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Directron.com Recovers from Hurricane IkeHere is our blog coverage on our experience during Ike. Original blog was published on our user forum. You are welcome to leave comments, pictures, and info there.Hurricane Ike Blog / Watch: | Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Page 4 | Page 5 | Page 6 | Page 7 | Page 8 |
Who says water and fire do not mix? There are at least three fires in Galveston today. A big boat facility warehouse got burned down. The firemen can't help because the warehouse was out of reach due to the flood. 
Also from Chronicle: Hurricane Ike could be the strongest hurricane to hit the north Texas coast since Hurricane Carla in 1961 and could be stronger than Hurricane Alicia in 1983. Based on the predicted path and strength of Hurricane Ike, out cost analysis program shows this area could have $75 billion dollars in total economic losses. Of course, this is just an estimate and it includes such things as the cost of shutting down local businesses, loss of income and property damage. Hurricane Gustav caused about $7 billion dollars in damage alone, but that storm hit in a less-populated part of southcentral Louisiana. Hurricane Rita caused $10 billion dollars in damage, while Hurricane Katrina cost more than $100 billion.
Story from Gustav We had a near-miss in Gustav only two weekends ago. The landfall point for Gustav kept moving east. It finally landed in central Louisana. A manufacturer rep lives in Barton Rouge. He evaculated during Gustav. I text him the next day. When he returned, he found not much damage on his house; but one of his neighbor's house was totally ruined. A very old tree fell right on top of that house. They didn't have electricity until one week later. So when Ike approached Houston, he called and offered this advise: Be careful and take hurricane seriously.
Hi Michael, hope everything's ok. Stay safe... and dry!
Envador, nice to hear from you! Ike is invading us right now. 
Ike has nowhere to go but Houston... 
Ike is as big as Texas. Who said everything is big in Texas? We don't need a big hurricane. :( 
Here is another picture of that pretty sunset at 7:47pm in Sugar Land. You can see the cloud forming. 
The guys on TV say it will be only a few more hours until Ike is there (the eye). Hang on and keep reporting as you can.
Nice hearing from you Steve, too. It's been a while. It started to rain. Sugar Land and our office are in West side of Houston - the good side of the hurricane. So far we haven't got any rain. But the rain seem to have started now. All the trees are shaking, making big, waving sounds outside. Yes, I am hanging on.... but getting sleepy. It's time to take a break. What will be really interesting is what morning will bring us when sun rises.
Houston, We are back in business helping our customers! Sunday, Sept. 14 Sorry for that long pause in this post. You can't imagine what we just went through in the last 48 hours since my last post. Well, I'll go through that in detail later. Let me go over the important stuff first: (1) All of our associates are alright from all we know so far. Some of them don't have electricity and/or water in their homes yet. Most of them experienced some damages in their front and/or back yards, but nothing major. (2) We are determined to get our business back in track starting on Monday despite some obvious difficulties: (a) Our showroom/will-call will be closed Monday and Tuesday (until further notice). (b) You may experience some shipping delays because as far as we can tell UPS, Fedex, and USPS shall not have pick-up services for at least a few days. We'll re-route the orders through Dallas and/or other locations. (c) Please send all emails to directron@dark-circuit.com (d) Please avoid calling us if possible. If it's an emergency, please call 972-428-5440 or 972-428-5455. Keep in mind that we'll only have limited staff answering your phones. (e) Our fax number during this unusual time is 214-483-5519. THANK YOU FOR YOUR PATIENCE AND WE APPRECIATE YOUR SUPPORT TO ALLOW US TO GO THROUGH THIS DIFFICULT TIME OF HURRICANE IKE.
Michael, Good to hear everyone's ok! Hope y'all get everything back up and running smoothly. I saw some raw footage of downtown -- many windows were broken out of the high-rise office buildings. Did your golfball-broken window make it through ok?
Here is a brief summary of what happened to us in the last 48 hours. I'll share with you some pictures later. I am sure our associates will have many Ike stories to tell as well. The terror of a hurricane I went to sleep at around 12 mid night on Friday, Sept. 12. Maybe I was too bored watching the news and the Hurricane. I woke up at 2pm to check around. The trees outside were making all kinds of sounds. My duct-tape covered broken window was still holding on there. But I found my DSL line at home was having trouble and couldn't make any post in this thread. I really missed that USB Sprint card that I have been missing for a while. I would have reported this hurricane while without electricity or DSL. I almost kicked myself. Alarm in our office went off at 4am. That was probably the time Ike reached metro Houston area. The alarm company called me. Most likely it was a false alarm because of all of the wind and rain going on at that time. No police will be dispatched during the "climax" of a hurricane. I called our security guard and George. Everything was "fine." My house and the office lost electricity by that time. I took some video of the hurricane hitting my neighborhood. Some big and tall maple trees in our neighbor's yard were shaking like toothpicks. The sound was so loud in the dark that it scared me. And this is only Category 2 hurricane. Houston must be the largest metropolitan area that has ever been directly hit by a hurricane. To us, Ike is very different from Rita. Rita almost had no impact on us except many coworkers had a bad experience sitting on the highway for more than 10 hours. Ike is causing some big challenges. Hurricane Ike made a mess everywhere At 7am in the morning of Saturday Sept. 13, George called me from the office telling me that there was a big leak from the roof in the warehouse. I had to drive up there to check on things. I realized that it was still the curview time; but I had no choice. There was already daylight. This was the first time I saw the mess Ike has left in our neighborhood. Tree leaves are all over the street. Tree branches are everywhere. Three trees fell down in my subdivision that blocked the streets. To get around one, I had to drive on the wrong way for a section. None of the traffic lights were working. A few of them were hanging in the air by their power cables. Police was blocking the toll way. Luckily there was no major damage to our house or yards. No falling or uprooted trees. Some bushes were beaten down; but we can deal with that. This afternoon I drove through a neighborhood in the northwest part of town - about 45 minutes from Sugar Land, which is southwest to Houston. I saw a similar mess there. People were already cleaning up their streets. There was not electricity there. Some moved their dining tables to their front lawn and some were having small gatherings in their front yard. Almost all schools were canceled for Monday and Tuesday. Some schools in the "bad side" of Ike were canceled for at least one week. Our warehouse was damaged It turned out that the hurricane has ripped two "holes" on the water-proof layer of the roof. The water "zipped" through the underneath layers. Luckily it was in the shipping area where there weren't too many products. It's hard to estimate how much the damage is at this time. The roof alone is probably above $300k. The rain was heavy. I had to call more co-workers to come in to help. The cell phone network was having trouble connecting. It was difficult to reach people. I found Adam and asked him to call more people. I had to drive to pick up a few people up. The rain has finally stopped by 2pm. Even the sun came out of the cloud momentarily. We spent the whole day on Saturday to clean up the mess. We thought it would not rain again the next day after the hurricane, so we didn't try too hard to give a temporary repair to the roof. Next morning, it rained heavily again. Have you had that experience? Heavy rain when you have a broken roof? We had to do some cleaning again on Sunday. We temporarily fixed roof this time. But the weather man says the weather will be dry for the next four days. And it won't be too hot either. That is certainly good news for the Houstonians to recover from Ike. Count our blessings Comparatively speaking, we were really lucky. We were blessed that Ike did take a shirt toward the east side of Houston and we were on the relatively good side of it (sorry at some other people's expense). We can't imagine how a Category 4 or 5 hurricane will be like. The one that hit Galveston in 1900 that killed over 10k people was a Category 4. We were also lucky that Ike hit us during the weekend, which gave us more time to cope with. People in Galveston Island had both strong wind and high flood. Most of them probably won't be able to see their houses for a few more days. Judging by the pictures and videos on TV, many people completely lost their houses. In the middle of the hurricane, there were a few fires reported. One apartment fire was not too far away from our warehouse. The entire city feels like a "war zone." Millitary helicopters were refilled in the air by a huge fuel plane. How often do you see that in a major metropolitan area? I saw convoys of millitary trucks driving on the freeway - south to Galveston. 90% of Houston lost electricity and water. We got electricity back in our house on Saturday afternoon in Sugar Land. The phone line is completely dead. So was our neighbor's. Jason has been really lucky this time. He has electricity, water, and internet at home. That is why I am able to access Internet 48 hours after the hurricane. I am now working in his dining room.
How to run a web store without electricity? Our office still does not have electricity as of now even though two of our neighbors have. Our webstore was never down during this ordeal because it's served not in Houston. As a matter of fact, we received orders during the entire time Ike was hitting Houston. That must be one of the true advantages of ecommerce. Almost every stores were closed by Friday afternoon. Most of them will experience downtime for at least a few more days. The challenge now is how to conduct our business without the electricity. Although the electricity may be restored tomorrow; we have to prepare to do our buisness without electricity for 1-2 weeks. We could shut out operations for a few days to recover. But we don't think our customers would like that. There are probably resellers and IT crews out there who are working on critical missions to resolve IT problems created by Hurricane Ike in the greater Houston area. They will need our parts and services. They depend on us during the normal days; they may depend on us even more at this difficult time. We will try our best not to let them down. I have already seen a few orders from Houston resellers who are ordering parts for their customers. Over the years, we have put our customers' needs before ours. So we decided to continue to run out business on Monday. Here are steps we have taken to ensure a smooth recovery: (1) We have moved our back-end servers for order processing to Sugar Land. (2) We have moved customer service calls to our Dallas office and redirect emails. (3) We'll use a generator in the office to process shipments. Some of the shipments shall be made from our Dallas warehouse and directly from our partner distributors. (4) If necessary, we'll delivery packages to the nearest UPS or Fedex stations. We hope UPS will resume picking up services on Monday. That would be a big help to us and our customers. Yes, our warehouse has some damage; but not our spirit to help our customers Please stay tuned and again thank you for your support.
As of Monday Sept. 15, our first batch of orders are processed in Sugar Land and delivered to our warehouse at 9am. That is the first step we are running our online store "without electricity." More updates soon.
Carriers came through I called our UPS rep last night. He told me that UPS may resume picking up services today. He called this morning to tell me indeed that is happening. By the time I got to the office this morning, I saw a FedEx Ground truck at our dock delivering products. Shortly after that the USPS lady, Michelle, was there delivering our mails and told us that she would be back this afternoon to pick up the USPS packages. So far all three major carriers of ours came through during this difficult time, which is a great help to us.
First package ready for shipping after Ike We moved our UPS shipping station to Terry's house, which happens to be close to our office and has electricity and internet access. Initially we couldn't get the label printer to work. After phone support by our IT director Lee, bingo, we got it going. We have the first pile of packages packed and ready to ship by 12 noon. Yes we can survive without the electricity. For a few days anyways. BTW, we now got water service in our office. Man, that does make a difference!!!
Customer service calls While in the office earlier, I received a phone call from a school district client. He was looking for a 200W AT power supply. Yes, an AT power supply. Our techs kept telling me, those are old, old stuff, maybe more than 10 years old. There is no way to find it. I gave the info to Adam. Bingo, he found a 300W AT power supply in our warehouse. I asked Jeff to deliver it to the customer, who was struggling to get a machine back online. Now that is customer service. :) At least two walk-in customers came to buy parts. One was looking for a car charger for his laptop computer. What he really needs is an inverter that would convert 12V DC to a 110V AC. That would power many AC equipment. We should have stocked many of them before each hurricane.
Houstonians are back on our feet Today is a super nice day. The temperature at 12 noon is 79 degrees. If you know Houston, that is exceptional. The low humidity also make it extremely pleasant. I noticed there are much more traffic on the free ways mow. There are gas stations that are open, but the line is like miles long. I am sure there will be people who run out of gas while waiting in line. Cell phones are working much better now. Most restaurants are now open and all those opened ones are packed with people. If you don't have electricity at home and the malls are closed, what can you do? Go out to eat. :) All local radios became make-shift stations for information and people are calling in for questions and suggestions. The government and FEMA are distributing water and ice at multiple locations. Some vendors are donating the supplies when requested. We are Texans. We are a tough bunch. :)
Thanks for keeping us posted on the Ike situation. Luckily for us we only lost electricty for a day or two and now are able to be back up and running. We are greatful that you guys are still up and running! Hope buisness gets back to normal soon for you guys! Hurricane Ike Blog / Watch: | Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Page 4 | Page 5 | Page 6 | Page 7 | Page 8 | Original blog was published on our user forum. You are welcome to leave comments, pictures, and info there. |
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