A personal comment from Stan

Our thanks to the City of Brownsville, The Brownsville Public Utilities Board, Cameron County Drainage District Number One, and to all who worked (and are still working, in some cases) to minimize and repair the damages caused by Hurricane Dolly over the last few days.

Our neighborhood has a fair amount of self reliance and it was quite a thing to go out on awakening at ten and see Leo and Jim and Leo’s neighbor chopping up the mesquite limb that had fallen against a handicapped neighbor’s house. Kudos to them.

Jim had lost a considerable section of fence in his back yard for the second time. Ten years ago a teen-aged girl had decided to try driving momma’s car and become frozen with fear with her foot on the accelerator, spun around the corner, plowed a path across our front yard with one wheel, but kept turning, plowing into Jim’s fence and across his and four more yards before either she fainted and let up on the gas or something pierced a critical engine part and it died. The fence is still down this second time, probably waiting on an insurance adjustment. The first time it was back up in two days. Fortunately, the yard is extremely well-kept

Kudos also to the Drainage District which, as advertised, had emptied Drainage Ditch One prior or the storm. We still had water rising in the streets, but that seems to be due to the failure of the lift station on Stagecoach Road, which has failed several times over the last couple of months. Perhaps it’s time for PUB to budget its replacement.

Damage at Chez NYBT was quite minimal and our initial cleanup was done in less than two hours yesterday, window boarding down and back into storage, and the porches swept up and the mud cleaned off. We had to wait until today to cut most of the downed tree limbs–not many, all things considered–because nearly all of our trusty power tools are electric, including our chain saw.

The worst was a neighbor’s chinaberry tree, which lost a six-inch thick branch across the fence, breaking a couple of pickets and landing on our former sandbox/then play fort/now gazebo bending a couple of the old fence boards I’d used to roof the structure. A wild olive tree that’s gone untrimmed for the last four years lost two major branches on its north side, and we’ll likely trim it back all around so we get balanced growth as it recuperates.

The worst for us was power lost for something like thirty-four hours–from around two Wednesday afternoon till ten Thursday night. We don’t have an exact mark on the reconnection because we had gone to the Trenfield’s house on Spanish Trail because they had power, air conditioning and television and we were worn out from sweating in the candle light. Coming back after the Colbert Report, we could see from Pablo Kisel Boulevard that the street lights were back on in our beloved El Chapparal subdivision. A clock showed an hour and twenty-some minutes had passed, so the power had apparently come back on a few minutes after we’d left. No problem. Letting the AC blower go for a while with windows open helped dump some stale air, I’m sure.