IKE was forecasted to make landfall on the Texas coast on the west end of Galveston at 0200 Saturday morning, however with the newest update they have seen it shift to the east 15 miles. This eastward movement has been consistent with the last several updates. They are still expecting Tropical force winds at 1100 tomorrow morning. Hurricane force winds at JSC starting between 2200 and 2300 with sustained winds of 100 MPH between 0200 and 0600 on Saturday morning. They are projecting 8 to 10 inches of rain with a 13 to 15 foot storm surge in the Clear Lake area. This would occur when we are approaching low tide. They are expecting a 20 - 22 foot surge for the ship channel area.
Noon - #ike trying to figure out best time to leave to minimize traffic, fwys are all backed up, will evac to W. Hou. Filled gas tank last nite.
12:15 - #ike Run from the water, hide from the wind: predicting 12-20 ft storm surge into Galveston Bay, 120 mph winds. Yikes!
1:30 - Hou traffic from #ike is too heavy, it's too hot, I'll wait til tonite to evac. Trip to parents house norm 45min but today could take hrs.
4:45 - #Ike now targeting Galveston, with eye moving over my house! Smaller storm surge but higher winds. Might hunker down instead of evacuate.
Tides have risen one foot above normal in Galveston too. The water level will continue to rise as Ike approaches Texas, and NOAA's experimental storm surge forecast (Figure 1) is calling for a 10% chance that the storm tide from Ike will reach 10-12 feet at Galveston, and 18-21 feet on the south and east sides of Houston.
Ike is likely to be a extremely dangerous major hurricane at landfall, and will likely do $10-$30 billion in damage. The chances of hundreds of people being killed in this storm is high if people do not heed evacuation orders. It is possible that Ike will make a direct hit on Galveston as a Category 4 hurricane with 145 mph winds. The potential storm surge from such a hit could be in the 15-25 foot range (Figure 2), which is capable of overwhelming the 17 foot sea wall in Galveston. I put the odds of such an event at about 5%.
We spent the morning cleaning up the house, preparing water reservoirs (bathtubs, plastic tubs, etc.) and making sure all the supplies were pre-positioned. I made a trip to the one convenience store in the area that was open, and bought some necessities (a case each of Corona and Coke). Amazingly, they even still had gas to sell.
After that, the only thing to do was wait, so we took a swim in the neighbor's pool, and came back to wait. The wind started around noon, the rain about 4:15 this afternoon. By dinner time it started getting dark, and we actually had a bit of sun to make a pretty sunset. After that, it's just wait and watch and listen, watching the banana tree in the back yard and the pine trees in the front yard. Fortunately, the wind direction is such that no pine trees should fall into the house, but we did move the cars to other people's driveways so my neighbor's trees wouldn't fall across the driveway.
We hear that a block in Galveston has caught fire due to power lines. I saw a transformer blow while I was in the back yard, with the familiar pop and flash. Someone is going to come home to a warm house and thawed food. We've got the air conditioning down pretty low so that if the power here does go out, it'll take that much longer to warm up.
The wind has picked up enough to blow the trees precariously and make some noise. Some small branches have fallen so far, but nothing major anywhere that I can see. We've had no more rain than a typical summer shower, and in any event I'm well outside the storm surge effects.
In retrospect, I'm glad we decided not to leave. It was the right decision based on what we knew at the time (which was that it had moved up the coast and was going to hit Beaumont to the east of us, not Freeport to the west), though others who left earlier could say they did the same since at the time the storm was going to come straight up Galveston Bay. But over 2.5 million people were "displaced" by the storm - they all seemed to be on the Houston freeways within the past couple of days. Fortunately all of the stalled cars were fixed or fueled during the night and nobody was left on the roads. I bet it'll be more of the same when people want to come home.
Something else we'll need to closely watch... the garbage situation. Trash pickup was supposed to be on Thursday, and we had 1-1/2 full bins. The city suspended normal operations on Thursday so we're stuck with all that garbage plus only half a bin's worth to last us the whole week.
Back after watching a movie.... it's 2:50 a.m. The wind is still going pretty good, still no damage other than some small branches down. But we still have power (for now).
