Afternoon, everyone.
Had a busy weekend so I haven't been around much.
Rex, Happy Birthday, you young whippersnapper.
The good thing is that it just gets worse from now on but you care less.
Ray, I'm happy to hear your BIL at least gets to go home from the hospital. I'm sure his prognosis is still not good but at least he might get a little time with his granddaughters and at least be in his own bed instead of stuck full of needles in a hospital.
Ray and Paul, even with some of the wind damage from the remnants of Ike, things could have been a lot worse. I was watching it on radar over Indiana and northern Ohio and some pretty nasty squall lines were forming up at 4:00 pm. When I next had a chance to look at the radar, nearly all the storms had vanished! I've never seen a storm system collapse that fast. I guess old Ike was just tired out.
David, sounds typical for the foothills in September. As long as the winds don't start up, anything else is easy.
Tom, you were in the tropics, at least briefly. Ike pulled a lot of tropical air into the Midwest and northeast. It was actually rated for a few hours as an extratropical depression, the same as a tropical depression except too far north for tropical characteristics. It got some renewed strength from the warm water of Lake Michigan and Lake Eire bit died quickly after moving away from the water, leaving the low pressure and pressure differential gales.
Jeffrey, looks like you got some pretty good wind at your place too. I'm glad those willows are far away from your parent's house. I see the purple martin house did just fine though.
Now that Ike is just a memory, we were actually pretty lucky. The eye wobbled just to the north on landfall so Galveston had "only" a 14.5 foot storm surge. This was still enough to cause serious flooding in downtown Galveston and but the seawall wasn't overtopped so most of the rest of Galveston didn't get flooded. Houston suffered way more wind damage than I expected. I knew they would loose a lot of windows from the skyscrapers but it was more than it thought would happen. The damage that I did expect was almost a complete destruction of the power grid in in southeast Texas, with 117 of 170 high voltage transmission towers being on the ground. It will take many weeks for power to be restored in most places with some places being out of power for a month. This is impacting the oil refineries and driving up gas prices but I expect that to last less than a week since power to the refineries is being restored pretty quickly. There were only two oil rigs badly damaged, a much better record than Katrina, when 43 rigs were completely destroyed.
The thing that really surprised me is how many people didn't evacuate. Many of them are having to be rescued now, putting the rescuers lives in danger. Having been one of those rescuers, this really cranks me off. These people should at least be given citations and fined for staying behind in an evacuation zone. If they don't start to crack down on this kind of stupid behavior, it will never end.
Since most of the people did have the brains to evacuate, the death toll was low, with less than 30 people dead so far. I hope the numbers stay that low as they get into all the houses that are still flooded. Kudos to the NWS and the National Hurricane Center. They had Ike pegged within 20 miles of landfall 48 hours before it happened, which is darned good accuracy compared to what we could do only a few years ago. The Atlantic is nice and quiet now, which is typical after a round of hurricanes. It will start to pick up again in a week but I hope we've seen the worse for this year.
I looked around my yard the night before Hanna was supposed to hit my area, there doesn't appear to be any really large trees close enough to my house to crush it.
