Hurricanes are always serious, but it’s rare that they actually have direct strikes on highly populated city centers. Well, Ike may turn out to be another one for the records. After weaving his way through the countries in the Gulf of Mexico, Ike headed straight for Texas and came ashore in Galveston while making a bee-line directly for Houston.

My brother lives down in Houston, and at least 8 hours before Ike hit his house he snapped this very short clip of his dog out in the front yard getting gusseted by winds from the far outer edges of the storm.

Then just a few hours later, this video shows the fury of the storm as it made landfall in Texas. Within about 1 hour, over 1.3 million people were without power, and the worst is still yet to come.

Mike Hollingshead is a storm chaser.

• He takes awesome photos of the storms he chases
• He posts said photos online at http://www.extremeinstability.com
• He has very cool information in his Storm Glossary section
• That is all.