silver lining?
can you surf on a 12 foot (what's that in proper units?) storm surge?
Hurricane Ike snuffs out Galveston webcam
A dramatic image from galveston.com appears to show the moment at which Hurricane Ike did for the island's webcam sited in the Strand Historic District: Interrupted webcam image of Galveston In fact, the timestamp shows this particular camera held out for a few hours longer than those facing the full wrath of Ike. Examination …
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Side Text
From the Spot Wave Cam:
http://www.galveston.com/webcams/thespottwo/
"Located at 32nd and Seawall, The Spot offers gourmet hamburgers, fresh seafood, ice cream, fresh-baked desserts and bread, an arcade, and Tiki Bar."
Ahem.. well, not really..
Mine's the one Dry Suit
check out the tourist blurb ...
... on the next cam down:
"Galveston's 32 miles of sun-drenched beaches are ideal places for numerous sports and leisure activities ... Stewart Beach is a family-oriented beach offering a children's playground, umbrella and chair rentals ..."
Ma! My umbrella is broke!
If you've done six impossible things this morning ...
"We have no communications."
... so how did she tell anyone this?
I'm sure everyone will be asking this but...
How do we know what they mayor had if they had no communications?
Crazy risk assessment
If only they did proper risk assessment, they'd know that hurricanes are far more likely than terrorist attacks, but we're taught to fear one way more than the other; and subsequently waste faaaar more tax payers money on one than the other...
If you haven't read it
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).
Flying free
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
And the fixed width design bites back
Now you'll need to resize all your images to fit.
Google was there?
Is that a Google-cam mounted on the mini-suv in the Gulf Cam photo?
Actually you can
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.
Wise words
"Do not come back to Galveston. You cannot live here at this time."
I surprised anyone could live there at all.
In Austin
we have alot of the evacuees still here. One guy reported that he rode out the storm in his neighbors third floor jacuzzi
"Michael Geml has braved other storms in his bayfront neighborhood in Galveston, where he's lived for 25 years, though none quite like Ike. The 51-year-old stayed in the third-story Jacuzzi of a neighbor's house, directly on the bay, with family pets as waves crashed across the landscape.
"I'll never stay again," Geml said. "I don't care what the weatherman says — a Category 1, a Category 2. I thought I was going to die."
can you surf on a 12 foot (what's that in proper units?)
>can you surf on a 12 foot (what's that in proper units?) storm surge?
As any surfer kno, the proper unit for wave height is feet. So the answer is, if you don't know that much, you can't.
Misconceptions
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.
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