Local Hurricane Ike coverage from Beaumont/Port Arthur

[last_texas_dem]

This is probably of little interest to most of y'all, but, due to the national news focusing almost entirely on Galveston/Houston, I've been trying to find out more about how the area where I'm from is being affected. This site has streaming video from the Beaumont CBS station. They just showed a tornado that went through Vidor! :scared:

http://www.kfdm.com /

[TTUBatfan2008]

1. If there was ever an area that should be wiped out, it's Vidor...

bunch of racist assholes. I'm praying for Beaumont though. Y'all got nailed by Rita. This whole situation sucks. My parents live in Baytown. They evacuated to my aunt's house in Pasadena to at least get away from the coast a bit.

[last_texas_dem]

4. Yeah, Vidor is definitely not a particularly enlightened place

I know that not everyone in that town *is* a racist asshole, but the fact that they still are (according to Wikipedia) only 0.07% Black, despite bordering a city that is 46% Black, says to me that it's more than the town's notorious reputation keeping Blacks from feeling safe about moving there.

I'm glad to hear that your parents are safe and out of Baytown.

[TTUBatfan2008]

6. Safe being a relative term of course...

Tropical Storm Allison. Damn thing stalled over Houston and turned out far worse than any hurricane ever could. Dumped like 2 feet of rain on parts of the city. Baytown got lucky during that, so did Pasadena, but areas like Pearland and North Shore got hammered bad. I remember going to play golf with my dad at a course in Pearland a couple months later and seeing the water lines on 2-story houses almost up to the roofs.

Regarding Vidor, I remember in junior high our basketball coach warned our team before we went to a tournament in Vidor that the black players on our team would hear a lot of insults and that we would all just have to ignore it. The jerks proudly fly their confederate (I don't respect it enough to capitalize that word) flags right by the highway for everyone to see how backasswards their town is. As you mentioned, not everyone there is a racist asshole, but a majority of them are apologists that put up with it and perhaps even encourage it.

Good luck to you in Beaumont. I remember going to Lake Charles a few months after Rita and you could just see the destruction in the trees along the highway. Then we roll into Beaumont and see all the reconstruction of roofs, etc. going on. And that presumably was not the worst of that storm if I remember right. Lake Charles supposedly had insane storm surge from it.

[last_texas_dem]

10. Yeah, I know that there is likely still a good deal to come

I always worry the most about the people living right near the coast, but hurricane winds and rains definitely do their share of damage. I remember seeing trees and power lines down as far away from the coast as Kirbyville, after Rita. I remember my cousin who lives in Houston telling me about what a bad storm Allison was. (It's also the name of his daughter, so I think he picked on her about that quite a bit!)

On Vidor; yeah, one of the weirder stories involving that town that I remember is one my dad told me about when he went through there in the mid-seventies with one of his friends and they were refused service at a gas station b/c apparently their beards and shoulder-length hair made them "hippies"! Certainly not on the level of the nasty racist stuff that has gone on there, but it shows that many in that town embrace backwardness across the board.

Yeah, Beaumont and the surrounding areas definitely got hit pretty hard by Rita. It hasn't been that long since I stopped seeing many of the "blue roofs", (though I did see some beach cabins that still had tarps on the roofs when I went through High Island fairly recently), and now there's another one coming. Thanks for the good luck; I'm just hoping for the best, too, and not that sure what to expect.

[Horse with no Name]

9. If VIdor is lucky

It will blow all of the sheets off the clotheslines.

[Kool Kitty]

2. Thanks for the link.

I wish they would cover more of the affected areas, too. Louisiana got hit by some of this, also. Hope you and yours are all safe.

[last_texas_dem]

5. Thank you

All of my family members on the coast evacuated; a few who live about 30 miles inland didn't, but hopefully won't get hit too hard.

Yeah, poor Cameron Parish in Louisiana got some of the worst damage out of Rita and looks to be in the line of this one as well. I'm obviously a little biased in my concern for the area because it's where I come from, but I remember getting frustrated by CNN's coverage during Rita when they would give a couple minutes to show towns like Sabine Pass and High Island getting walloped and then spend fifteen talking about how Houston had escaped the worst!

[uppityperson]

3. noaa/nws maps/links of tornadoes

These are for 9/12. If you go there you can click on 9/13 once it starts up.
http://www.spc.noaa.gov/climo/reports/080912_rpts.html

[geomon666]

7. 95mph wind gusts hitting

KBPT 130728Z AUTO 11053G73KT 1 3/4SM +RA
FEW009 BKN021 OVC030 25/ A2905 RMK AO2 PK WND
11083/0659 PRESFR P0000 PNO $

Gusting to 95MPH at Beaumont/Port Aurthor

[Horse with no Name]

8. I was reading on Jeff Masters blog about the river flow near Lumberton

sounds really scary.
When I lived in Beaumont years ago...I remember being told if a hurricane EVER came in over High Island, the entire Golden Triangle would be wiped out so it ASTOUNDED me to find out that folks stayed on Bolivar...and I would imagine that there will be some high loss of life there for those who stayed.
Good luck to you.

[last_texas_dem]

11. Thank you

Yeah- I haven't been hearing a lot about if a substantial # stayed behind, even w/ Orange and Jefferson Counties being under mandatory evacuations. I was worried that a substantial # might stay behind b/c there was also a mandatory evacuation for Gustav and not much of anything happened. I'm hoping most of them saw that this one looked potentially a good deal worse and got out.

[Horse with no Name]

12. I think Beaumont still remembers Rita

I heard somewhere today that the evacuations there went well.
I hope they did.
My daughter goes to school in Tyler and showed up last night with her roommates who live down South in Humble and Victoria.
She said the highways were packed coming up north which would mostly be people coming from the southeast portion.

[TexasProgresive]

13. KHOU reported at 04:15 that TV transmission was lost in

Beaumont. I hope that things aren't too bad there-the east is going to get beat with tornadoes.

[TTUBatfan2008]

14. CNN reported 20-25 foot storm surge in Port Arthur...

that city is going to be pretty much wiped off the map if that is true. They said they did not send any reporters over there because they felt it would be too dangerous (no San Louis Resort like in Galveston, which can withstand a Cat. 5). That level of storm surge in an area that does not have much protection could lead to a similar result as Camille and Katrina in Mississippi. Utter devastation.

[last_texas_dem]

15. Hey

Just wanted to give this thread one kick as I kind of disappeared last night when people were still responding. My Internet connection went out and then a few hours later the power went out altogether as the wind and rain really got going. I woke up in the early afternoon and a tree had been uprooted and fallen over the fence between my apartment complex and the house behind it. Uprooted trees are certainly more the exception than the rule here, but, as of 3:30 PM, power is still out around most of town. I came to the office here on campus where the electricity is still working; it looks to be one of the only places around here where that is the case. There are some huge branches down in some places and what looks to be the library's book deposit(!?) seems to have blown several yards off. (It could be something else similar-looking.) There is not much major damage where I am, but Walker County didn't really get the worst of the storm by any means.

[last_texas_dem]

16. One more link from home

http://www.orangeleader.com

Front page of my hometown paper has a number of photos of the damage. I can't manage to just link to the pics from here. Looks like it was more the water than the trees this time around. Most striking one may be that Bridge City Pizza Hut with a several feet of water around it.