Within hours, the full force of Hurricane Ike will be felt along the Texas Gulf Coast:
HOUSTON, Sept. 12 — Hurricane Ike, a massive storm almost the size of Texas, strengthened late Friday and churned toward that state’s coast, battering the city of Galveston with 105 mph winds, forcing the shutdown of refineries and oil and gas rigs, and leaving millions of people in the Houston area hunkered down and preparing for the worst.
Authorities braced for a potential catastrophe if Ike made a direct hit on Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city, with 2.2 million inhabitants. The city’s compact downtown is a clutch of vulnerable, glass-encased skyscrapers that house some of the world’s largest energy companies.
The storm threatened to inundate more than 100,000 homes, cut power to as many as 7.8 million people and disrupt 40 drinking-water and wastewater-treatment facilities.
“It’s a worst-case scenario for us,” Texas Gov. Rick Perry said. “It’s a tsunami, is what you’re looking at.” He said the storm, expected to make landfall early Saturday, is predicted to send 20-foot waves rushing into the Houston Ship Channel and 24-foot waves to Port Arthur, 90 miles to the east.
Brendan Loy, who is blogging about Ike just as intently as he did Katrina, points out that the severity of this storm isn’t in the wind speed, but in the storm surge:
Hurricane Ike, although “only” a Category 2, is going to be a catastrophe because of its massive storm surge, which is more typical of a Category 4.
The city of Galveston (from which, reportedly, 24,000 people refused to evacuate!) is about to be totally destroyed, and there is going to be a ton of devastation to both the industrial and residential areas along Galveston Bay and its estuaries, including the Houston oil refineries and such. This is a very big deal. Lots of surge damage up north, too, in Port Arthur and southwestern Louisiana.
Brendan was right when he talked about how severe Katrina would be when it hit New Orleans, and I fear he may be right about Ike as well.
