Ike left the water on

When Mama and I were preparing for Tropical Storm Edouard, we spent some time working on the water supply. We were so very lucky when Hurricane Ike hit us that we did not lose our water supply. We stayed in Houston even without electricity--and we still don't know that that was the best choice--but we clearly could not have survived for two weeks without being able to turn on the tap and get clean water.

Some things did, however, go well, and some of our planning and preparation worked as it was supposed to. More did not.

• We ended our two weeks of no power with 5 gallons of drinking water still in storage, so we had enough for three adults to drink plenty of water on some very hot days. The Red Cross should be proud of us!
• I filled the bathtub with water the night the storm hit. It all leaked out before the storm was gone.
• I had begun saving gallon water jugs to fill up, but then read that we should find jugs that have screw tops rather than the little snap cap that we were getting. The only screw caps were were getting were on two-liter soda bottles. So we started saving those. I only got about 9 saved and filled up before the storm, so that was some incomplete work that might have hurt us.

The first thing I did the morning after the storm was turn on the tap to see what we had. I was so relieved to see that water. This gave us water for showering, toileting, cooking, washing, and all the zillion other things that we need water for on a daily basis.

Sadly, we often combine water and electricity in order to accomplish many of those things. The dishwasher didn't work without electricity, so I spent a lot of time washing dishes by hand. True, we often used paper plates, but we did try to avoid it when we could. We had to borrow the use of a generator to wash clothes after a week. I had made sure that all of our "water work" was done before the storm hit, but I was, after all, supposedly on a short visit and didn't have a lot of clothes, especially cool and casual clothes that would see a lot of dirt as we did after-storm clean up. It was even hard to do general housecleaning--the water was there, but sometimes I just couldn't see what needed to be cleaned without electric lights.

Houston issued a couple of "boil water" alerts, but we usually didn't hear about them until too late (emergency information really stank as far as I am concerned). We had good drinking water, but the dish washing and hand washing and such were probably questionable a few times. We all ended up with tummy issues, but nothing too serious, so I guess we handled it all pretty well.

One thing that we did throughout the time after the storm was fill up every plastic drink bottle we came across with pure drinking water and stash it in an ice chest. Water was good for us to drink at any temperature, but it always went down so much better when it was cold. We reused water bottles and even Coca-Cola bottles. For the trip home today, I filled up some of the small water bottles with water and froze them to help keep our canned drinks cool on the road. I also filled up some Coca-Cola bottles with cold water. I ended up drinking more of our "homemade" bottled water than I did soft drinks. I think we may have developed a new behavior!