The Commercial Appeal started to run a map after a few days, showing which parts of town were still without power. It ended up taking nearly three weeks to get most of the city restored, though the bulk of power was restored after a week. It was amazing to hear the number of people fussing on the radio about still being out of power, only a few days or a week after the storm, and calling MLG&W every name under the sun. People can be so short-sighted and selfish sometimes. But they also brought some trouble on themselves when they turned away offers of help from utilities and teams from outside the city; a lot of folks blew up over that, thinking that the pace of recovery was being delayed. The community uproar over MLG&W's perceived failure to quickly handle the power outage eventually led to the firing of the utility President, Herman Morris, a few months later.

The tree damage took many months to clear. Some dead oak parts laid on our street until the Spring of the next year. One guy at the end of the block just left his fallen oak where it lay and let Nature reclaim it on her own schedule. You can still see the trunk stump and root bundle with a thin coating of dirt and weeds today, across from Sekisui, laid open to the sky.

Hurricane Elvis, as the storm was quickly dubbed, left a mark on the city. You can still find tree and building damage all over the place, a year later. Ike's on Union is still closed. City disaster awareness plans have been re-evaluated. People are more aware of storm cells now; television weather teams are more likely to jump to wall-to-wall coverage during strong storms.

But by and large, we've returned to all the old patterns. Politics is worse than ever here. Racial tensions flared up during recovery — some folks claimed that "white neighborhoods" got power before "black" areas — and haven't improved much as they've cooled. The storm is still remembered and talked about, everyone has their stories, but the wind-knocked-out-of-sails feeling has passed.

WPTY, ABC 24, is doing a television special on the storm Thursday night at 7PM. I'm looking forward to it, as I didn't get to see some of the storm onset and immediate aftermath footage. Some of the other news programs will be doing retrospectives during their programming.

I can still recall my feelings of wonder that first night. It was very much like so many of those end-of-the-world movies, lying in bed in the middle of a dead city worrying about how we'd make our way back. Would we make our way back? Pitch dark, deathly quiet, huge shadowed blocks on the horizon from darkened buildings, no planes overhead, tinny radio alternating between normal programming and news of the devastation, only the occasional car and siren telling you that there was still a world out there. It was truthfully one of the spookiest feelings I've known.