We woke up to really bad news this morning. Thunderstorms dumped inches of rain on an already waterlogged city. Buffalo and White Oak bayous were already stressed but now we are looking at flooding reminiscent of tropical storm Allison.

The interstate in front of us looks like a 100 foot wide river. I’m hearing that I-45 south is similarly flooded and sealed off. It’s going to get worse too. Radar shows much more rain on the way.

We need to reach a friend’s family with some supplies. Unfortunately, they’re in Clear Lake which means that we’ll have to skirt a lot of flooded highways, We’re leaving in about a hlf hour and expect this to take several hours. Hopefully, we’ll make it back before the city-wide curfew goes into effect.

More updates to follow.

Update:
Mayor White is asking people to stay off the streets. That’s great advice. We’re only traveling out of necessity. We’re both locals and have decades of experience dealing with these kinds of situations.

The past few hours have been pretty intense. We expected the eye to pass over but we ended up riding its Western edge the entire time. We’ve seen no letup in Ike’s intensity. In fact, it seems to get worse by the hour.

Trees have been ripped apart, parts of the building’s siding have been ripped off, and the bayou next to us (I-10 and Studemont) is rising to frightening levels. I think we are in for some severe flooding. Yet somehow, through all of this, electricity and internet remain functional.

My personal safety isn’t an issue. I can go up several floors if catastrophic flooding occurs and I have to say that I can’t imagine it not occurring at the moment. I hope that the rain lets up.

We were on balcony overlooking interstate 10. It was being whipped by rain and high winds. We looked down at the feeder road and noticed a guy running down the center lane. We watched as he kept running. He never slowed and finally disappeared.

We’re hearing reports on the police scanner of a large fire near Smith and Brazos. Twitter is full of reports that the historic Brennan’s Restaurant has burned to the ground. It sounds like the same fire.

It’s getting pretty hairy around here.

I don’t expect to have power much longer. It’s flickering and I’m getting reports from people all around us (like Groovehouse) who are losing theirs.

We have generators and car batteries with power inverters so we’ll just have to see how it goes. I may also be able to post Twitter updates via my Blackberry. I’ll do whatever I can to keep the updates flowing.

Update:
HPD is reporting power lines down across the Southwest Freeway at the Loop.

It’s taking forever for this huge storm to pass. We probably have more than 12 hours of this ahead of us.

We’re starting to see really strong gusts. They’re moving the trees around quite a bit and you can hear the big ones coming for 30 seconds or so before they hit you. Stuff isn’t coming apart yet but that is almost certainly going to happen as the eye nears us early in the morning.

Thankfully, we still have power and satellite TV despite brief flickers. I don’t have much hope that we’ll maintain this luck through the early morning hours.

Stay tuned.