Weather News

Billions Of Dollars Messes In Texas

September 16, 2008

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Hurricane Ike pretty much destroyed or rendered uninhabitable, most of the single housing units in Galveston and other barrier island communities. Time to estimate the losses and this will all impact on the housing crisis because I believe that much of the housing here will be abandoned except if the US government pays people to rebuild. But the US government can't afford to constantly rebuild houses damaged by hurricanes. And insurers like AIG won't do this, either. They can't afford to do this. Or rather, the realistic insurance premiums would be much too high for homeowners.

Here are some videos of the damage:

One of the communities that was totally wiped out, literally, was Port Bolivar. This community was on the more destructive side of the hurricane's surge and had no seawall to break the waves up. Helicopters flying over this region see only the cement pads of most of the homes that used to stand there. Anyone sheltering in these missing homes probably didn't survive. But there are no bodies since they were swept to sea.

I do hope everyone evacuated. This should be a warning to anyone tempted to ride out even a category 2 hurricane if they are living on the edge of the sea.

Out of power and 'unsafe,' Galveston starts long cleanup

CNN) -- As Galveston's leaders on Monday repeatedly urged its residents to stay away, people who never left tried to make the best of their muggy, tree-strewn, powerless city.
*snip*
City manager Steve LeBlanc said people like Reid who remain in Galveston should leave. There's not enough clean drinking water to serve the needs of the 15,000 to 20,000 people who stayed on the island, he said Monday, and there would be a "downward spiral if everybody started coming back."

The city's resources are "stretched to the max," and it could be a month before electricity is restored. The clean-up will be massive, he said, and the city is "unsafe."

North of Galveston, Texas Gov. Rick Perry urged residents who evacuated Houston, the nation's fourth-largest city, not to hurry back to their homes.

The displaced population is now homeless. After hurricane Katrina, it should be obvious that the state governments must shelter large numbers of people for long periods of time after hurricanes. Of course, limiting population growth on vulnerable shorelines is the best option. But people are drawn to these areas and these zones are very popular destinations. Living in these places weakens the natural forces that regenerate these barrier islands.

Developments on barrier islands should be eliminated or tremendously reduced. But this is very unpopular so it won't be done. People living in these zones don't prepare for hurricanes by setting aside emergency funds. Politicians have grown accustomed to having Uncle Sam do this for them. While they let rampant housing development to mushroom in these same, vulnerable regions.

Dallas newspaper:

Despite images of mass destruction along Galveston’s coast, many of the city’s historic structures and the new high rises overlooking the Gulf of Mexico survived the onslaught of Hurricane Ike, residents and real estate developers said Sunday.

While no one was downplaying devastation on the 30-mile-long island, treasured historic sites in Galveston’s Strand area, which survived the huge hurricane of 1900, are still standing, as are the new high rises that have sprouted along the coast in a recent $6 billion real estate boom.

Dwayne Jones, executive director of the Galveston Historical Foundation, said Sunday that most of the damage to the island’s oldest structures occurred north of Broadway, facing the bay. “There is significant wind and flood damage to many of the buildings in that area,” he said. Jones has evacuated to Austin and was speaking from the Preservation Texas offices, but said he has been in contact with people in Galveston.

So the solution is to park high rises right on the edge of barrier islands that are being undermined by a rising ocean? Talk about insane!

I know from news reports that emergency crews and TV reporters were terrified during the category 2 storm due to the high winds and the surging seas. Some of these high rises took significant damage! If this were a category 5 storm, these high rises may have survived but would be like the ones in Cancun 10 years ago when a category 4 storm left ships stuck inside of the third story of these hotels and all the windows were blown out. Weathering and surviving a mere category 2 hurricane is no advertisement of strength.

The added blow of this storm has worsened the housing crisis. Perhaps, significantly. I went poking about the web, trying to see how much money has been lost. I found a page with data that is 8 years out of date.

From 2000: Galveston, Texas Mortgage and Housing Information

So, at the very beginning of the housing bubble, half of the homes in Galveston had mortgages and only 6% had second mortgages. We know that the frenzy of lending from 2001-2002-2006 put many, many homes into hock. Second mortgages proliferated. I would think that the statistics today would be much closer to 80% of the homes there are deep in debt. To discover what the real estate market was like before the storm, I looked up houses for sale there.

Home for Sale by Owner in Port Bolivar

Property Address:
2012 Houston
Port Bolivar, Texas 77650

Property Description:

This is a Operating Vacation Rental located on the Bolivar Peninsula with spectacular views of the Gulf, the Marsh, the North Jetty, the Galveston/Houston Ship Channel and Galveston Island. 1 1/2 miles from the Ferry Landing across from Galveston just 3 miles across bay and 10 miles down the road to Crystal Beach. For pictures and more info go to www.c-covington.com The home has 1600 sq.ft of living space, fully furnished. Living room (19’x21’);Dining room (8.3’x11’); Kitchen (11’x11.6’); Decorated in Bamboo, Large deck on front of home also enclosed sun porch (8.3'x17.6')has 9 windows overlooking Bolivar Roads, where the ships lie in wait to await passage to Galveston or Houston docks. It has 4 Bedrooms - 2 Baths - 1st Bdrm (13.6'x15.7')Canopy King (Oriental theme); 2nd Bdrm (10.8'x11.10') King (Jungle rm); 3rd Bdrm(11.6'x16.4') 2 Dbl/Twn Bunk (Children's rm); 4th Bdrm (9.2'x11.6') Queen. Sunporch Trundle bed Amenities: Central Air/Heat, Satelite TV, TV/VCR & Multi-game table (pool, soccer, basketball, etc.) in children's room, Linens included, DVD player, Library of VCR tapes both children and adult, Poker Table/w chips; numerous games/puzzles/toys, highchair, Portable playpen and crib. Carpet, Fully equiped Kitchen, Blender/Food Processor, Coffee Pot, Toaster, Popcorn Microwave, Dishwasher, Microwave, Ceiling Fan in each room, Shower downstairs, Bicycles, Fish Cleaning Table w/hot & cold water, Gas BBQ Pit, Swing, and built-in picnic table. Deck furniture. Fully concrete under house with parking for 2 cars also enclosed work area with washer, dryer, and shower.

Here is the satellite image of where this house used to stand, taken before the storm:

In the videos at the top, one of them shows Port Bolivar and it is the helicopter video showing virtually no houses left standing at all. This house no longer exists. It was an investment property going for over a quarter million dollars. If we multiply this amount with the number of houses that vanished during the storm, this would probably exceed $500,000,000. That is, five hundred million dollars. Port Bolivar was a very small community. There are many tranches floating around the planet that expect the owners of these now-totally destroyed buildings, expecting someone to keep on paying down the mortgages! And this won't happen. These segments of tranches are now dead meat.

It gets worse.

Open house:
2008-08-01 to 2008-09-09

Buy this single family home for sale by owner. This fabulous house is equipped with four bedrooms, four baths and a vast garage. Inside you will love Waterfront, Fireplace, Patio, Boating, Alarm, Gas Range, Central AC, Marble Floors, Wheelchair Accessible, Carpet. School district: Galveston i.s.d.. At this price this home will sell quickly! Price: $949,500

A MILLION DOLLAR HOME had its open house literally while the hurricane's waves were already battering the barrier island! I am betting, since this was put on the market in a 'self-selling' mode, the owners were desperate to be their own brokers since they couldn't afford to sell it via a broker due to the fees eating up what little profit there was to be had. Now, these people have no home to sell, not at a million bucks. Let's say, just 1,000 homes in this area were million dollar babies. This is a billion dollars in losses!

The housing bubble endangered US finances since these very expensive homes are uninsurable in any realistic way. Any mega-natural event will wipe out any insurers which is why insurers are in terrible trouble and the cost of insuring a house in geologically and weather-hazard regions have climbed beyond most homeowner's abilities to pay. The US government should not be in the business of insuring hyper-expensive housing. Banks should NEVER be extending mortgages to buildings in very inappropriate, dangerous or stupid places!

Instead, the opposite has happened: the entire US banking and government systems are now in danger of collapse or are collapsing because people were given vast sums of money to build in very stupid places. And any inevitable natural event ends up hammering the entire financial systems of our nation! I don't think it is very wise for a nation to put itself into bankruptcy trying to coddle people who want to live in extremely hazardous zones, in extremely overprices houses! If they want to play this game, they can do it on their own dime.

I built my own home, myself. It has no mortgage on it. It is quite possible for people to do what I did. But people want to tap into the reasonable system for building and buying homes but doing this in places where we know, statistically, the houses have a high chance of being totally wiped out every 50 years or less! I rebuilt houses that were up to 200 years old. These were built in safe regions with few hazards. But the houses that withstood all the hurricanes of the last 100 years in Texas were Victorian buildings on very specific sites that were built with materials few can afford today. How many people can afford to build stone houses that have walls 2' thick?

Virtually no one. And the internal damage of even these stout structures is still very expensive. When people built houses in 1860, they had no electricity, no insulation and little plumbing. Today, houses are extremely vulnerable to water damage thanks to modern building materials and systems.

Galveston, TX, 77554 - For Sale

Don't miss this move in well cared single family home with three beautiful bedrooms and two perfect baths. This would be a great home for a family. Price: $339,000

Click on Street View to see how flat and desolate the area was before the hurricane smashed everything.
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The average price of housing in Galveston before the bubble was around $130,000. It looks to me that the price average before this hurricane wrecked most of the housing was at around $275,000. If there were 20,000 homes destroyed in this sector and that is the average price, the cost to our government, to pay off the mortgages or rebuild these useless homes would be....$5 billion.

In other words, the cost of one month in Afghanistan and Iraq. We can't be spending this money doing very stupid and futile things in these distant lands while passively watching our entire financial infrastructure collapse here at home. We are treating our nation as if it were a barrier island and we are now drowning like rats, in red ink.

The US has to make choices. And one of these is to cease and desist in our imperial overspending. We just cannot afford this. Saving the people of Texas is more important than ruling Muslims who hate our guts. We are losing the war against nature here at home as well as the war for hearts and minds in the Middle East. Note how the media doesn't connect these events. When talking about the stock market crash, they don't mention the hyper-expensive wars. But Mother Nature will teach us sharp lessons in economic matters as well as the potent powers she possesses.

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Hurricane Ike Disappears Into Canada

September 14, 2008

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Today, we had suffocating heat and 100% humidity as Hurricane Ike spun past, over the Great Lakes. Even though I live more than a hundred miles away from this epic storm, the effects of its passage were obvious even this far away. So I took a series of pictures during the day which shows the massive size and strange effects of this great hurricane.

UPDATE: violent winds tonight as part of former hurricane Ike has made a sudden swerve right towards my mountain! Had to run around in the dark with the dogs and Fluff, stowing away anything that is loose or putting inside the lawn furniture, etc. Even the chickens are complaining to me, sleepily. 50 mph winds is pretty strong, actually. What a storm!

Here is the position of the hurricane as it passed far to the west of where I live:

I live where Massachusetts and Vermont border New York. The rain is far, far from my home. The picture below is from noon, the first clouds came scrambling in from the south. The winds, which were minor in the morning, suddenly began to get quite gusty. I was on the ladder, two stories up, working on the gutters when I had to stop due to the increasingly blustery winds.

By mid-afternoon, the temperatures on my normally cool mountain reached nearly 90 degrees F. This is abnormal even in high summer. And with the strong winds, very unusual. This picture below is from 2 pm.

The high cirrus clouds were always visible throughout the afternoon. But gradually, much lower clouds began to race towards us, heading toward Canada. Some very low, very dark little clouds scuttled right overhead, one by one, like little black sheep.

By 4 pm, the light changed. People watching hurricanes from afar often mention the eerie light changes. It is quite stunning. The thick humidity that masked the nearby hills from my view suddenly began to glow. This is similar to the glow we get before a rainbow appears in front of a storm only there was no rain, just an immense amount of humidity.

The sky to the east became soft and pink.

But when I looked straight towards the fading hurricane in the early evening, the sky was prematurely dark and the thick air settled down on us as the wind paused. All was quiet.

It is ten o'clock at night now. And the wind is still gusting again. The moon has a rainbow ring as small clouds continue to scuttle past, all heading northwards still! This was one big storm.

Ike's aftermath: The return of $4 gas

(CNNMoney.com) -- Gas prices are poised to shoot back toward record highs after Hurricane Ike's direct hit to the heart of the nation's oil refineries, analysts said.

The average price of gasoline nationwide has already shot up 12 cents in the past two days to $3.795 a gallon, according to figures released by the AAA Sunday. And the average price of gas is now at or above $4 in Alaska, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and South Carolina.

In addition, Hurricane Ike could turn out to be the third-most expensive natural disaster in U.S. history, according to preliminary forecasts from a firm that does loss estimates for the insurance industry.

The US nearly shut down in June as gas prices made travel nearly impossibly expensive. I noticed the lack of cars going up and down Rt. 22. I have a great view of that minor highway and it was like a grave yard. When gas prices fell, everyone jumped back into their cars and there was a sense of optimism. But now, we are right back where we were in June.

Bush has announced he will release oil from the reserves but this is stupid, of course. He only knows how to do the dumbest things. The problem isn't a lack of oil. The problem is, the refineries in the Gulf are messed up. And getting things going it going to take a while! This is the nature of major hurricanes. We can't evade this.

Price freezes coupled with rationing WOULD work but the US doesn't want the harsh solutions of the seventies. We want to have fun, not be responsible or fair. So we will have to live with rank price gouging and hoarding of gasoline. This will deplete the US economy further but this doesn't seem to bother our rulers very much. After all, they make lots of money by allowing hoarding and price gouging.

Here are some CNN stories of people who were very foolish but survived:

Among the coastal Texas residents who found themselves in trouble after Ike hit were Paul and Kathi Norton. They overslept as Ike closed in on their home, so they decided to tough it out because their evacuation route was already flooded.

Though their Crystal Beach, Texas, home, about 20 miles northeast of Galveston, was on 14-foot stilts, the couple was concerned, they told CNN affiliate KHOU-TV in Houston, Texas.

"My husband made me wear a life jacket inside our house," Kathi Norton said. "Thank God for that, or I couldn't be here."

Early Saturday, about two hours before Ike officially made landfall, high winds and rising floodwaters began battering their home. The house began collapsing, and "if the flagpole wouldn't have stopped the house, the house would've crushed us," Kathi Norton said.

"It took the floor up, buckled down and took it right off the piling. And we dove out the door and grabbed the staircase, and we floated off," Kathi Norton told KHOU on Sunday after the couple was delivered in a National Guard helicopter to an evacuation point in Texas City, Texas.

No possessions are worth losing one's life. Living is a one-time thing. Getting or keeping stuff is an activity. But living is more than a mere activity. It is literally life and death. Many people pretended they wanted to leave but forgot or fell asleep or something. But the honest truth is, most wanted to guard their possessions. As if they could contest with the mighty powers of Mother Nature when she is shoving miles of ocean on shore.

Matt Damon, Wyclef Jean visit Haiti city in ruins

Cries of adulation — and hunger — followed Haitian-born singer Wyclef Jean and actor Matt Damon as they toured flood-ravaged Gonaives on Sunday to call attention to widespread suffering in the marooned city. Tropical Storm Hanna and Hurricane Ike submerged the Haitian city and cut off roadways. Where waters have receded, streets remain a stinking mud bath and homes are carpeted with muck and encrusted pots, pans and laundry.

"I'm speechless, I can't believe it," said Damon, looking down from a U.N. helicopter at people living on the rooftops of flooded homes.

Haiti is one of the basket case countries. Even tropical storms now cause terrible devastation. This is due to deforestation as well as overpopulation. The US isn't overpopulated. But it does have concentrations of populations in inappropriate places. And the costs of these hurricanes grows each storm as more people park more stuff in the path of obvious destruction.

Ike's death toll keeps climbing

(AP) -- Hurricane Ike and its remnants are now being blamed in at least 16 deaths in the U.S. And the number is expected to climb.

Most of the fatalities have occurred outside Texas as the storm moved northward. The number includes two golfers killed by a falling tree in Nashville and a woman killed by a tree in Ohio.
*snip*
The Gulf energy industry has begun assessing its damage. At least 10 oil and gas platforms were destroyed and some pipelines were damaged.

I see videos shot from the air that clearly shows many houses utterly smashed. And dead people don't call for help or wave down rescuers. They won't be found for months. It took several months for the victims of Hurricane Katrina to be found and a number of them were never counted, being swept to sea. When the death toll from a hurricane is greater when it weakens to a tropical depression, we can be certain the people who bore the brunt of the worst of it, are uncounted.

I expect the number to climb rapidly as the water recedes.

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Hurricane Ike Will Destroy Galveston

September 12, 2008

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Matthew 7:26: 'And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand.' Tonight, Hurricane Ike is repeating history nearly exactly 100 years later than the great Hurricane of 1900. Galveston, instead of being returned to nature, was nearly totally rebuilt behind hopelessly low seawalls. For the oceans are rising thanks to global warming. As per usual, not all people evacuated extremely dangerous sand spit island communities. They may die tonight. It is all so very sad, in the end.

Here is Ike in Cuba:

The size of the waves clearly shows us, this is one powerful storm. Now, it is heading into Texas.

Hurricane Ike's Sprawl a Meteorological Mystery

Hurricanes come in all sizes, from speedy little cyclones with small sharp teeth to giants that maw and pummel away at large swaths of earth for days. Ike is one of the latter -- a super-sized storm with winds howling over vast fetches of water, piling up massive storm surges like those now being seen in Texas.

Considering the vastly different dangers posed by these storms, it's natural to wonder just why some storms get so big while others stay small, despite having the same hurricane-force winds. Why, in other words, is Ike such a titan?
*snip*
"This is actually a very important and unresolved question in the science right now," said senior scientist Chris Davis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. There are a few theories out there, he said, some of which look to the number of cloud clusters around a storm in its early days.

The dynamics of the hurricanes this year are quite different from 2005. We had the hottest recorded summer that year. Each hurricane, and there were many, would suddenly jump from smaller category 1 hurricanes to massive category 5 monsters. In the case of Rita and Wilma, this transformation took less than three hours! A record in speed of growth.

Hurricane Ike is not so dynamic in wind speed but has far, far more WATER than the 2005 hurricanes. In the past, we have seen such monster hurricanes. Looking at this radar shot below, we can see the huge rain band which is many miles wide and far vaster than the 2005 hurricanes which were much tighter and faster.

The sheer size of the active parts of this storm nearly fills the entire Gulf. The last time I saw one that was this wet was in the mid-1990's.

Hurricane Mitch:

Hurricane Mitch was one of the deadliest and most powerful hurricanes on record in the Atlantic basin, with maximum sustained winds of 180 mph (290 km/h). The storm was the thirteenth tropical storm, ninth hurricane, and third major hurricane of the 1998 Atlantic hurricane season. At the time, Hurricane Mitch was the strongest Atlantic hurricane ever observed in the month of October, though it has since been surpassed by Hurricane Wilma of the 2005 season. The hurricane also tied for the fourth most intense Atlantic hurricane in recorded history, but it has since dropped to seventh.

Mitch formed in the western Caribbean Sea on October 22, and after drifting through extremely favorable conditions, it rapidly strengthened to peak at Category 5 status, the highest possible rating on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale. After drifting southwestward and weakening, the hurricane hit Honduras as a minimal hurricane. It drifted through Central America, reformed in the Bay of Campeche, and ultimately struck Florida as a strong tropical storm.

Due to its slow motion from October 29 to November 3, Hurricane Mitch dropped historic amounts of rainfall in Honduras and Nicaragua, with unofficial reports of up to 75 inches (1900 mm). Deaths due to catastrophic flooding made it the second deadliest Atlantic hurricane in history; nearly 11,000 people were killed with over 8,000 left missing by the end of 1998. The flooding caused extreme damage, estimated at over $5 billion (1998 USD, $6.5 billion 2008 USD).

37,000 may need to be rescued after Hurricane Ike

Texas already has asked for help, and the active-duty military has 42 search-and-rescue helicopters on standby, the official said.

Meanwhile, the Coast Guard and Air Force were unable to rescue 22 people aboard a freighter adrift in the Gulf of Mexico because of weather, the two military branches said Friday.

"Weather on scene deteriorated to a point that made the rescue impossible," the Coast Guard said in a statement issued Friday. First Lt. Lauren Johnson, an Air Force spokeswoman, confirmed the report. Aircraft were used in the effort, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Coast Guard said.

Hurricane Mitch simply rained and rained as it staggered about the Gulf of Mexico. Like Ike, it left a trail of death and destruction. Floods and mudslides can and are very deadly. One interesting feature of all the 2005 hurricanes was how they ran out of moisture very rapidly. The drought that had hammered the entire southern tier of the USA was like a very dry sponge. Nearly all the rain was sucked out of the storms even when the storms were category 5 ones like Rita.

The high stratosphere volcanic ash this year seems to have dampened the heat considerably. But it also creates big, heavy raindrops and torrential downpours. I have had many such storms this summer, for example. Several inches of rain in less than an hour is not normal for the temperate zone where I live. Europe has had some very severe floods this year, floods that killed people. So we are now seeing this playing itself out with this year's hurricanes: these are wet, wet, wet storms. And the possible storm surge of over 22' is just amazing.

On top of all this, we are also at a full moon tonight. This increases the fury of the tidal flows. The hurricane is blowing ashore right when the full moon is causing the ocean to bulge towards the moon. This is why this particular hurricane has greater potency.

Dire Warning as Hurricane Ike Nears Texas

Thousands fled the island earlier in the day in private cars or on government-chartered buses, but a few diehards insisted they would stay in their homes. One was Denise Scurry, a 46-year-old pool hall employee who was sitting on a milk crate Thursday afternoon in downtown Galveston near her two-story home, reading “Thugs and the Women Who Love Them” and sipping brandy.

“It ain’t going to be nothing but wind and rain,” she said. “Everybody’s all excited about nothing.”

Larry Drosnes, who lives a half-mile from the beach, drove his black Ford Ranger to an elevated parking garage for safekeeping, and then returned to his house.

“The people that left are prudent, and those that are staying are reckless,” said Mr. Drosnes, 61, who has ridden out nearly every storm that has hit the island since 1948. “It’s pretty obvious which category I am in.”

Already we can see from videos made this afternoon, the entire island of Galveston is underwater already. Now, night has fallen and it is one dark, dark night. Time to go back to the past:

Galveston hurricane of 1900

At the time of the 1900 storm the highest point in the city of Galveston was only 8.7 ft (2.7 m) above sea level.[7] The hurricane had brought with it a storm surge of over 15 ft (4.6 m),[16] which washed over the entire island. The surge knocked buildings off their foundations and the surf pounded them to pieces. Over 3,600 homes were destroyed[16] and a wall of debris faced the ocean.[17] The few buildings which survived, mostly solidly-built mansions and houses along the Strand District, are today maintained as tourist attractions.

The highest measured wind speed was 100 mph (160 km/h) just after 6 p.m., but the Weather Bureau’s anemometer was blown off the building shortly after that measurement was recorded.[7] The eye passed over the city around 8 p.m. Maximum winds were estimated at 120 mph (190 km/h) at the time, though later estimates placed the hurricane at the higher Category 4 classification on the Saffir-Simpson Scale.[18] The lowest recorded barometric pressure was 28.48 inHg (964.4 mbar), considered at the time to be so low as to be obviously in error.[2] Modern estimates later placed the storm’s central pressure at 27.49 inHg (930.9 mbar), but this was subsequently adjusted to the storm's official lowest measured central pressure of 27.63 inHg (936 mbar).[19]

This storm has only 110 mph winds which is still very, very dangerous. I have experienced such winds and it screams as it tears at everything. Unlike Rita and Wilma which were stronger wind storms, Ike is taking its time as it moves about. 3 hours of 130 mph are not as destructive as 10 hours of 110 mph wind. And if this is accompanied by a massive storm surge, that is extremely destructive. It baffles me, why people are allowed to build in obviously stupid places. Like right on top of huge fault lines that inevitably will blow out, massively like the San Andreas and all those other fault lines in California.

Sand spits are terrible places to build housing. If people insist on it, they should sign a social contract that forces them to fend for themselves when the inevitable storm comes along and wipes them out. If we set up systems to protect people doing immensely stupid things, they will do these stupid things over and over again.

Click here for the storm damage map of 1900.

All the housing facing the Gulf of Mexico was totally and completely pulverized. Most everyone in these houses, died or were injured. So, is it forbidden to build houses right along the ocean front right where this destruction happened in 1900?

Note how the entire width of the sand spit is squared off and developed! An army of very foolish people parked their homes right smack dab where all those people were swept away! And look at how narrow this sand spit is! Long Island's shoreline is equally unstable and dangerous. I used to live in Coney Island and watched the Atlantic Ocean relentlessly eating away the beaches there. One girlfriend of mine was woken up in a winter storm, hearing beams smashing down her front door that faced the ocean! The fire department had to carry her out of the top story window and it was very dangerous. She lost everything except for the clothes on her back and her two dogs.

Her house was over 100 years old and was built on the sand when the ocean waves were crashing a good 500 yards away. Over the years, erosion and the rising oceans due to global warming, ate up the beach until it was only 10 yards away. Now, the second block in of Sea Gate is being menaced by ocean storms.

This satellite photo clearly shows how utterly stupid Galveston is! Look at the large bodies of water on the landward side of Galveston! This is no towering spit of land with beaches! This is not Long Island. This is a flat sand jetty that is incapable of coping with rising seas! Building sea walls is useless if the ocean simply goes AROUND them and submerges the island. Eventually, the raging seas will submerge this island totally just as the rising ocean is destroying all those small Pacific and Southeast Asian island communities.

Here is the list of the worst hurricanes of the last 100 years. Ike is already on this list. This, in a year which is cooler than the year that spawned three of the other giants on this list. Katrina, Rita and Wilma are still a dominating trio of old sea hags.

Our playgrounds and happy time places tend to be where disasters are most likely. Around volcanoes, on shores prone to tsunamis and hurricanes as well as the usual earthquakes. It is OK to play in such places. But to build permanent housing is a whole other matter.

I will note here that all the places swept by the Boxing Day Tsunami are back in business and filled with eager tourists! Go figure.

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Fine Veil Of Volcanic Dust Affects Weather Dynamics

Sept. 1, 2008
Labor Day

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Hurricane Gustav didn't reach Katrina proportions. But the levees still flooded. This has been a year of floods. We had nonstop rains up here for nearly two months, for example. Mega storm systems are forming all over the place but are not producing great winds. But certainly, are making lots of rain. This is a dual effect of global warming interfacing with high stratospheric volcanic ash. Weather is a very complex, dynamic system on this particular planet.

First, a story I wrote approximately one year ago discusses this high stratospheric gas and particulate volcanic dust:

September 7, 2007: High Volcanic Dust And Hurricane News

Summer up here in the Northeastern US which is almost always under the Jet Stream has been quite cool and even downright cold on my small mountain. We have even had frost warnings in August! I have noticed for a while an increasing amount of fine white volcanic ash in the high statosphere so yesterday, being a fully wind from the north jet stream day, I took photos at sunset showing this effect. Namely, the winter will be hard up here as this fine dust produces snow because it attracts moisture as it slowly filters down.

*snip* My parents wrote one of the first books about how volcanic dust can change the statosphere's light effects. The scattering of the light by fine volcanic dust means the whole heaven is evenly lit by any light source. Normally, when the wind blows from the Arctic, it is pure and clean. When the wind here blows from the south, it is filthy with pollution in summer. Pollution usually doesn't make it to the higher levels of the stratosphere which is why sunsets are redder than sunrises. All day long, human and animal activities raise dust and other particulates on the lower levels so when the sun shines through all this, all but the red lights are blocked out.

But when volcanoes pump fine pumic dust into the higher levels, this spreads out and can be seen at all hours of day or night. Last night, to test this out, I went out at 2am and looked up. The moon is exactly at half full yet the landscape around me was very lit up. I could see perfectly well because of the fine, white light that was universal. Only the very brightest stars could be seen. This white veil of light is a characteristic of volcanic eruptions.

We had a snowy winter right after writing that story. It may even be a super-snow winter this year. China, last winter, had epic snow and ice storms. This caused tremendous damage. Indeed, China has been hit by a number of big earthquakes like the one this week. It seems, the lithosphere has definitely shifted downwards in Sichuan province. I suspect this is distantly related to the huge jump the seabed alongside Sumatra two years ago.

As global warming melts the glaciers, this releases tremendous amounts of locked-up water coupled with the release of these massive weights on the continental land masses and they spring upwards, feeding even more earthquakes. This last week, Vancouver Island had a banging big series of quakes. The entire West Coast of the US is shuddering and moving. The San Andreas has one locked section running from west of LA to the center of the state and we know this will be rearranged in a microsecond. This looming event clearly shows us what to expect as we watch China's landscape respond to all these mega-forces.

The sun is showing no sunspot activity. My father surmised last year that this would happen. This is due to the sun going through its periodic 'shut downs' of the magnetic flows from the core. This leads to cooler weather as we shall see. But the ice on the extreme areas on earth are still melting. This contrary-wise action is due to changes in the earth's atmospheric chemical configuration. McCain just chose a woman from Alaska who believes in magic forces [much more about HER later!]. She thinks changing the chemistry of the planet has no effects. A total fool.

The effects do interact with other forces which is why weather is one of the most complex things one can study. Powerful computers can barely peer into the near future because of this complexity. Forget, figuring out 5 days in advance. The planet, unlike others, also has the living elements that have utterly overwhelmed the 'natural' forces we see on say, Jupiter. Thanks to living things, the atmosphere's chemical composition is very 'queer'. And getting 'queerer' thanks to human beings.

Let's again visit the 'magic' side here:

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This is beyond the pale, one of James Dobson's cronies asking their minions to pray for rain on August 28, the day of Obama's acceptance speech at Invesco stadium, not just rain, torrential rain.

The Goddesses do love it when foolish humans pray to the Invisible Gods for weather changes. As if anyone can petition Mother Nature in this regard! She follows her own wishes and doesn't give a damn about anyone making requests. People are amused that a major storm has disrupted the Republican Convention after Dobson pleaded with his demonic god to intercede and do ill to others. We know for certain, Dobson was begging for lightning bolts.

He is also a fool: he talks endlessly about exactly how much and how little this demonic storm is supposed to act. Not too big and not too small. I remember Pat Robertson. I nearly sued him in Federal Court for damages. I actually talked to a lawyer about this. Back in the 1980's, a hurricane was moving up the East Coast. He prayed it would hit someone else. So the hurricane came to MY house and the eye passed over MY house and we had significant damage to MY house. After this hurricane messed up my home, Robertson went on TV and boasted that his demon and he did it to me.

Har. More about all this later today as we talk about magic, politics and seeing the future.

Hurricane comes ashore:

(CNN) -- Hurricane-force winds slammed into oil terminals around Port Fourchon, southwest of New Orleans, as the eye of Category 2 Gustav was churning just off the Gulf shore Monday morning, according to radar.

The eye of Hurricane Gustav made landfall near Cocodrie, Louisiana, about 10:30 a.m. ET, the National Hurricane Center said.

According to forecasts, Gustav -- which was downgraded to a Category 2 hurricane when its winds weakened to 110 mph (177 kph) Monday morning -- is expected to skim New Orleans, which is still recovering from 2005's Hurricane Katrina.

Port Fourchon is packed with oil terminals and distribution facilities. It is the terminal for tankers bringing oil to the United States from overseas. The U.S. Department of Energy says 56 percent of the imported and Gulf of Mexico oil entering the United States passes this point.

When Katrina, Rita and Wilma all slammed into the Gulf states, there was virtually no volcanic dust in the high stratosphere. So they gained energy, not lost it. Gustav is not all-powerful thanks to this veil covering the earth. But it has astonishing amounts of rain.

Gustav, near landfall, could park over northeast Texas

CNN) -- As Hurricane Gustav neared Louisiana's coast Monday morning, forecasters warned the storm could stall over Louisiana and northeast Texas for several days, which would "exacerbate the threat of heavy rains and inland flooding."
*snip*
The latest discussion published by NHC forecasters said computer models show "Gustav or its remnants slowing to a crawl" over northeast Texas over the next three to five days.

"Such slow motion would exacerbate the threat of heavy rains and inland flooding," the forecasters said.

No kidding! The rain from Katrina was particularly bad for the Mississippi river's residents because it blew straight up the Mississippi valley and tore through my own mountain landscape, dumping lots of rain. Much of this rain that fell across America fell in the water basin of the Mississippi River. So a heroic amount of water came pouring down to poor New Orleans. The damage from the passage of the hurricane the first day was nothing compared to the huge body of water that moved in the next day and the day after, day after day as all the storm's floods moved towards New Orleans.

The present hurricane isn't doing this. It is moving west. If it stalls, anything can happen. Certainly, Texas must brace not for high winds but terrible floods. Hurricane Mitchell got stuck over Honduras and killed tens of thousands from the endless floods and mudslides. A stationary hurricane that turns into a tropical storm can be every bit as deadly as a more compact, higher-wind, faster moving hurricane.

Army helps in India as South Asia reels under floods

(Reuters) - The Indian army and navy stepped up efforts on Monday to rescue hundreds of thousands of people marooned by floods, while rising river levels also rang alarm bells in neighbouring Bangladesh.

In India's impoverished eastern state of Bihar, villagers have been living on rooftops for days, while others are eating plants and leaves after exhausting food stocks.

Aid agencies said the Bihar government should have done more to anticipate the disaster and plan relief operations in a region hit by monsoon flooding every year.

This is a prime example: the winds are being clipped by lack of solar feedback due to the fine veil of dust. But this same dust makes for big, fat rain drops, for example. All summer long, I marveled as to how the rain came down in huge drops or like a fire hose. Splat city.

Mekong carries the runoff from China's superpower status

Some Thais hit by the floods, as well as non-governmental organisations campaigning against dam building, say that water released from the reservoirs of three big Chinese dams on the upper reaches of the Mekong swelled the runoff from a tropical storm and heavy monsoon rain across northern Laos and China's southern Yunnan Province early last month.

But the Mekong River Commission, in a statement last week, pointed out that the volume of releasable water held by the three Chinese hydro-power dams to generate electricity was too small to have been a significant factor in the flooding. The commission, established by the governments of Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam in 1995 at the end of a long period of conflict in the region, helps to coordinate management of the Mekong Basin in South-East Asia.

Mega-storms are difficult for dam operators. The best dam system is one fed by slowly melting glaciers and annual snow storms like in the Sierra mountains in the Western USA. Fast melting coupled with massive floods is a bad thing, all around. But since most humans grab onto the concept of looking only at the thermometer instead of the dynamic interplay of all systems.

China is blamed for floods:

While this may be true, Chinese dam construction on the upper reaches of the Mekong is a legitimate source of concern for downstream South-East Asian countries. To generate electricity, water has to be released to drive the turbines.

Their worry is that too much will be released in the wet season, contributing to flooding, and too little in the dry season, when the water is needed in South-East Asia.

This concern will be accentuated when China completes the fourth dam on its section of the Mekong by 2013.

This dam at Xiaowan will be 292m high, one of the world's tallest. It will generate over 4000 megawatts of electricity, the equivalent output of at least four nuclear power stations.

Eventually, the Mekong will be like the Colorado: a trickle at the final end going into the ocean. Humans are changing all sorts of systems and water is a major, major system. Along with the chemistry of the atmosphere.

I had to wait a whole month for the North Wind to bring 'clear skies' so I could take some photos of the stratosphere. All these pictures were taken well after the sun set. The limpid, lucid evenings we have been having this year are due 100% to this high veil of volcanic dust. The brilliance of the evenings is startling, quite frankly. At night, the dimmer stars are masked and the Milky Way is more difficult to see the details of the dust lanes, etc.

Like last year, Fall is early. The birds are troubled by this and most have migrated already from our mountain, the goldfinches, for example. Trees started turning red last week. It is most startling. They aren't doing this due to it being very dry, we had a very, very wet summer! I suspect the veil is blocking various elements of the sun's spectrum. The parts that are missing are triggering this 'early fall' response. Trees don't use a calendar to figure when winter is coming. They rely on the data coming in from all those tiny little cells that fill the leaves which are really scaffolding for these migratory creatures. When they aren't harvesting enough solar energy to multiply or to feed the main body of the tree, they go into hibernation and the juices all begin flowing into the root system. This is why, in spring, we can tap maples for syrup as the same rich, sweet fluids flow into a new scaffolding system which we call 'leaves'.

And see how, at the end of August, it looks like late September here! Various varieties of bushes and trees are dimpling the landscape with yellow and red already. This is going to be one interesting winter, that I am certain.

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