Bucs game cancelled and Disney World closed...Hopefully there is not too much damage. Good Luck Floridians and try to stay safe.
They have gotten better a predicting where storms will land, but I was watching MSNBC earlier and they were saying that just last night they miscaculated where this storm would land.
I went through Alicia, and we lost power for 5 days, I lived in Baytown, and the neighborhood right next to ours was washed out into the bay. Brownwood, 1100 homes just gone, it was weird. I rode my bike through there and it was nothing but slabs and an occasional washer or dryer. Also, I used to rag on my dad for keeping empty milk containers in our freezer filled with water, We had like 50 of them in there, and it kept the freezer bills down. We put 2 in the fridge and 2 in the ice box of our refrigerator and none of the food spoiled, and we had drinking water when they melted. Smart man, my pop. DD
Day off, but not leaving home... waiting to see if FEMA needs Incident Management Teams to help with the aftermath... looks like they might, though they would need to go through the two Southern Teams before working over to our New Mexico team.
The photographer I assigned to that game called me this morning to tell me that he was evacuating the area.
I helped some friends pack up their U-Haul here on Monday (Odessa, Texas); they turned it in this morning -- in Tampa. They came really close to getting a BIG welcome.
One thing that never gets mentioned when talking about past storms during every hurricane season is the Galveston Hurricane of 1900. Of course this is partially due to when it happened, but to this date, it ranks as the deadliest natural disaster in US history - something like 5000-6000 people died in that storm. From what I recall it was either a Category 4 or barely a Category 5. The one storm that I recall looking at and saying "crap, that sucker's the end of the world coming" was Hurricane Gilbert. I think it's still the most powerful Atlantic Hurricane ever recorded. It had winds that hit 200+ mph. Luckily it had "calmed down" a bit before it hit the US.
Gilbert hit the coast of Mexico: This was one of the strongest hurricanes ever seen in the Atlantic, Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. Gilbert had winds up to 184 mph and a barometric pressure of 888 mb, which is the second-lowest pressure ever recorded for an Atlantic hurricane. Gilbert devasted Jamaica as it raked the entire length of the island. It hit the Yucatan peninsula shortly after recording the lowest pressure reading. The Yucatan was spared as the eye wall weakened shortly before landfall. After moving over the Yucatan, the strength of the hurricane diminished from a category 5 to a category 3. It caused serious flooding in the Monterrey region when it made landfall in Northern Mexico. We (my family) got soooo lucky...we just got back Monday from a vacation in Florida. We went from 3 days in Tampa to 5 days in Orlando to 2 days in Savannah Georgia. Charlie has cut a path directly thru the same route we took.
The History Channel did a special on this storm just last weekend. It was chilling to hear what those people went through. Most people spent the night during the storm floating over the island on debris and when the water went down they were stepping all over dead bodies. The island was completely covered. There were so many dead that they tried to send them out to sea on barges. They paid black laborers to take them out there and gave them rum so they could handle throwing all those bodies in the ocean. Then a few days later the bodies began washing up on the island. So they finally just had to burn them. People years later still remembered the smell of all those burning bodies. The history channel didn't say this, but I remember reading somewhere that Galveston was the largest city in the state before the hurricane. It really changed the course of history in Texas. Also, what's really weird is that just a few miles up the road in Texas City is the sight of the largest industrial disaster in American history.
Hurricane Camille was no picnic either. I was a year old when it hit Biloxi, MS, not far away from my father's hometown of Mobile, AL. Fortunately, we were in Japan at the time. The devastation it caused was catastrophic to say the least. Looks like an atomic bomb went off here. Look at the size of that storm. Before After Camille. The only thing that remains is the swimming pool.
Charley's been downgraded to a tropical storm. Did anyone expect it to do as much damage that's being reported or is the media just running with it and this is the norm for a hurricane this size?
Here's a picture of Hurricane Gilbert. After doing some research it is still apparently one of the largest recorded Atlantic hurricanes. http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/gifs/1988gil15xx.jpg The core of the thing is as big as Texas and if you count the arms/outer bands, it's 2-3 times as big. That's a massive hurricane. I think Texas lucked out that this thing was downgraded before it hammered the state. Here are some hurricanes of the past : http://wxpaos09.colorado.edu/hurricanes/GreatStorms.html Camille was another monster.
