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Morning before Rita: the
largest hardware store in town takes numbers for the last generators
coming to town.
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"The truck is late, we
don't know when it is coming. It will have only ten generators
on it, if it gets here."
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We are 250 miles from
the coast. Rita will not make landfall for eighteen more hours.
Already we can see her clouds
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We Are open! They
have plenty ice in the morning, I buy lots of canned goods. The rain
and wind starts just at dusk, around ten pm, a large limb falls from
our tree onto the neighbor's house. A few punctures of the roof
on the den, but no structural damage. We lose power about 3 a.m.
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In the morning there's
lots of wind
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. . .and rain
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Our three oak trees lighten their
load
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The street is flooding because the
drains are stopped up with debris, my neighbors clean them out, as the
postman(!) passes delivering the mail with the eye of the storm just
sixty miles away
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The street beside our house
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The rain is nearly over, but the
winds keep dropping branches.
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This is the first time
since 1991 I've really worried about these tall trees, they bend
and swirl with the lashing winds. We were fortunate
though, the only damage except for windfall limbs was on my
neighbor's house and that wasn't serious, just scary.
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We were spared a direct hit.
The eye wall passed along the other side of the Sabine
river just 50 miles away. This is across from my son's
apartment.
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This tree toppled between two garages
with cars in them. Didn't hit either
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Not so lucky here; the top of the
tree is in a house. No major structural damage though. The
owner was watching as the tree fell. If I wrote what he said at
the time, I'd have to delete it.
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Power lines down all over, we got
power back up late the same night, but some people were without
service for two weeks.
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At the Public Library, a tree
narrowly missed the building
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Limbs crashed through the fence at
the American Cemetery
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Several days later, Wayne came to
take my limb out of Nick's roof
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John does delicate
surgery with a chainsaw avoiding having the rest of the limb fall into
the house.
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Seems out of context,
but this is a cotton field near my house. about half the crop is
on the ground, and the rest is soaked. A big loss considering
some 6000 acres in Natchitoches Parish were ready for harvest.
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