When I started this blog back in early 2004, it never occurred to me that hurricanes would end up being a frequent topic.

Then, on August 27, 2005, many folks discovered this little corner of the blogosphere when this post was one of the first to predict the potential for disaster in New Orleans from an approaching Hurricane Katrina. The extraordinary exodus of Gulf Coast residents to Houston followed, along with the impact of that hurricane and others on the U.S. oil and gas industry, and — presto! — before you could blink, hurricane-related issues had become the subject of over 90 posts on this blog.

A few more hurricane-related posts may be on their way over the next several days as Hurricane Ike bears down on the Houston metropolitan area late today and through the morning tomorrow. Houston has not taken a direct hit from a hurricane since Hurricane Alicia ravaged the area in 1983 (the eye of that storm went over my house at the time), so many current residents of the city have not experienced a hurricane. That lack of experience, along with the large number of variables that are in play with regard to any hurricane, leads inevitably to some very poor decision-making.

The reality is that the best course of action for the vast majority of Houstonians is to stay put and ride out a storm of the size and intensity of Hurricane Ike (probably a category 2, maybe a 3). Most of the Houston area is different from New Orleans in that it is farther from the coast and of higher elevation so that the threat of flooding is not as big an issue. Thus, outside of the areas of Houston that are close to the coast and are subject to flooding from the storm surge (primarily Galveston Island, the coastal area of Brazoria County and the areas adjacent to the Houston Ship Channel and Galveston Bay), Houston is mainly subject to damage from the wind during hurricanes.

Although hurricane-force winds over a prolonged period are certainly disconcerting, most reasonably-well constructed houses will endure those winds just fine without much damage. Yes, power may be lost for awhile (some parts of Houston were without power for over a month after Alicia) and there is always the risk of tornadoes cropping up as the hurricane passes through. But staying put allows homeowners to take immediate action to mitigate damage to their homes if damage occurs and avoids the not insubstantial risk of injury involved in getting on the road with hundreds of thousands of mandatory evacuees making their way through Houston to a place where they can ride out the storm.

One thing that everyone should do regardless of whether they stay or evacuate is to make sure that, before the storm hits, all loose items on the outside of the house are secured or placed in a secure location inside the garage or house. In hurricane-force winds, those loose items can become projectiles that can break windows and cause other property damage. That — along with downed trees — is among the most common cause of property damage and injury during hurricanes outside the areas that are subject to coastal flooding.

As noted earlier here, the best information source for hurricanes these days is the Web and the blogosphere. Most of the local TV weather analysts are quite good (I prefer Frank Billingsley at KPRC), although the local television and radio coverage overall is often atrocious. The anchor people and news reporters often do not have enough to talk about and, thus, end up saying and doing absurd things just to generate attention. It is rather entertaining watching some of these folks make fools of themselves.

By the way, speaking of poor decisions, what on earth is the University of Houston doing playing Air Force in Dallas on Saturday afternoon (they were scheduled to play Saturday afternoon on the UH campus)? Not only is it irresponsible for UH officials to suggest that students and other supporters of the program clog one of the main evacuation routes out of Houston to attend the game, the game itself is likely to be played in driving rain and tropical storm-force winds as Ike passes through the Dallas area on Saturday afternoon. I know this is Texas and all, but Is it really that important to play a non-conference football game?

As long as I have access to power, I will be providing Twitter updates from the north suburban side of Houston during the storm. So, feel free to follow my updates by clicking on the hyperlink on the right side of this page.

Looks like we’re going to be dealing with another powerful hurricane (Ike) in the Gulf of Mexico late next week. Ay, yi, yi, yi, yi!

This earlier post in regard to Hurricane Gustav noted a number of excellent sources of Gulf hurricane-related information. Here is another one — Stormpulse. Check out the very well-done site.

Hurricane Gustav is another powerful hurricane bearing down on the Gulf Coast, so I wanted to recommend Chron science reporter Eric Berger’s SciGuy blog as the best source of hurricane information for the Gulf Coast region.

Eric and I got to know each other over the fateful weekend of August 27-28, 2005 when we each posted one of the first blog posts in the blogosphere noting the dreaded turn of Hurricane Katrina toward New Orleans during the early morning hours of Saturday, August 27. Although we both recommended that New Orleans residents seriously consider immediate evacuation, local governmental officials in New Orleans did not do so until much later. We now know the result of that misjudgment. With that disaster in mind, at least I doubt that such misjudgments will be a problem this go-around, as New Orleans lawyer Ernie Svenson explains.

Since that time, Eric has developed his blog into the go-to source in the blogosphere for information on hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico. Bookmark it and check it regularly for updates on Gustav.

At this time, it looks as if Gustav will make landfall along the Louisiana coast just west of the New Orleans metropolitan area (check out this cool WSJ map that compares the projected path of Gustav with those of the deadly 2005 storms, Katrina and Rita, and this slick new MSNBC hurricane tracker). That track would put much of New Orleans in the storm’s northeastern quandrant, which is the most damaging part of the storm.

If that path holds, then post-landfall rainfall next week will be the main problem for the Houston area. The storm is expected to slow down somewhat after making landfall and become a tropical storm or depression in northwestern Louisiana and then northeastern Texas. The Dallas-Ft. Worth Metroplex has been in the throes of a drought for the past several months (as was Houston until the past couple of weeks or so), but that should end next week if Gustav continues its current course.

The “News-Hurricane” category of this blog began with Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The second post in that blog was this one in the early afternoon of Saturday, August 27, 2005, which was one of the first in the blogosphere warning of Katrina’s potential danger to the New Orleans area and urging citizens to evacuate immediately. Unfortunately, most of the folks who stayed and lost their lives in Katrina probably had no way to read the recommendation passed along in the final sentence of that post.
Over the past two years, the “News-Hurricanes” category has developed into a cross-section of articles and blog posts on the various legal, economic and political issues involved in the rebuilding of New Orleans. On the two year anniversary of the storm, here are several more good ones:

Reason Magazine’s Daniel Rothschild has traveled to New Orleans twenty times over the past two years reporting on the reconstruction. Here is the first installment of a three part series that is a must-read for anyone interested in the reconstruction of New Orleans;
The NY Times’ Adam Nossiter, who has also reported extensively on New Orleans over the past two years, provides this article entitled “Commemorations for a City 2 Years After Storm;”
Moneyball’s Michael Lewis writes about the risk of Hurricane Katrina;
Nicole Gelinas of City Journal writes on how the breakdown in law and order continues to hamper the rebuilding of New Orleans;
Ben C. Toledano argues that New Orleans effectively died long before the hurricane struck; and
This Associated Press story describes the difficult task of re-establishing New Orleans’ small businesses, which were a major source of job loss after Katrina (a point made at the time). One of the most interesting aspects of the story is one small businessman’s view on immigration:

“Trying to find workers, that’s the toughest thing,” [small businessman Robert] Thompson recalled. “The people we dealt with ó craftsmen, carpenters, electricians, roofers ó weren’t home and if they were, they were decimated themselves.”
Help did come in the first few weeks and months, in the form of workers from Honduras and Mexico who arrived in New Orleans to work in the rebuilding.
“Thank God for them, they were the work force for many, many months,” Thompson said.

According to this NY Times article, apparently not much:

Six inches.
After two years and more than a billion dollars spent by the Army Corps of Engineers to rebuild New Orleansís hurricane protection system, that is how much the water level is likely to be reduced if a big 1-in-100 flood hits Leah Pratcherís Gentilly neighborhood.
Looking over the maps that showed other possible water levels around the city, Ms. Pratcher grew increasingly furious. Her house got four feet of water after Hurricane Katrina, and still stands to get almost as much from a 1-in-100 flood. [ . . .]
New Orleans was swamped by Hurricane Katrina; now it is awash in data, studied obsessively in homes all over town. And the simple message conveyed by that data is that while parts of the city are substantially safer, others have changed little. New Orleans remains a very risky place to live.
The entire flood system still provides much less protection than New Orleans needs, and the pre-Katrina patchwork of levees, floodwalls and gates that a Corps of Engineers investigation called ìa system in name onlyî is still just that.
The corps has strengthened miles of floodwalls, but not always in places where people live. It has built up breached walls on the east side of one major canal, but left the west side, which stood up to Hurricane Katrina, lower and thus more vulnerable. It has not closed the canals that have often been described as funnels for floodwaters into the city. [. . .]
As a result, the city still lacks a system that can stand up to that 1-in-100 storm, let alone one like Hurricane Katrina, which the corps calls a 1-in-396 storm. The work that could build the more robust system ó originally estimated at $7 billion, and now at least twice that ó will not be completed until 2011 at the earliest, and experts agree that even that level of protection will be less than the city needs.
The corps is working on a two-year, $20 million study to find ways of providing even more protection, but it will not even be released until December.

Read the entire article. As noted in many posts over the past two years in the hurricane category of this blog, the performance of the various federal, state and local governmental entities in rebuilding New Orleans has been generally abysmal, at best.