Bruce Johnson wrote:
> There's one photo with the oddest caption, about a store that
> reopened..."Residents jam the store to purchase all the essentials,
> and cigarettes and beer."
>
> AND cigarettes and beer!! Don't those come first on the list??? ;-)
Yeah, for a lot of folks here cigarettes and beer are essentials, but
toilet paper is right up there, too. :) However, cigarettes (fire of
any kind) doesn't go well with mounds and mounds and mounds of bone dry
branches and leaves that line both sides of every street and cover the
yards, and beer isn't the proper lubricant for thousands of us trying to
use chain saws to clear said debris from our roofs and yards. :)
You know there are still streets here that are like tree tunnels. Trees
have fallen across the road, but are being supported by trees on the
other side so cars can still travel up and down them. I had to go down
one like that Saturday so Mom could check out the Pace/Pea Ridge
Homemaker's Clubhouse. I could just imagine one of those massive trees
breaking it's support and falling down on me, but we made it in and out
okay. The Clubhouse had a lot of trees fallen around it, and the power
pole was snapped off about 8 feet up, but there was no damage to the
building that I could see. There are pictures I should take that show
the damage out here in the countryside away from the beaches. There are
buildings that were *completely* destroyed right next to buildings with
no damage at all. There are trailer parks that look like a bomb was
dropped in, and others that are still there. Oh, and down on the bay
next the 90 there was an RV park and a fish camp just up the road from
it....now there is *nothing*, pieces of docks still exist, but the
buildings are just...plain...gone. From the highway you can see where
the storm surge went up 200 or 300 hundred yards sweeping everything
ahead of it, but when it withdrew it must have taken all the remains of
the houses and boats with it. You can see snags and broken hunks of
roofs and walls scattered all over the bay.
I drove in to work today, a 20 minute drive to the main campus took over
an hour because of the stacked up traffic. Then I drove across town to
my campus on the west side (nearer the hurricane's path), and was very
happily surprised to find there was almost *no* damage to my campus. The
computer labs were up and running, my office was just as I left it, a
*lot* of pine trees had snapped off, but none did any damage to the
buildings. The main campus wasn't so lucky...a tornado took the roof
off the Computer Lab building and wreaked the Networking and Engineering
Tech rooms. It looks like the main lab and computer rooms and computers
downstairs suffered a lot of water damage. We won't know until Wednesday
whether we can hold classes in there or not, but the Lab Techs have
already started "salvaging" the computers, and think most will be okay
once they are well dried and cleaned (or would that be well cleaned and
dried). IAC, *I* am golden as 4 of my 5 classes are in labs on the West
campus and they are undamaged and fully operational.
Eris
