Damage Assessment

Local officials continue to do damage assessment within our town and as of right now the info is not that promising. Entergy, our power supplier, says that 99% of Texans in southeast Texas are without power and 119 out of 187 transmission lines are out with two entire plants off line, so they do not estimate that we'll have power for weeks. The sewer lines have been comprised so you can guess what that means. And several of our local schools sustained a lot of damage too.

Mark still has cell service, our home line is out. He and I continue to be in contact and he more than likely will head our way today, if he can get out. He spent so much time preparing our house and helping some of our church members that he's concerned about how much gas he has in his tank now, and there are no gas stations open. Also the damage to some local highways is not totally known and as the storm progressed north, it did more damage through towns we usually travel through but are not shown on our local news, just national, so it's hard to know what the roads are like there.

I just tried to pull up our school board site and it's offline so I'm not sure what we'll do about school for the kids. They're obviously not begging me to find a solution but I'm nervous about the possibility of them being out school for weeks. I have all their records with me in the paperwork you should always have in place to gather if there's a storm, so I could register them here at my parents but that seems like such a headache.

Just wanted to give everyone a little update and I'll continue to do so when I have something a little more promising to post. Thank you so much for all the messages you've sent to our email and cell phones. We really appreciate the support.