A Second Hand Conjecture

ChrisB on Sep 12 2008 at 7:00 pm | Filed under: Chris' Page

Scroll down for the updates.

Well Hurricane Ike is heading my way. The center is projected to hit west of Houston, but a Freeport landfall would be the worst case for Houston, as it would entail a huge storm surge and we’d get the dreaded northeast quadrant of the Hurricane. I’ll be heading up to north Houston today to my family’s house, and will try to take some pictures with my new found camera (funny story). In the meantime you can see some webcams of Port Aransas and Galveston here.

Now one interesting thing about Ike right now is that the eye pressure dropped quite a bit last night to it’s current 945 mb. This low pressure is equivalent to a strong cat 3/4 ‘cane, however the wind speed hasn’t picked up accordingly and it’s still at a cat 2.

Right now I’m making a list of things to do when/if the power goes out. A couple of books definitely. A game of drunken Risk brings back college memories. The most lamentable part of this whole ordeal however is the postponement of the UT/Arkansas game to Sept 27th, and the possiblity of missing college football this Saturday. Hopefully you were used to not hearing from me on the weekends becaues of football, so you won’t miss me now if power does go out.

Update 1pm: I’m still in southwest Houston at my apt, and it’s a little windy now, like a light breeze though even a light breeze isn’t very common to Houston. Still sunny and partly cloudy. I’m busy charging up everything I can and trying to eat everything in my freezer.

Update 8pm Sept 12th: Up at my family’s house now in NW Houston. Ike is still a few miles away from Galveston, but we’ve seen the storm surge flooding the island all day. Anyone staying there is making a huge mistake. I’m pretty far north up here, so I think the worst part is going to be the part where I lose power, and how long it takes to get power back. It’s been getting more and more windy all day here, as I watch the clouds streak across the sky towards the south west. Kind of reminded me of the path of the beam in the Dark Tower series if you’ve read that. And of course wind itself is kind of anomalous for Houston. I spent 10 years in Corpus Christi and it was about this windy all the time. Been in Houston for another decade and it’s just never windy much at all, just a nice, calm thick humid air. Ike’s eyewall has been shrinking right up until the very end as it approaches the coast. It’s 1 mph below a Cat 3 hurricane and it’s wind is going to be very powerful over a very wide range. The newscasters are saying tropical storm force winds all the way north up here for the next 20-24 hours pretty much. I’ll try to update some more until power goes out. After that I have 2 cell phone batteries that can hopefully last until power is back. We’ll see.

Images after the break