Would Someone Please Turn off the Water?

It started raining sometime on Friday and only occasionally stopped here in mid-Michigan. Now it was not raining real hard or fast but it just was not giving up. Everywhere you look there are puddles or small ponds. I saw a few people who’s driveways were flooded enough that I am not sure I would want to drive through it. See they have ditches on both sides of the drive at the road and the land on either of the rest of the drive is also a bit of a drop off. One mistake, miss the drive, and you would be stranded. Now I am not complaining. I know we have it lucky compared to the rain, high winds, and horrendous storm surge that Texas and Louisiana experienced. But I am just trying to mention what all the impact was of Ike all the way up here 2,000 miles away.



That rain just made it so I did not feel like doing anything. I was hardly out but when I was I got wet, yes I did. The rain also played games with my satellite tv and I had long periods of time with no signal. I was going bonkers. OK, some people might say to late but that is a different story.

Well I decided to get out of the house and went to see a movie I was not particularly interested in seeing. But getting out of the house and having some popcorn to boot ... priceless. I was right, I did not particularly like Star Wars but it felt good to be out.

Here in Michigan we started to hear rumors while at work on Friday. Rumors were coming in from family and friends. Reports that by night on Friday we would see gas prices of $5 or $6. People were in a panic and rushed the gas stations. The lines were long. Gas stations everywhere were running out of gas. Prices were going up. Of course they would go up. I mean first of all the last several hurricanes were having an affect and gas had already went up 10 to 20 cents before Friday. And then the people were creating an artificial shortage of fuel so again, of course the cost was going up. People were in line at stations waiting to get gas only to have the station run out of gas and they had to move on to the next station. People were running out of gas in line.

I saw this very same thing happen on September 11, 2001 and again when a large portion of Eastern United States backed out August 14, 2003. I was on vapors and there was no power to pump gas. So I decided to drive west and see what I found. Luckily the power outage was stopped in Lansing as Consumer Power had reacted quick enough and taken itself off the grid before the grid pulled it down. Lucky for me, 5 miles down the road I not only get water but also got gas. But the gas experience was interesting. I got into a long line and after a while word came out that the Shell gas station was out of regular gas. Not to much later word got out that the station had just run out of mid grade and all that was left was premium. Now I hated to spend over $2.00 for gas (boy don’t I wish I could do that now) for premium but at least I got my gas. Anyway what happened was people who normally may have went one, two or even three more days before filling up were filling up RIGHT NOW. That created the excess demand, well at least it did this time.

The Governor addressed the people of Michigan on Friday early evening and said if anyone was guilty of price gouging they would be prosecuted. She also encourage anyone seeing price gouging to call the Attorney General’s office.

On my way home from the movies Sunday night I noticed one station with a price of $4.11, everyone else was higher. So since I only had about an 1/8 of a tank left I decided to decided to fill up on the return trip home. I found by then one other station had also lowered their prices to $4.11. What I did not know is that the area was actually pretty much run dry of gas on Friday (well at least the news said that) and had not got more gas in until Sunday evening. So I guess I was just lucky.

Well now here I am. The weekend is just about over and it will soon be time to go back to work. Of course the rain is just about to stop now that the weekend is over. I wonder if I can get away with cutting the lawn tomorrow or not?

Oh one more thing, it was real interesting but I could tell that tropical storm Ike reached Michigan this afternoon. Besides the rain picking up and both in how fast it rained and how much came down but also there were winds that had not been there. Nothing huge, maybe 20 or 30 mile an hour winds but it was very noticeable. So we were affected by Ike also, just nothing at all like Texas, Louisiana, and others down south were affected. We can only hope that the death toll continues to stay low but you know that things will be worse as they are able to reach more distressed areas. I find it frustrating that people chose to ignore the mandatory evacuation order and then put all the rescue workers lives in danger to rescue their butts. I know this is going to sound heartless but I think these people should be charged for the rescue if there was a mandatory evacuation order in place. I mean something needs to be done to cause more people to evacuate. The story would be far less tragic and less costly if people would just listen. Didn’t anyone learn anything from Katrina?

Well we can only send our prayers to those in need and help out organizations like the Red Cross so they can help others, volunteer time and materials or what ever is needed. Let’s hope the rest of the hurricane season is a little more tame.

Oh and one more thing, something for you to think about. Obviously New Orleans was hit once again but not as bad as Ike was a massive hurricane. So why is it in what ever news I saw, about all they talked about was Galveston where the Hurricane came ashore and Houston more or less next in line? It really makes your wonder how censored our news is based on what stories our news media choose to cover.