Hurricane Ike Live Video News Links – Watch Live
September 12, 2008 by national
Filed under Homeland Security News
Hurricane Ike Live Coverage
Hurricane Ike live video and live news coverage from around the web, particularly from media sources on the Texas coast. For updating weather information on the storm, The Hurricane Center at NOAA is your best choice. Read more
Hurricane Ike Update – Texans Told Flee or ‘Face Certain Death’
September 11, 2008 by national
Filed under Stories of Interest
Hurricane Ike UPDATE: Texans Told: Flee or ‘Face Certain Death’ as Ike Nears
It appears that hurricane Ike is going to be BAD. Texans are being urged to get out now, without delay.
Cars and trucks streamed inland and chemical companies buttoned up their plants Thursday as a gigantic Hurricane Ike took aim at the heart of the U.S. refining industry and threatened to send a wall of water crashing toward Houston.
Nearly 1 million people along the Texas coast were ordered to evacuate ahead of the storm, including Galveston Island where the National Weather Service warned residents to flee or “face certain death.”
In a calculated risk aimed at avoiding total gridlock, authorities told most people in the nation’s fourth-largest city, Houston, to just hunker down.
Ike was steering almost directly for the city, where gleaming skyscrapers, the nation’s biggest refinery and NASA’s Johnson Space Center lie in areas vulnerable to wind and floodwaters. Forecasters said the storm was likely to come ashore as a Category 3, with winds up to 130 mph.
But the storm was so big, it could inflict a punishing blow even in those areas that do not get a direct hit. Forecasters warned that because of Ike’s size and the state’s shallow coastal waters, it could produce a surge, or wall of water, 20 feet high, and waves of perhaps 50 feet. It could also dump 10 inches or more of rain.
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Hurricane Ike heads towards Houston and authorities in the Houston area and along the Southeast Texas Gulf Coast ordered hundreds of thousands of people to evacuate Thursday as Ike bore down with hurricane-force winds that stretched across more than 200 miles and were expected to gain even more strength.
Forecasters issued a hurricane warning for the Texas Gulf Coast from the Louisiana state line to near Corpus Christi. The warning, which also extended east along much of the Louisiana coast to Morgan City, means hurricane conditions could reach the coast by late Friday with the front edge of the storm before its powerful center hits land over the weekend.
Ike is expected to become at least a Category 3 storm, meaning winds upward of 111 mph, before it comes ashore, the National Hurricane Center in Miami said.
<a href=”http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,420783,00.html”>Source</a>
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Hurricane Ike Aims at Houston; Evacuations Called
The system’s strongest winds extend as far as 115 miles (185 kilometers) from the eye, up from 35 miles yesterday, the Miami- based National Hurricane Center said today. Ike’s wind field is now larger than that of Katrina, the storm that devastated New Orleans in 2005, said Jeff Masters, the director of meteorology at private forecaster Weather Underground Inc.
“The total amount of energy is more powerful than Katrina, so we could be seeing a storm surge that could rival Katrina,” Masters said. The storm is so large “the location doesn’t matter much; it is going to inundate a huge part of the Texas coast.”
Galveston, parts of southern Houston and areas south of the city and near the Texas coast were under a mandatory evacuation order starting at noon today, local officials said at a press conference. The coast may see a storm surge of as much as 20 feet (6 meters). Ike is following a track similar to the 1900 Galveston hurricane that killed 8,000 people.
Officials in Harris, Brazoria, Chambers, Matagorda and Galveston counties ordered about 564,063 people to leave homes that are now in Ike’s path.
Hurricane Ike Links
More Hurricane Ike Links
News
Live Images – KGBT 4
Additional Links
Texas Governor’s Division of Emergency Management
City of Houston Office of Emergency Management
Harris County Office of Emergency Management
Galveston County Office of Emergency Management
Food Safety Information for Hurricanes, Power Outages, & Floods
Houston Chronicle Suggested List of Emergency Supplies
Disaster Preparedness Guide for Persons with Special Medical Needs
Federal Alliance for Safe Homes
The Federal Emergency Management Agency
The US Department of Homeland Security
Hurricane Ike Category 4 – Sustained Winds 145 Mph – Florida Watching
September 5, 2008 by national
Filed under Homeland Security News
Hurricane Ike Update Sun. 09/07/08 – Mapping Link At Storm Pulse
Hurricane Ike damaged most of the homes on Grand Turk island as it roared onto the Bahamas, raked Haiti’s flooded cities with driving rain and threatened the Florida Keys on its way to Cuba as a ferocious Category 4 storm Sunday.
Turks and Caicos premier Michael Misick said Ike damaged 80 percent of the homes on the main island and that hundreds lost their roofs as the hurricane made a near-direct hit. People have been cowering in closets and under stairwells and “just holding on for life. They got hit really, really bad,” he told The Associated Press Sunday morning.
With 135 mph (215 kph) winds, Ike was swirling on from the tiny British territory to the Bahamas’ Great Inagua Island, where about 85 people inside a community center shelter huddled around a radio.
“It’s looking terrible,” said Henry Nixon, a reserve police officer inside the shelter. “All we can do is hunker down and pray.”
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Hurricane Ike Update Sat. 09/06/08 – Hurricane Ike is shifting course and could strike the Florida Keys before moving into the oil-producing Gulf of Mexico, where it could strengthen, a U.S. emergency official said on Friday.
“That’s kind of a bad scenario for us, to go into the Gulf,” Federal Emergency Management Agency Assistant Administrator Glenn Cannon said. Moving over warm Gulf water could make the already powerful storm more dangerous.
Ike is a Category 3 hurricane on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale. The storm’s path was taking a more southerly direction and “changing as we talk,” Cannon said.
He said the current course could cause it to “heavily impact” the Florida Keys.
Cannon, briefing reporters on a string of Atlantic storms, also said residents evacuated by federal officials last week due to Hurricane Gustav were expected to return home by the end of this weekend.
Mandatory evacuations due to Tropical Storm Hanna along the U.S. Southeast coast were expected to be minimal, he said.
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Original Post
Hurricane Ike Category 4 – Sustained Winds 145 Mph – Florida Watching – NTARC will continue to monitor Hurricane Ike and begin posting regular updates and emergency links as additional information becomes available and a projected path of the storm becomes available.
Almost as soon as Florida fell out of Hanna’s forecast cone, it slipped into Ike’s, and that mighty, major hurricane could be on our doorstep Tuesday. Read more
Hurricane Ike Extremely Dangerous Category 4 Hurricane
September 3, 2008 by national
Filed under Stories of Interest
Hurricane Ike was upgraded to an ‘extremely dangerous’ Category 4 storm by the National Hurricane Center late Wednesday as the system roared west across the central Atlantic.
The latest advisory from the National Hurricane Center, issued at 11 p.m. ET, increased Ike’s maximum sustained winds to 135 mph, with higher gusts. Hurricane-force winds extended 35 miles from the storm’s center of circulation.
The hurricane center’s official forecast puts Ike on a path toward the south Florida coast sometime early next week, though the storm’s path and strength can change without warning.
Other storms in the Atlantic, have become less of a threat. Hanna, once a hurricane, weaked into a tropical storm near the Bahamas, and is foercast to strike the southeastern U.S. as a Category 1 hurricane by the end of the week.
Beyond Ike in the Atlantic, Tropical Storm Josephine had winds of 50 mph at 11 p.m., but appeared headed northwest into open seas, where it would weaken in the coming days.
Ike is the fifth hurricane in the Atlantic this season.
