I've seen a few of them in my time, but only one big one. I missed Cameal by like a week or 2, was born just after she blew through. Or maybe I was an infant, I can't remember

We have home movies from a week or 2 later when we drove to Atlanta. There was a barge 1 mile INSHOAR
The big one I went through was Alicia back in '83, I had just turned 14 and it was the weekend before I started high school. If I remember correctly

she had 140mph sustained winds in Houston. I spent the first half of the storm with my face about 2 inches in front of the bay window in our living room, a nice 4'X6' piece of glass bouncing back and forth slapping my nose.
Durring the eye I called my buddy william and we met at the park, it was directly in the middle between our houses which were about 10 blocks apart or so. Well we're out goofin off looking at all the trash and trees every where and tripping out on the sea gulls. Then he's like "oh my god!" I look down the street and all we see is a wall of wind and water that goes to the skie. It was one of the most sureal moments of my life and I'll never forget it. We started running to his house because we were on "his side" of the park. We made it to his house about 3 min after the back side of the eye. MAAAAAN that HURT!!!! ever had a maple leaf hit you in the face at 140 mph? It left a leaf shaped welp on my cheek

stem and all. Well about 10 minutes later his electricity goes out and his parents won't let me go home, thank God. So there I sat in the dark, now scared for the next 4 hours.
I went back home and my parents were still sleeping

So Williams electricity was off for 2 weeks. We lost ours for about 15 seconds during the first 1/2 of the storm. We had that huge bay window in the living room and (8) 3'x'6 windows up front and a 40' palm tree in the front yard. We lost nothing

Our next door neighbor's tree went through his daughter's room. Across the street from us was out of electricity for about a week. Houston looked like a nuke had gone off. A waste land.
Was a blast, but I never want to go through one again...