Y-Ike-s!

[edschweppe]

I've been watching the streaming video from KHOU in Houston, showing the devastation that Hurricane Ike has wrought. They've got their helicopter up showing live pictures of flooded streets and blown-out buildings (currently over Texas City? I don't know that area at all).

Rep. John Culberson recently gave a press conference where he was appealing for local residents to send food and water to the command center at Tully Stadium - apparently, there are some three hundred first responders at the command center there who ran out of supplies. Culberson is on the Appropriations subcommittee that funds Homeland Security; I wouldn't want to be Michael Chertoff at the next set of budget hearings.

Meanwhile, the news folks are demonstrating their ignorance, misidentifying both a C-17 Globemaster II and a Navy P-3 Orion as C-130s. And nobody's gotten any aerial pictures of the west end of Galveston Island ...

Comments

[txanne.livejournal.com]

What about the east end, i.e. the Bolivar Peninsula? That's where Crystal Beach and Gilchrist used to be. The KHOU forums are full of frantic people wondering about that area.

[edschweppe.livejournal.com]

What about the east end, i.e. the Bolivar Peninsula?

Didn't see any from there, either. But I suspect it's pretty much flattened.

Apparently, there's a deck of low clouds - around fifteen hundred feet or so - right along the coast. The news chopper isn't being allowed any lower than two thousand feet; airspace below that is reserved for official aircraft (such as search-and-rescue), and if they're carrying cameras, I haven't seen the footage.

Storms like Ike make me glad I live in New England, twenty-plus miles inland and at 260' elevation. It'd take an asteroid strike to get a storm surge up my way.