Friday night was a noisy night. Winds steadily increased from breezy to windy to powerful to indescribable. Through most of the storm the sound of the wind reminded me of heavy surf crashing against the shore. That sound was constant. In spite of the fact that it was holding steady at 60 mph and higher, it almost had a soothing sound to it, like walking on the beach. Then, around 1:30 AM the intensity ramped up. We had actually gone to sleep, but as the eye of Hurricane Ike moved on shore the volume got so loud that we got up to see what was happening. The “loud surf” continued, but along with it was the sound of being in a subway station as the trains come rushing in through the subway tubes: a rumbling that rapidly gains intensity and then suddenly bursts over you. The “subways” came in one after another for about two hours. We were hearing the wind off of the eye wall. At that time our sustained winds were 80-90 mph and those gusts were up to 110 mph. Our community never saw the calm eye as we were in the southern eye wall the whole time. Apparently, we had some tornadoes also, however, we never heard the “freight train” we have heard about. Frankly, we went back to bed around 2:30. At that time we prayed a short prayer and drifted back to sleep.
As you can see, I can talk a lot about what we heard, but I can’t describe much else. I left myself two openings so we could look outside, but in the midst of the storm there was nothing to see. The rain was very heavy and it was being driven sideways. Had there been no wind, it would have looked like pea-soup fog. Because of that, even with a flashlight, we could only see a few feet out into the back yard. And, again, we actually went back to bed and more or less slept through the varying stages of the storm.