Friend Tom Kirkendall posts some excellent advice today:
As all grizzled veterans of Hurricane Alicia in 1983 know (related Chronicle story is here), this is a serious situation for the Texas Gulf coast and it is time to prepare to batten down the hatches. If you are a relative newcomer to this area and have never been through an intense hurricane before, do not fall into the trap of thinking that the media and others are crying “wolf.” This is a deadly serious storm that has the potential to be every bit as devastating to the Texas Gulf coast as Katrina was to the Louisiana-Mississippi-Alabama Gulf coast. As destructive as Alicia was in 1983 (it’s eye came in on Galveston’s West Beach and tore through the middle of Houston on a track that essentially followed I-45), it was a minimal category 3 storm. In comparison, Rita is shaping up to be a much more powerful storm that is comparable to Hurricane Carla, which was a category 4 (winds of 133-155 mph) storm that caused incredible damage to Houston and the upper Texas Gulf coast on September 11, 1961. Carla had the same minimum barometric pressure as the great 1900 storm that killed over 6,000 people in Galveston.
I hope I have gotten your attention.
We’re happy to do our part to help Tom get your attention.
Tom’s post also contains links to web resources related to Rita, including the Chronicle‘s excellent SciGuy blog by Eric Berger. Laurence Simon also continues to link to local bloggers at the top of his blog. We’ll try to remodel a bit here, and do something similar shortly (probably this evening).
(Old) Forum Comments (21)
