can you surf on a 12 foot (what's that in proper units?) storm surge?

"We have no communications."

... so how did she tell anyone this?

Erik Larsen's book about the 1900 hurricane which utterly destroyed Galveston, 'Isaac's Storm', is a fantastic read. (While you're shopping for it at Amazon, also take the time to pick up 'Devil in the White City' from the same author).

I love that the last image the webcam gave was a dying shot of the American flag standing tall. Suddenly I feel like I'm an extra in a humanity-will-overcome cheese-fest film

Is that a Google-cam mounted on the mini-suv in the Gulf Cam photo?

surf during the early hours of a hurricane, however, it's ill advised. I've seen it done a couple of times by some of the more hard core surfers, on the east coast. Idiots just waiting to be cleansed from the gene pool, in my opinion.

Sorry to be anti-climactic here Mr. Haines, but a hurricanes wrath is a gradual process.

It is not uncommon for an area to lose power hours before the hurricane ‘actually’ comes ashore. Galveston had to have been battered for a significant amount of time before these webcams (Galveston as a whole) lost power, fourteen to sixteen hours before Ikes eye wall ‘officially’ hit at around 2am on the 13th.

The eye wall is not a determinating factor as to who loses power and who doesn’t. As witnessed by the hundreds of thousands of people that were flooded, suffered wind damage and/or lost power east from the Galveston/Houston area, back into western Louisiana.

While the eyewall has dangerous conditions associated with it, the outer bands of the storms can cause significant damage in and of themselves. Ikes sheer size caused problems days before land fall, with flooding along Louisiana’s gulf coast south of the New Orleans area. You could follow the flooding and/or power outages west from there, without Ike ever officially making land fall in Louisiana.