We normally would not use 24/7 Wall St. as any venue for non-stock or non-financial news or issues, but there really is no other venue we have to use these photos for.  I also wanted to share these photos with anyone interested in seeing the devastation inside of Houston.  These are all pictures inside The 610 Loop, although we could not yet get into Downtown Houston as the police had it blocked off for security purposes.  Here are some of the images I took with a brief description after 11:00 AM local time here in Houston:

Here is a photo of Buffalo Bayou taken from the overpass of Sheperd between Memorial Drive and Allen Parkway.  This 2X zoom photo faces downtown with a new high rise development there and downtown’s buildings are on the right.  Normally this is a small Bayou unless we get heavy rains.  Today it is large enough to be called Buffalo Lake.  There won’t be any joggers or people riding bikes down there for quite a bit of time.

This is a second photo of the same, just a bit more centered.  Again from the overpass of Sheperd between Memorial Drive and Allen Parkway facing downtown.

This Buffalo Bayou photo should show you the context of just how high it is.  This one faces away from Downtown Houston on Waugh Drive facing west to Sheperd.  It truly is Buffalo Lake today.

This one pretty much says it all. "IKE B GONE!"

This was taken right by West University.  Those aren’t branches next to the house.  Those are upturned tree roots.

If you hate oil companies or if you feel gouged, this one won’t exactly break your heart.  They’ll probably miss a couple days of high gasoline prices to sell here.  That is a Shell gas station and convenience store located on Richmond between Sheperd and Montrose.

River Oaks, neighborhood of the wealthy….  River Oaks has bigger lots than most neighborhoods and because it is an older area it has very large and very old trees.  Many trees didn’t make it and this will give you an idea for the size of it.

Another big tree to show the size, with this one also in River Oaks.  Here is the real sad thing about what happened in River Oaks.  These images only capture a fraction of the destruction that occurred to the neighborhood.  Perhaps the only good news is that most homes were not seriously damaged unless it was from a tree falling into them.

Cleveland Park at Memorial and Jackson Hill.  This photo is of another fallen tree in a park right by my house between Memorial Park and Downtown Houston.  The size would not easily stand out except for one thing.  That metal fence it to a tennis court.  That fence is also about 14 feet high.

Here is a stop sign over in Houston’s Heights section.  They are immune from floods for the most part, but winds still took this monster tree down.  We’d tell you which intersection that was, except there was no intersection market anywhere.  That blew away too.

Now here is the funny part of this entire situation.  Actually, it isn’t funny at all but important for the infrastructure.  These are only a handful of the pictures we took and most off of the drive-around smartphone camera pictures just don’t show you the depth or breadth of things.  I have seen total wipe out photos of West Beach in Galveston.  But as far as Houston is concerned, the city is going to recover.  The biggest damage was to the electric system and it is very likely that there may be people without power even in 7 to 10 days.  Most the infrastructure itself "looks" intact, although certain office buildings like the JPMorgan tower may be missing more windows than it isn’t and that is going to take weeks to properly fix.  There are many broken windows and there are many buildings we saw that have tree damage or other issues.  The Houston water supply is now out in most areas or has no pressure as a major water pump station was damaged, leaving questions to whether or not it is safe to drink the water or to use for any cleaning. Telephone landlines and cable lines are down in many places and some traffic lights are non-operational or just destroyed.  But at least the Inner Loop had far less damage than you might have expected.  The major building projects that were not completed weren’t destroyed and for the most part looked unscathed.

We may follow up with some more photos tomorrow, but we like to focus primarily on stocks and economic issues affecting you and your money. Going through this hurricane was not an easy task even if we did have it far easier than many others.

JON C. OGG
September 13, 2008

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