiest i've ever seen it. small terminal and people were over flowing to the front porch as well as the back. following are a couple of pics from the air of the main ramp and the next is a bunch of planes waiting for an "intersection departure". there were at least 10 others waiting at the threshold.

the next are various circuits out of the city via hwy 90A, hwy 59S, hwy 59N as well as a few others:

more:

on the way home we were talking about the door coming open and how it affects the airplane. not 5 minutes later the phucker blew! and a shot of downtown just for kicks....oh, yeah, when the door gave way, we were north of houston enroute to DWH or David Wayne Hooks airport. we thought we'd fixed the problem but on take off from there, right before rotation the door blew again. abort take off. *think* we fixed the door again. nope. right after rotation BAM! we are committed to take off so we do. then after we assess the situation, we continue the flight back to la porte airport with the door open. in a single engine it's really no big deal but in a twin you have to hang onto it and keep it as shut as possible. safe? yes and no. if you know what your doing and don't turn a non-emergency into an emergency, you'll be ok.

you guys remember the phuck up two weeks ago where the dumb ass ran out of fuel? got the pics today:

more: pretty benign for flipping a plane.....

then i think i mentioned somewhere here that our aerostar is no more. it was worse than i thought and definitely pilot error. homeboy stalled the airplane on take off, belly-landed and about 3 minutes after they egressed the phucker blew up!! no fucking shit people! it was right out of the movies! everyone escapes and BOOM! too bad the local news paper in Mexia (pronounced meh-hay-uh) don't put their shit online because they had a pic before the explosion, one during and one after on their front page. *un-fucking-believable*

almost 1:00 and no rain but gusts to 30ish mph.....

I take it you are staying, good luck.

yep and thx. it's been down graded to a cat 3 w/125 mph winds. i'll be lucky if i see 90 mph here....we'll see in a few hours though...

Galveston asos (automated surface observation)

Good luck there.

I doubt you're going to get much of anything if she hits so far Northeast of you. Just sit back, relax, have a couple drinks, and make sure you're prepared for the power to go out.

thx griff,

kit - i am, i just got back from the liquor store, NBN and i, we're stocked!

The weather channel showed a shot from a subscription website that shows a graphic of all air traffic. The traffic over Texas was nuts...mostly private with a few commercials in the air. :mg:

"I doubt you're going to get much of anything if she hits so far Northeast of you. Just sit back, relax, have a couple drinks, and make sure you're prepared for the power to go out".
Yep I live about 135 miles from where Katrena made land fall, 11 days w/out phone or power. Still no one has come by from insurance co. Look at some of my other post. Might be enlighten for some. So kick back and have a beer!

I talked to Fred ( plthijinx ) about 11am , he is fine , has power , water , and a hang over , but no Net connection .

Howdy Y'all! yeah xob the air traffic was NUTZ!
no damage, like zip said, just no net connection. i'm next door at NBN's house. he, however lost his back fence and will post a pic sometime today i think.
i wound up taking Mike and Karen from the flight school in at my house. i let them have my bedroom and i passed out (literally) on my lazy boy. funny as hell though, mike had to tow our tool truck with his trailer and fuel truck. i'll let the following pics tell the story. i did have a poker/hurricane party and won $45.

more

yeah, i was a little toasty! :drunk:

remember the guy i talked about that was with scinto the night he shot himself? here he is (2nd photo) i wouldn't allow him in my house. trust me on this one. it takes alot for me to not be hospitable, but i won't let someone in my home that i even think would steal from me.

shuffle up and deal!

more poker

Awww man that looks like fun!! I love poker. And beer. And storms. And dogs.

My good friend stayed behind (hunkered down) in Huntsville. We haven't heard from her yet. I could just shoot her - I offered her a plane ticket outta there, but she wanted to stay because of her pets. I guess I can't blame her.

she should be fine, seak. the worst of it happened east of there. louisiana and such. poor bastards, they've been through enough already. i have to fly relay again in the morning in the geronimo, door better be fixed by then!

Hey jinxy, your dog looks a bit like mine (see below - he enjoys displaying his manhod but no photoof that position....yet!) - mainly a French breed called Beauceron, but not pure - great temperament.

Just put the phone down on a shipowner we have a current contract with who is based in Houston (home) and Galveston (office). He's just got back home and phone just been turned on. Office he believes is still completely out but will be checking in morning - all blue skies and still air now outside he says!

pretty dog! cuba is mike's rot, i do though plan on getting a rot in november though...
yeah, the day turned out alright. can't complain....

My story
 

The first thing I see when I go outside is my neighbor's flagpole. Old Glory may be a bit tattered, but never torn. This was encouraging.

At approximately 0400 today, we were awakened by a loud crash. Forty feet of my back fence just blew down into my yard.

Rita con't
 

We were more worried about the palm tree, but as it turns out it probably provided additional protection. A few more inches and the fence would have been inside my bedroom.

More Rita
 

I could look at this as losing a fence, or I could look at it a gaining a boardwalk. The other pic is a rare view from my back neighbor's. His place is so nice, I'm thinking of suggesting we don't need to rebuild.

Damn NBN , See what happens when you PISS on your fence posts !!!!

Nest
 

On a short walk around the 'hood, it appears I got the only damage. I found a birdnest that was blown out of a magnolia tree, but remarkably intact. I took it home as a souvenir.

Glad to hear you guys are OK. :thumb:

Thanx, Brucie. Actually I was surprised there weren't any crossbow bolts sticking out the other side.

You want to rebuild that fence. Not for the sake of your view of your neighbors, but for the sake of the neighbors' view of you. We've seen what happens behind that fence. Think about it won't you?

NBN needn't worry.

Neighbor will build fence Sunday morning following Saturday night.

Looks like you all didn't get much than a good summer thunderstorm might have been able to do. After all the dire predictions, it is good to see that you've emerged relatively unscathed.

You are exactly right. All throughout we never got more than a hard drizzle and gusty winds in the 60 MPH range, but certainly no worse than a decent summerstorm. What was bad was the duration, 18 hours of this shit. Could have been a lot worse.

Glad you guys ducked it. Now let's set those posts a little deeper this time... unless a view of your neighbor is what you really are going for...

I heard from my friend - she is fine. She says they didn't even lose power or anything!

well i've got one. and go freaking figure that when i left my house this morning at 5:30 i forgot my camera for my helicopter relay mission. only good news out of this is i got to fly the geronimo which is valuable twin time ($160/hr) for free and get paid to do so. but that's mute in comparison to what i saw today people. my post was Abbeville Louisiana, same as with Katrina. Abbeville is 90% under water. the coast from at least there to into Texas looks as if the jolly green giant himself (not being so jolly) took a straw broom and swept the gulf onto the mainlands. you could see wind swaths and the water that came in with them. La has been losing it's marshlands for a while now, and thanks to Rita, more is lost. i circled over a VOR (aerial navigation transmitter) for about 3 hours plus and looked in awe at the destruction the whole time. fields, houses, trucks, cars, trailers, you name it, destroyed. if we are still doing the relay missions this weekend, i'll get some pics for sure. you see pictures and video on TV. that's one thing. Busterb, just damn bro. i know katrina was worse but i didn't make it that far east on the missions to even grasp what i saw today. just damn. i feel for everyone that has suffered these recent tragedies.

Okay, I'm sure I missed the explanation somewhere, but:

1) What is a helicopter relay mission?
2) How does one fly it in a fixed wing aircraft?

lol, right! this goes back to katrina, and rita did the same thing: the radio repeater towers were knocked out offshore so a helicopter company contracted us to relay the choppers flight plans to their base. i.e. go circle over said given point and fly there for several hours, take flight plans and radio them to their base in Galveston since they can't hear one another. yesterday i was over abbeville for about 5 hours before returning to my airport for fuel and a quick bite then i went to a fix southwest of Abbeville for about 3 hours. it can be boring but, hey, it's free time in the aircraft.

So, essentially, you were an airborne human repeater?

yep. sample call:

"Relay 1, Relay 1, 814 off of west cam214 enroute to westcam 300, 30 minutes, 4, and 60 gallons." pretty self explanatory, helicopter 814 is leaving oil rig west cameron 214 and he's going to west cameron 300 and it's going to take 30 minutes to get there, there are 4 on board and he's got 60 gallons of fuel on board.

so i copy that down and radio base operations and give them the info. then when the dude is landing he calls and reports that to which i relay that to base ops.

or sometimes after the enroute portion they'll just say 30, 4 and 60.

ok, i have some more pics, not from the abbeville area, but Sabine Pass/Beaumont area that was slightly less hit. yeah, it's where the eye went through but either the damage wasn't as bad or they've done a bang up job in a week cleaning things up. the first coupla pics are the shoreline where there used to be a beach but the runoff ate it up, eight more pics to follow...

this rig was stuck in the channel leading to port author and the second is/was an area where houses were. hopefully trailers or something that was easily moved by man.

these pics were taken from 9,500 feet so please excuse the quality....
the next two are of still flooded low lying areas

more low areas. in the second one here if you look hard enough you can see the direction of the wind during the hurricane

a small residential area devistated and another of the texas coastline, i just thought it made a cool pic

and finally can anyone tell me the purpose of the diamond shaped cuts in the ground? and the last one is a rig being taken in for repairs through the houston ship channel.....possibly more pics tomorrow. i have the 6 a.m. shift.

I found a picture of your and NBN's neighborhood!