Hurricane // Current

Hurricane Paloma heads to Cayman Islands

Late-season Hurricane Paloma bore down on the rain-drenched Cayman Islands on Friday, triggering a run on stores and stranding... more

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outview of the tropics

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Meteorologist90
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Behind The Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale

Discovery-News.com: Hurricanes played a big part in Robert Simpson’s life, which is why his name is on the Saffir-Simpson... more

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stormpulse

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Meteorologist90
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At least a half million gallons of crude oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico

WASHINGTON - Hurricane Ike's winds and massive waves destroyed oil platforms, tossed storage tanks and punctured pipelines.... more

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Islanders who insisted on staying died in Ike

GALVESTON, Texas (AP) -- The final hours brought the awful realization to victims of Hurricane Ike that they had waited too long.... more

ivxx
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300 people still missing since Ike

Alligators loom over submerged cars. Mountains of debris are embedded in the ground. The bodies of cows, trucks and the remnants... more

Apocalipstick
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Two weeks after Ike, more than 400 are still missing

Gail Ettenger made her last phone call at 10:10 p.m. She was trapped in her Bolivar Peninsula bungalow with her Great Dane, Reba. A drowning cat cried outside. Her Jeep bobbed in the seawater surging around her home.

Ettenger, 58, told her friend she was reading old love letters by flashlight. "I think I really screwed up this time," she said, according to Monroe Burks, Ettenger's neighbor who had evacuated to Houston.

That was Friday, Sept 12. On Wednesday — 12 days later — her nearly nude body was found face down by a huge debris pile in a remote mosquito-ridden marsh in Chambers County, about 10 miles inland from where her gray beach house once stood.

Two weeks after Hurricane Ike swept through the Texas coast, 400 people remain missing, mostly from Galveston County, according to an analysis of calls logged to a hot line set up by the nonprofit Laura Recovery Center to assist local authorities.

Until Wednesday, Ettenger was one of them.

About 60 of the missing lived on the Bolivar Peninsula, stripped bare by the storm surge that felled beach houses like a bomb. More than 200 were listed as missing on Galveston Island itself, according to a city-by-city analysis of the data conducted for the Houston Chronicle by Bob Walcutt, executive director of the recovery center in Friendswood.

Hot line and rescue workers hope that many people, especially on Galveston Island, will be reunited with family and friends as hurricane recovery efforts continue. More than 145 already have been located through blogs, media Web sites, Red Cross shelter lists, endless phone calls, welfare checks and sometimes dramatic rescues led by the Galveston County Sheriff's Office and other agencies.

Yet disturbing tales told by survivors from Bolivar communities like Gilchrist, Crystal Beach and Port Bolivar suggest some may never return.

"There's still lots of people who are not accounted for," said Capt. Rod Ousley, of the State Parks & Wildlife Service, which is helping to search for survivors or bodies in remote corners of several coastal counties. "We don't know if they got washed out to sea, or buried in the sand or in debris piles. We just keep looking until they come up ... we're just going to keep trying."

Gail Ettenger made her last phone call at 10:10 p.m. She was trapped in her Bolivar Peninsula bungalow with her Great Dane, Reba.... more

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1 month ago

Why Hurricane Ike's "Certain Death" Warning Failed

As residents of Galveston, Texas, were allowed to return to the devastated island this week, experts puzzled over why tens of... more

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1 month ago

Kyle spreads rain, wind in Maine on way to Canada

MACHIAS, Maine (AP) -- Fishermen moved boats to shelter from a rare burst of tropical weather along Maine's rugged eastern coast Sunday as a weakening Hurricane Kyle spun past on its way to Canada, delivering a glancing blow equivalent to a classic nor'easter that made locals yawn.
As darkness fell, the storm produced winds hard enough to jiggle road signs, cause scattered power outages and rip early-autumn leaves from trees while lashing the Maine coast with a third straight day of heavy rain. Flooding closed roads as the storm sped up the Bay of Fundy, which separates Maine and the Canadian province of New Brunswick from Nova Scotia.
Kyle made landfall Sunday night in southern Nova Scotia as a marginal Category 1 hurricane and was later downgraded to a tropical storm by the Canadian Hurricane Centre. Some 12,000 power outages were reported in the province.
Maine emergency responders had braced for wind gusts as high as 60 mph and waves up to 20 feet, but as the storm edged eastward it became clear that the state had escaped a direct hit.
"This was a run-of-the-mill storm. It had the potential to be a real problem and it all sort of went away. That shift to the east did wonders for Maine," said Michael Hinerman, director of the Washington County Emergency Management Agency.
Earlier Sunday, a hurricane watch for Maine was discontinued, but a tropical storm warning remained in effect from Stonington, on the central Maine coast at the mouth of Penobscot Bay, to Eastport on the Canadian border, the National Hurricane Center said.
Officials had once expected the eye to hit at the Maine-New Brunswick border, but with the storm fading to the east, the state closed its emergency operations center in Augusta Sunday night. There were no evacuations in Maine, but more than 500 customers lost power because of the gusty winds.
Still, as much as 7 inches of rain had fallen in three days along some coastal areas. Flood watches were lifted for the southern two-thirds of New Hampshire and southern Maine but remained in effect for the Down East coast.MACHIAS, Maine (AP) -- Fishermen moved boats to shelter from a rare burst of tropical weather along Maine's rugged eastern... more

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1 month ago

United Kingdom Talk Saturday 27th September 2008

Saturday's edition of my three times a week talk show.Watch the show here on CURRENT TV on Tues, Thurs & Sats. In... more

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1 month ago

NASA Delays Atlantis Mission to Hubble Telescope

NASA is delaying next month's shuttle launch to the Hubble Space Telescope because of problems stemming from Hurricane Ike... more

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1 month ago

Hurricane Ike Aftermath

My friend Christa and I (Dave) killed some time after the hurricane by entertaining the crowd that past by the bar we work at. It... more

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1 month ago

Ike Helps Uncover a Civil War Schooner?

FORT MORGAN, Ala. - When the waves from Hurricane Ike receded, they left behind a mystery — a ragged shipwreck that archeologists say could be a two-masted Civil War schooner that ran aground in 1862 or another ship from some 70 years later. The wreck, about six miles from Fort Morgan, had already been partially uncovered when Hurricane Camille cleared away sand in 1969.

Researchers at the time identified it as the Monticello, a battleship that partially burned when it crashed trying to get past the U.S. Navy and into Mobile Bay during the Civil War.

After examining photos of the wreck post-Ike, Museum of Mobile marine archaeologist Shea McLean agreed it is likely the Monticello, which ran aground in 1862 after sailing from Havana, according to Navy records.

"Based on what we know of ships lost in that area and what I've seen, the Monticello is by far the most likely candidate," McLean said. "You can never be 100 percent certain unless you find the bell with 'Monticello' on it, but this definitely fits."

Other clues indicate it could be an early 20th century schooner that ran aground on the Alabama coast in 1933.

The wrecked ship is 136.9 feet long and 25 feet wide, according to Mike Bailey, site curator at Fort Morgan, who examined it this week. The Monticello was listed in shipping records as 136 feet long, McLean told the Press-Register of Mobile.

But Bailey said a 2000 report by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers determined the remains were the schooner Rachel, built at Moss Point, Miss., in 1919 and wrecked near Fort Morgan in 1933.

He said the wreckage appears to have components, such as steel cables, that would point to the Rachel rather than an 1860s schooner.

Glenn Forest, another archaeologist who examined the wreck, said a full identification would require an excavation.

"It's a valuable artifact," he said. "They need to get this thing inside before it falls apart or another storm comes along and sends it through those houses there like a bowling ball."

Meanwhile, curious beach-goers have been drawn to the remains of the wooden hull filled with rusted iron fittings. Fort Morgan was used by Confederate soldiers as Union forces attacked in 1864 during the Battle of Mobile Bay.

"It's interesting, I can tell you that," said Terri Williams. "I've lived down here most of my life and I've never seen anything like this, and it's been right here." FORT MORGAN, Ala. - When the waves from Hurricane Ike receded, they left behind a mystery — a ragged shipwreck that... more

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1 month ago

The short - but eventful - life of Ike - The Big Picture - Boston.com

Flood's and I don't mean short Pants !

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1 month ago

Media obstruction in Galveston

And fear of Internet gossip should not prohibit responsible journalism. The ABC News affiliate in Houston carried a video of investigative reporter Wayne Dolcefino confronting Texas governor Rick Perry about temporary “no-fly” zones for TV helicopters over parts of the Bolivar peninsula and west Galveston, the hardest hit areas. Later in the video, Dolcefino tells the ABC anchors:

After Katrina, we were able to go to Waveland, Mississippi, and Gulfport, and Biloxi, and places that were devastated, where there were, sadly, bodies on the road. Now that’s a horrible thing to see and a horrible thing to show, but people who live there, who have friends there, who have relatives there, have a fundamental right to know that stuff. They have a fundamental right to know, not just from the words of a politician or public official, but from the news media, which are independent of government and have also the responsibility of trying to help the public evaluate response…

We couldn’t get crews back on Galveston last night and this morning until we complained on the air for about twenty hours. And it’s not because we want to sightsee, guys, it’s because we have the responsibility of telling people… I made it as clear to [Gov. Perry] off camera as I did on camera that this is not going to be tolerated. You know, we hear about disasters in other countries—what was it, Burma, Myanmar—where they won’t let people in to see and you know, this is the state of Texas; this America. And we’re not trying to interfere with rescue and search operations, nor did anyone suggest we would be.
When asked why he thought the government was obstructing access, Dolcefino did not mince words:

I don’t think they want us to see images that may remind people… of the images that we saw in New Orleans. I don’t think they want us to see the images that were seen in Waveland, Mississippi or Gulfport… I think that’s the reality; they do not want us to see yet, until they can control what we see and how we see it. And that is simply, at least in my career, unacceptable. Maybe a lot of reporters won’t say it, but I will. I think they do not want us to see images of potential fatalities that may be on land or on water.
Other reporters didn’t think access was much of a problem. The Houston Chronicle’s Matthew Tresaugue said he wasn’t sure why TV choppers were prohibited from flying last Sunday, but that there were, in fact, reporters in the air. On SEJ’s list-serv he noted that:

The Chronicle had a photographer over Bolivar on Sunday about the same time as the televised confrontation. I flew with a photographer from High Island to Galveston’s west end to Surfside Beach in a Cessna yesterday, and one of our columnists and a photographer got a closer view of the same area from a helicopter. … I think the difference is the television guys wanted to take their helicopters, and we hitched rides. On my flight, I was able to see what I needed and even double back to take second looks. I can’t complain.

There's more..........
And fear of Internet gossip should not prohibit responsible journalism. The ABC News affiliate in Houston carried a video of... more