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.
If we take a look at what Ike did on the way to Houston, it was already impressive – in a bad way. It ripped through the Caribbean, doing major damage to Haiti and the Bahamas:
The made its way over to wreak havoc on Cuba:
I’ve got no idea what’s going on, as it’s 4:20am, but we’ll see how everything actually turned out later in the day after the storm has passed. I sure hope everyone is Ok.
Edit: Bloomberg is reporting that 4.5 million people are now without power in Texas:
Virtually every customer who receives electricity on the overhead distribution network is without power,” said Floyd LeBlanc, spokesman for Houston-based CenterPoint Energy Inc. “This was a really big hurricane; we looked at a wind field when it was on land of 250 miles.’
Hey John! Ike hit pretty hard but has passed for the most part. As you know, I live in Sugar Land and we “hunkered down” (as all the reporters put it) at my in-laws’ home. The wind really picked up here at around 330am with gusts over 80mph hitting us. We lost power quite a few times but are okay now. There seems to be plenty of wind damage as the fence at my in-laws is blown over along with the tree limbs littering the streets. The news channels are also showing multiple videos of flooding and some fires around the city from downed power lines and transformers blowing. It’s estimated about 2 million people are without power and might be for up until a week from now.
I am trying to get back to my house to assess any damage but the whole county is under a curfew until 2pm. Hopefully, everything will be fine.
Will keep you updated.
I live in Port Aransas, Texas. Right after Ike passed over Cuba people started calling and wanted to know if #1 – are you evacuating, #2 – where are you headed & #3 – when are you leaving. My final decision….. no, no where and NOT! It really looked like and was reported as heading straight toward us. This is the 5th or 6th time in 9 years that the weather people told us that we were the primary target. Once again, we have dodged the bullet. Sitting here, Saturday morning, the sky is clear and all is well in our sleepy little drinking town. Last night the few people left on the island hopped from one bar to another getting hurricated. There are those that left town, must of them knowing that the storm was veering off to the north of us but would never miss an opportunity for a hurrication. Gotta run now…. ttyl