Hurricane Lilly

[Jedi Master Carr]

If anybody around New Orleans is reading this get the heck out. As the worst hurricane since Andrew is aproaching Louisiana. Right now it has winds of 145 mph and is a catagory 4, some weather guy said it could reach 5 status which would be a first, I think. This could be awful for that area as Isiodore just went through and flooded the region now a Storm 20 x that one is going to hit the same areas. I guess we will find out tomorrow what the storm will do to the state.

[Daiquiri Van-Derveld]

Good thinking, JMC!! I second his warning....leave now, while and if you can!

[Darth23]

The sad thing about living where I live in Florida is that whenever there's a big hurricane in the Gulf we all hope it his Louisiana or Texas instead of us.



Hurricanes suck.

[Lilaena De'Ville]

*huggles New Orleans* :(

[Sanis Prent]

(Gets washed away from the inevitable rain)

[CMJ]

Ahhh hurricane's...:)

I have been fascinated by these weather systems since I was a kid. In fact I SERIOUSLY considerded going into meteorology so I could study them and perhaps work at the National Hurricane Center in Coral Gables Florida.

I actually own 15 or so books on the storms and have a few docomentary video's in my film collection. When a storm is approaching land I watch religiously.

My first screenplay was actually ABOUT a hurricane. :p

Yes, I'm a nut. ;)

As far as your comments Carr. If it had hit at it's maximum intensity Lili WOULD have been the most powerful storm to hit since Andrew. The '92 storm was the 3rd most powerful ever to hit the U.S. coast. You are wrong...we have been hit by 2 Category 5's and that is like getting hit by the wrath of God.

Camille in '69 and the Labor Day Hurricane of '35(which hit the Florida Keyes) were both Cat 5's. I can't even begin to go into how truly maginificent(in a bad way) those storms were. Camille had a 24.5 foor storm surge...that is UNREAL. The sustained winds were clocked over 180 mph! Even after it had gone inland it dumped over 18 inches of rain in the mountains of Virginia in like 2 or 3 hours. To put that into context...meterologists say it rains like that...on average once every THOUSAND years! The Labor Day storm was even more powerful and killed hundreds of ppl. If the Keyes had been more populated, it coulda been a total disastor, because nothing was left after it went through. It blew the only highway AND railway line clear off into the sea.

As mush as I've gone...I could go on much more about both storms.

The worst disastor is U.S. history(and the subject of my first screenplay) was the Category 4 that hit Galveston Texas in 1900. Over 6000 perished in the storm surge, including 2 of my ancestors. I could give ya the whole rundown on it too(hell I penned a screenplay) but I'll stop for now. ;)

[JonathanLB]

OMGWTF I think it hit Oregon! Oh wait, no, sorry it always rains here ;)

We lost power briefly last night, not sure what the hell was up with that. I cannot believe that, how stupid, and it is raining now, miserable day. Like my Thursday's aren't already bad enough without the rain...

[Jedi Master Carr]

I didn't realize that CMJ, I knew about Galveston and knew it was horrible but didn't know the other two storms were 5's. As far as Lily New Orleans got lucky the storm weakened before it hit and only became a 2 but still did a lot damage to the coast, I imagine the worst problem will be flooding at this point.

[Arya Ravenwing]

*wants to read the screenplay* :) Yeah the rain up here in Oregon is teh suck, but normal, unfortunately, and nothing like what the poor people down South are experiencing. :(

[CMJ]

Well Carr...New Orleans probably woulda been "okay" anyways, because the storm was kinda far west. A direct hit on New Orleans is the Doomsday scenario for hurricane trackers. The city could literally be wiped away by a major storm...and I'm not exaggerating.

[Arya Ravenwing]

http://www.wunderground.com/tropical/tracking/at200213_sat.html

Awesome picture

[CMJ]

IF I could ever get my screenplay sold it would be a helluva movie. This is a great article I found on the storm. Of course I incorporated nearly all of this stuff in my script(since I have like 5 books just on the Galveston storm I've done a LOT of research).

GALVESTON, Texas (CNN) -- The deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history ripped into the "Jewel of Texas" one century ago, killing some 8,000 men, women and children and wiping away 12 city blocks -- nearly three-quarters of the island city of Galveston, Texas.

The Category 4 hurricane struck September 8, 1900.

Linda MacDonald, whose late grandfather lived through the Great Storm, remembers the stories he told of how, as a six-year-old boy, he rode out the tempest in his father's bakery as winds howled and waves crashed.

"He could hear children calling for their mothers, women screaming for help and men begging for mercy from God," said MacDonald, a Galveston native and an amateur expert on the storm.

"He said he could hear sounds that were very faint, then they grew louder and louder, then the sound abruptly cut off, and he knew someone's life had ended."

The killer storm did not come without warning.

Days before the hurricane reached Texas, telegraph reports received in Galveston told of the havoc the storm caused in the Caribbean. Sailors arrived in port talking of the stormy seas.

A city with hubris

"People in Galveston knew that there was a storm in the Gulf of Mexico. It was reported in the Galveston County Daily News but they didn't know where the storm would make landfall," said historian Casey Greene.

Some historians say people's attitude increased the number of fatalities.

"That's one of the reasons so many people lost their lives: complacency," said Greene.

In 1900, Galveston was stuck on itself, boasting Texas' first post office, telephones and medical college. There was more money in Galveston than in Newport, Rhode Island.

Downtown was packed with ornate office buildings, many on The Strand, known then as the "Wall Street of the Southwest." Galveston was the hub of a booming cotton export trade because it had the only deep-water port in Texas at the time.

City streets led to imposing Greek Revival, Romanesque and Italianate mansions. Street cars ran along the beach. Bathhouses jutted out like sentinels in the gulf.

"There was this great sense of hubris that America and Galveston -- Galveston in particular --was going places, could do no wrong," said Erik Larson, author of "Isaac's Storm."

'Isaac's Storm'

Isaac was U.S. Weather Bureau climatologist Isaac Cline, who dismissed as absurd the notion that a hurricane could devastate Galveston. His stance discouraged the town from building a sea wall.

The day before the hurricane arrived, warning flags were raised as huge waves pounded the shores, barometric pressure dropped rapidly and high fish-scale-shaped clouds moved inland.

Before dawn September 8, the water crept ashore and kept rising, despite strengthening north winds that should have repelled the storm.

By now, Cline was worried. "Unusually heavy swells from the southeast. ... Such high water with opposing winds never observed previously," he wrote in a telegram to the bureau's headquarters in Washington.

But less than half the population evacuated the island and some sightseers even came over from Houston to view the spectacle of the huge and powerful surf.

Cline rode down the beach in a horse-drawn buggy, warning people to get to the mainland. But for most, it was too late. A steamship broke free of its moorings and destroyed three bridges to the mainland.

As people fled to higher ground, waves raged inward from both the gulf and the bay. Homes disintegrated and rushing waters swept people away.

Cline's aides measured speeds of 100 mph before their anemometer was blown away, and the wind would eventually peak at 150 mph.

Entire island under water

"The roofs of the houses and timbers were flying through the streets as though they were paper and it appeared suicidal to attempt a journey through the flying timbers," Cline wrote later that month in a report to his superiors.

St. Mary's Orphanage, home to 93 children and 10 Catholic nuns, stood near the beach and was one of the first buildings to succumb to the storm. The only survivors were three boys who managed to cling to an uprooted tree as it was tossed around by the rising waters.

Water continued to rise until the whole island was submerged by 3 p.m. and by midnight waves 15 high tore buildings apart with contemptuous ease. Cline's own home, battered by the waves and heavy debris, eventually collapsed.

"My residence went down with about 50 persons who had sought it out for safety and all but 18 were hurled into eternity. Among the lost was my wife who never rose above the water after the wreck of the building," Cline wrote in his report.

Almost a month would pass before Cora May Cline's body was found among the mounds of debris that littered the city.

Cline himself nearly drowned but recovered and found himself clinging to his youngest child. His brother Joseph had grabbed Cline's other two children and they managed to keep afloat for three hours on wreckage until the worst of the storm had passed.

Rich and poor alike huddled together in ornate mansions such as "Bishop's Palace." Still standing today, its strong walls saved the lives of some 200 people.


Ghoulish sights

Others had desperately clung to life.

"Some of them were on rooftops. some of them were in trees, some of them were hanging on to logs and stuff in the water," Maybelle Doolin remembers from her family's history.

Doolin's father and his three step brothers spent hours in a row boat pulling people from the debris filled water; they are credited with saving 200 lives.

Historians don't know exactly how many people perished, but they believe it could have been as many as 10,000. Nearly everyone lost family and friends.

After the storm's fury had passed and the water receded, survivors stared in disbelief at human and animal corpses strewn among piles of smashed timber and masonry.

There were too many dead to bury, so the remains were initially weighted down and dropped into the Gulf of Mexico. But the bodies floated back to shore and were eventually burned in funeral pyres.

"If you can imagine walking out your back door -- and where you ordinarily see somebody's yard, kids playing and houses and the streets and all that stuff -- what you would most likely have seen is a pile in which your neighbors where at that very moment being incinerated," said Erick Larson.

Human remains were found as late as February of 1901.

Raising Galveston

Months after the hurricane, Galveston started construction on a 17-foot-high, 3-mile-long sea wall. Phase one of the project cost $1.6 million dollars, an astronomical amount at the time.

Civil engineers also raised Galveston's elevation, the highest point of which before the storm was less than nine feet above sea level. Thousands of homes and buildings were propped up so earth could be filled in underneath, a method that raised some structures as high as 17 feet.

Galveston is a city built on sand at the eastern end of a 30-mile-long island, two miles off the Texas coast. It remains vulnerable today despite the sea wall.

Constant vigilance is maintained during the June-November hurricane season because it would take more than 40 hours to evacuate the 65,000 people to the mainland.

Anyone who failed to heed a call to evacuate would be at the storm's mercy because the causeway to the mainland is closed when winds reach tropical storm strength of 39 mph.

"We have a name for people like that. We call them statistics. There's nothing that important to risk your life for," said city emergency management chief William Zagorski.

While Galveston succeeded in rebuilding after the storm, it would never regain its former prominence as one of the wealthiest communities in the nation. As a major Texas city, it was soon overshadowed by the emergence of nearby Houston as a center for the Texas oil industry and as a major port following the completion in 1914 of a ship channel that linked it directly to the Gulf of Mexico.

CNN Miami Bureau ChiefJohn Zarrella, CNN Correspondent Eric Horng, TheAssociated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

[Lilaena De'Ville]

oooh. That is singularly impressive.

[CMJ]

This is based on pressure at landfall(which measures how powerful the storm is).

Top 10 Most Intense

1. Florida Keys 1935
2. Hurricane Camille
3. Hurricane Andrew
4. Florida and Texas 1919
5. Lake Okeechobee 1928
6. Hurricane Donna
7. Galveston, Texas 1900
7. Grand Isle Hurricane
7. Louisiana 1915
7. Hurricane Carla

[Daiquiri Van-Derveld]

I dont think youre nuts, CMJ. Im fact, I think its awesome! Im always watching the storm shows on TV. I love seeing the video tapes of tornados, etc. Thats what I have to worry about...that and earthquakes, though thankfully the latter are rare for us.

*thinks we should appoint CMJ the Official BO weather reporter*

You and JMC can be our early warning systems :D

[Lilaena De'Ville]

You know, whenever I use the initials BO, I think of Body Odor. :x

I love natural disasters, except when they happen to me, of course. Earthquakes aren't too bad, but then I've never been smashed inside s building either.

7.1 is the biggest I've ever been in.

[Admiral Lebron]

I feel special. I was camping on a beach and hurricane Andrew hit. Oy. That was interesting. Granted it hit on Maryland's Eastern Shore but it was still fairly powerful.

[Jedi Master Carr]

That was really interesting CMJ, it would probably make a heck of a movie. As Far as Lilly, I knew it was going to miss New Orleans but it would have been affected I am sure probably no where near as bad as direct hit. Also CMJ I was surprised that Hugo didn't make the top 10, is Hugo any close to the top 10 or was it not as bad as I remember? And Lady Daiquiri well right now there is only one other storm out there Kyle, and I have no clue if that will go anywhere, the reports have been going back and forth, it was suppose to go back out to sea, but now it is moving back to the west. Its not a big deal so far though, it is only a tropical storm.

[CMJ]

Carr...Hugo IS in the top 20 somewhere. My book listing the intensity of all Catgory 2 or higher storms to hit the U.S up until '97 is boxed up somewhere, so I'm not sure of the exact placement of Hugo.

The U.S. has obviously been hit by a number of category 4 storms over the years(Hugo was a Cat 4).

[Jedi Master Carr]

That makes sense, I just remember Hugo being worst of course being 3 hours away from where it hit would do that.

[Morgan Evanar]

Hugo was nasty 4. I'm just really glad Marylin didn't hit the US...

I went through Andrew, and rode through the north eye wall (the most intense part of that storm. The eye lasted for 30 seconds. WEEEE FUN. No.

The media said that Andrew was a CAT 4, but with a pressure of 922 milibars and no surviving instrumentation anywhere near me (or the most intense part of the storm) I really found that to be BS. After 10 years, they upgraded it to a full CAT 5 (which a lot of instrumentation that lasted into the most instense part of it said it was, with many wind monitors dying at 175 mph after 10 minutes.)

Oh, if you are in a hurricane zone, get a flat tile roof. They did better than every other kind of roofing material.

[CMJ]

Yeah Morgan, I heard they were re-evaluating the strength on Andrew, but I didn't hear they for sure did yet.

Hell the Weather Channel still refered to Andrew as a Cat 4 just last week.

[Admiral Lebron]

I remember Andrew being a little drizzle that was throwing tents and all sorts of crap around.