Hurricane Ike

For those of you who don't know, I am from southeast Texas which for the past 4 years have been a Hurricane Alley. For the 18 years I lived there, I think we only have had to evacuate maybe twice for hurricanes and none of them did any damage. In just the past 4 years however, my family has had to evacuate 4 or 5 times for hurricanes coming right their way! Right before Justin and I got married, Hurricane Rita burrowed through our small town as a category 3 and pretty much took every tree down with her and caused a lot of damage. I think my family was actually without power for like a month. And then this last week Hurricane Ike caused a lot of damage in my city and especially to the cities surrounding it. My parents decided to wait the hurricane out in our house, which luckily had minimal damage. We had a few trees come down but none of which hit the house.. whew! Turns out because Rita took out most of the trees down there, but Ike brought in all of the water. Ive never seen southeast Texas so flooded before. Where streets were, rivers are now there. For example...
This is the underpass on Main Street in Vidor ( my hometown). I think that might be the roof of a car you can see under it. That has to be about 7-8 ft high. Thanks Caroline for the pic!

Luckily our house is high enough up in elevation that we didnt receive any flood damage. Unfortunately the cities south of us were pretty much demolished by flooding. Check out the pictures on this website ( thanks Rachel) It's pretty sad....
http://kogt.smugmug.com/gallery/5953607_Nn2hu#371807198_RjkXc

We are hoping that another hurricane doesn't decide to come through and finish these poor cities off. Oh yeah, and remind me to never live in southeast Texas again! I think I like Phoenix- no real natural disaster threats, I like that!