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Except for one in the garage, a pair in the kitchen and another in the sun room, most of the Victoria man’s windows remain boarded two weeks after Hurricane Ike made landfall in Texas.
“I figure, leave them up there for a while,” he said.
Other Victorians have made the same decision. Plywood still covers many windows in the city. And some windows might stay boarded until the end of hurricane season in November.
To Custer, keeping the plywood up is all about practicality. He doesn’t want to remove the boards only to have to put them back up again in the event that another hurricane threatens Victoria.
“It’s hard lugging all that plywood,” he said.
This effort is particularly onerous, he added, because multiple boards cover several windows.
Some of the boarded houses are owned by year-round residents like Custer. Many others are rentals or weekend homes, said Jeb Lacey, emergency management coordinator of Victoria.
“A lot of people don’t live in their home,” he said.
Many of these houses remained boarded because their owners arranged to have them protected before the storm, but hadn’t yet coordinated a time to put them back to normal, Lacey said
Lacey doesn’t see a problem with keeping plywood on the windows, but he also wouldn’t recommend it.
“There’s no need to have your boards up year-round as long as people are prudent,” he said.
At this time, Victorians don’t need to be too concerned about an imminent hurricane. None currently threaten the area, said Christina Barron of the National Weather Service.
“What we do have is Kyle, which is hitting farther up on the northeast part of the U.S.,” she said.
Hurricane Kyle caused heavy rainfall in New England on Sunday before heading to Nova Scotia, Canada.
However, another storm this year is not impossible, Barron said. Hurricane season does not end until Nov. 30 and tropical storms have formed above the Atlantic Ocean into December.