Coverage of Rita from Two Houston Apartments

Sunday, September 25, 2005

More Trees

I biked to the office tonight to turn some of the servers in my group back on. On the way, I encountered a few more downed trees, and branches were scattered everywhere. I have to commend the residents of Southside Place, the island city (not part of Houston!) to the South of Rice through which my bike commute takes me: A lot of them had already cleaned up their yards and the street in front of their homes and stacked neatly cut pieces of wood next to their trash bins.

Rice's heavily wooded campus was hit pretty hard too. Rita had turned the engineering quad next to Duncan Hall, the building housing the Computer Science department, into an obstacle course. Some parts of Duncan Hall were strangely dark; it seems like only the emergency lighting was on. The fridge in our lab had been switched off, probably to minimize the power surge when the electricity is restored after an outage, so that was an ugly mess I had to fix. Fortunately, at home I followed an optimistic strategy: I would have turned my appliances off only after an outage had actually occurred ;-)

Keeping all the trees in mind, I have to admit that Rita was probably stronger than I had expected, even here in Houston. I'm very relieved that nothing worse happened. This was a crazy week, and I'm looking forward to the day normality has returned. The world is incredibly small, though: One of my friends reported at dinner tonight that her neighbor's wife died in the bus accident near Dallas. I'm three degrees removed from a person who lost her life this weekend. It's a potent reminder that some things will never be as they were.

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