‘We are going to disappear one day’
This year four hurricanes hit Haiti, leaving 800 dead and a country drowning. Photographer Gideon Mendel waded waist-high through mud to bear witness to an ecological disaster that will only get worse

http://www.guardian.co.uk/ world/ 2008/ nov/ 08/ haiti-hurricanes

“The whole country is facing an ecological disaster,” said the prime minister, Michele Pierre-Louis. “We cannot keep going on like this. We are going to disappear one day. There will not be 400, 500 or 1,000 deaths. There are going to be a million deaths.”

Ike was not just a category 2 storm. It could and should have been classified differently due to its size and duration. Living in the Galveston Bay community, we had reports from local sources in the boating industry that wind speeds hit 135 mph. It was 12 hours of very intense winds from all directions.

The intense wind speed and duration broke plywood and decking screws on the west windows of my two homes. We had a storm surge of a category 4 due to the length of time it had to shove water into the Galveston Bay and its bayous. An elderly gentleman who has lived next door since 1939 said the water has never reach this level, ever!

This storm snapped trees and telephone poles like twigs.

If a hurricane rated as a category 4 or 5 the size of Ike ever threatens our community, you will see this bullrider flipping burgers in Oregon.

Looks like IKE doesn’t include a moisture rating. At least as reported here.

Possibly moisture content as well. Just don’t recall reading anything about that.”

The new rating is called Integrated Kinetic Energy or, ironically, IKE for short. Jeff Master refers to it on his WunderBlog: “The way we can estimate this damage potential is to compute the total energy of Ike’s surface winds (kinetic energy). To do this, we must look at how strong the winds are, and factor in the areal coverage of these winds. Thus, we compute the Integrated Kinetic Energy (IKE) by squaring the velocity of the wind and summing over all regions of the hurricane with tropical storm force winds or higher. This “Integrated Kinetic Energy” was recently proposed by Dr. Mark Powell of NOAA’s Hurricane Research Division as a better measure of the destructive power of a hurricane’s storm surge than the usual Category 1-5 Saffir-Simpson scale.”

The grocery stores were bare of basic necessities. There was no meat on the shelves due to lack of power. There was some produce and almost no bread on the shelves. It reminded me of those old iron curtain countries where you had to queue up for every basic necessity.

The only plus side was that I was able to clean up the debris on my lawn with a good old fashioned hand rake and a good new fashioned electric lawn mower I’ve been using with pride for the last 5 years. I knew one day that an electric mower would pay off.

Possibly moisture content as well. Just don’t recall reading anything about that.

I keep seeing Ike referred to as a ‘major hurricane.’ Technically, it was not. It was ‘only’ a cat 2. Imagine what stronger storms will do.

Ike was category 4 when it passed to the north of Hati, and category 4 when it made landfall in Eastern Cuba. It was ‘only a cat 2′ when it affected the US Gulf coast. It is standard practice to classify hurricanes which are no longer active by their peak strength (they designated by their current strength only when still active). Likewise – Katrina is remembered as a category 5 hurricane, even though it was only cat 1 when it affected Florida, and had weakened to category 3 when it had made landfall in New Orleans. So Ike was a major hurricane, even though it was no longer at major hurricane strength when it affected Texas.