Friday, September 12, 2008

IKE'S COMING - PLEASE HELP IF YOU CAN

You may remember the summer of 2005, when I offered a couple stinging posts on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. To this day, I feel the response of our federal and local officials was ridiculous, and it showed a complete lack of any forward thinking and preparation for such an event.

On this Friday night, there is a monster on its way to Galveston and Houston. It's Hurricane Ike. While it's "only" a strong Category 2 storm with winds at "only" 110 miles per hour, it's going to devastate much of the Texas coast.

Ike is a large storm with a huge field of hurricane- and tropical storm-force winds. The storm surge will be that of a major hurricane, even though Ike may not officially cross that threshold. The reason for that is that it has such a wide range of high winds from the storm center, meaning it's churned up an insane amount of water in the Gulf of Mexico.

Much of that water is going to end up being pushed up Galveston Bay.

(I am not a meteorologist, but I have done some research on tropical weather. Please don't take any of this as being an expert's opinion or anything.)

This is setting up to be a huge catastrophe for this area, and I implore you to monitor developments. If you have DirecTV, you can watch a simulcast of KHOU-TV on Channel 361. It's much better than the sensationalized crap you see on the news channels or the Weather Channel, though if you want to see Geraldo try to get blown away by the storm, you will probably have to watch Fox News.

If things are as bad as the "experts" think, we then need to unite as a real country and help these people. Give money, donate non-perishable food items, help gather supplies to send down there, give blood. Whatever you can. It's not about being a Democrat or a Republican or an Obama person or a McCain supporter.

As I said in 2005, you know these people would get in line to help you should something bad happen in your area. Please show them the same courtesy.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Bruce,

I'm a former Duluthian living down here in Texas. I live in Dallas, about 250 miles from the Gulf, so we probably won't get much more than a strong thunderstorm if it hits us. We do have a lot of evacuees from the Houston area here who will be in town for a couple of days though.

While I agree that the response by the federal and especially the state and local officials was awful during Katrina, I blame the individuals much more. For several days before the storm hit, they were warning people that the storm would be a monster and people needed to evacuate. People just didn't take the warnings seriously. There's only so much the government can do if people refuse to leave. If there's one good thing to come out of Katrina, it's that people will take the warnings seriously from now on. I blame the government more for not building the original dikes big enough or strong enough than I do for the aftermath of the storm.