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In my best fake Scottish accent: "Cap'n, there be power here!"

Lights went up about three hours ago to the sound of cheering in the neighborhood. We lost power at 2:15 a.m. Saturday, and with first light had no power, water, or phone...and I assume cable service. The water came back up around 6:00 p.m. Sunday; phone landline started working between 12:30 and 2:30 p.m. on Tuesday, and I pegged the power on at 6:05 today, Wednesday.

I scraped by with only a little damage: shingles off on about 15%-20% of the roof, and down to the plywood in a few places. Rain-in water damage in two of the upstairs bedrooms (one worse than the other; carpet will need to be replaced) and the upstairs bath; a lot of rain damage to the garage ceiling...so I assume I have a lot of clean-up and trash prep in the attic and the boxes of mixcellaneous stuff stored up there. Bizarre thing is that the two house on either side of me have a few shingles off, but none on the street have anything approaching the roof damage I do...and my house was one of the last three built in the neighborhood and is newer by up to four years than some with little or no damage. I also had a tree half-stripped (but not downed), and I seemed to be the only one doing tree clean-up, too. I'm thinking a tiny microburst, but who knows?

Plenty of food, water, lights, batteries, first-aid supplies, and ordnance. No looters here. I even have about half my stash (all the ordnance, of course) left, even after sharing some with a neighbor who hosted two kids more than expected in his house and ran short on Monday.

Thank God for the cool, dry front that moved in Sunday. It's making this far more bearable for literally millions of people than it otherwise would be. I understand about 900,000 CenterPoint customers have power back on, with another 1.2 million or so to go. Our power lines are all underground, and I believe that aided us in getting electricity back sooner rather than later. They're saying most of the west side of metropolitan Houston should be up before Friday is over, with central and eastern areas taking a few more days to over a week.

My prayers go out to the coastal residents who got hit the hardest. They may be facing less base structural damage than they would have if Ike had been a Cat 5, but the clean-up will be long, arduous, and tedious, and they have to contend with the threat of disease from contaminated water sources and septic debris.

Dr. Sweetness Light here, chief meteorologist for ACME Gunstores.

The NHC fine tuned Ike's projected path as of the 10:00 a.m. update, and news is generally bad:



The point of landfall has moved only 5 or 10 miles east--closing in on a dead-on smack into the mouth of Galveston Bay--and the track no longer turns north as rapidly as it did at the 7:00 p.m. update yesterday. Now, the eye shows to be moving almost exactly up I-45 all the way from Galveston to Huntsville.

What's changed is that the low pressure front off to our northwest has basically stalled south of Lubbock. The southern area of the front may actually be weakening, and if it does--or if it stops any southeastward movement and just drifts over Oklahoma--I wouldn't be surprised if the final track for Ike doesn't turn north as quickly even as this revised model shows.

The NHC is now giving Houston a 50% chance of seeing hurricane-force winds, and Galveston a 77% chance.

The good news is that Ike's pressure has not beem falling overnight, so the expectation now is that it won't reach a Cat 3. But to Galveston and Chambers Counties, that may not matter. The storm surge is expected to be huge. Here's NOAA's storm surge model (this is an experimental product and really isn't an announced forecast):



The little blue flags show the anticipated maximum surge. Upper San Jacinto Bay and Trinity Bay are nearing 20 feet, and Port Arthur tops 22 feet. High Island up around 18 feet.

On behalf of ACME Gunstores, this is Dr. Sweetness Light signing out until we see if we have power about 30 hours from now...

Here is the map overlay showing the 4:00 p.m. update projected track from the National Hurricane Center. Very slight easterly shift:



The first "H" marker is 1:00 p.m. Friday, and the third one is 1:00 p.m. Saturday. That would place landfall at about 1:00 a.m. Saturday between Freeport and Galveston. Meteorologists are saying that a strike in that location by a Cat 3 would translate into a 12 ft. to 16 ft. storm surge. At a 20-foot surge, basically everything from NASA Rd. 1 south is standing in water.

The Pearland Shooting Club is in a mandatory evacuation zone.

Meteorologists are saying there's a plus and a minus based on how large the storm is. The plus is that it probably won't grow to a Cat 4; the minus is it's so large that it's highly unlikely the projected track will move very much. This one won't be pulling a Rita and curving off to the east.

I'll bet the 4:00 p.m. update will move it very slightly to the east, somewhere a little east of Freeport. Storm surge expected through Galveston Bay could flood a broad area, and as of the 10:00 a.m. update the NHC is giving these probabilities of hurricane force winds: Galveston: 45%; Freeport: 44%; Houston: 37%; Port Arthur: 25%.

I tried to run a couple of errands at noon (no luck, BTW) and the traffic was already abysmal. Even northbound surface streets like Eldridge and Hwy. 6 were already congested. News is saying over two hours now to get from NASA Rd. 1 through downtown northbound.

Here's the 10:00 (9:00 Central) update from the National Hurricane Center with a Google Maps overlay to give you a better idea of the geography:



My company has announced Houston area office closures for tomorrow through Sunday.

Stay safe out there, folks.

Russell wrote:I sort of hope the storm is strong here in Huntsville. Not a single exciting thing has happened here since I moved here.

Be very careful, my son, about your wishes. Be very careful, indeed...

KBCraig wrote:It looks a lot better now (for me, anyway!) than it did when it was aimed straight at Port Arthur. Sorry for you folks from Galveston on south.

P. (his wife's nickname for him; I will never reveal it) you're just a tad far north to worry much about tropical storms.

As of the 10:00 a.m. National Hurricane Center update, Ike was expected to land at San Antonio Bay and the eye scrape the west side of Victoria. As of the 4:00 p.m. update, landfall has moved about 30 miles closer to Houston, now landing right at Matagorda Bay.

An incoming low pressure system (currently near the southeast edge of Oregon) is projected to affect the high pressure dome that has been steering the storm west. At this point, it looks like a race between the advancing low and Ike's forward speed. If Ike slows down and/or the low pressure area encroaches a bit faster, landfall will move farther up the coast. It only needs to move another 100-115 miles to come in just east of Freeport, and the storm move north right over the Houston metro area.

Regardless, unless Ike pulls a Rita and really takes a right-hand turn to head back toward the Texas/Louisiana border, Greater Houston will be on the dirty side and may well experience hurricane-force winds, and Galveston a storm surge of a few feet.

What we need is a storm named Tina to come in immediately and turn Ike into a has-been...

News flash: HCTRA has evidently opened all toll lanes, meaning all lanes will be direct drive-throughs with no toll required for the duration of the event.