Tag: hurricane ike

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So Long, Ike; Next Up: Hurricane Nutjob

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We continue with more exclusive coverage of the coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Ike. The image above is the storm as it looked last Wednesday from the International Space Station, which was at an altitude of 220 miles. (For comparison’s sake, the GOES satellites that provide most of the views we see of Earth weather are parked in geosynchronous orbits with an altitude of 22,300 miles. The Terra and Aqua earth observatory satellites that regularly provide stunning images of wildfires and other events work at an altitude of about 430 miles.) NASA has posted a gallery of ISS shots of Ike. And if you like these ethereal views of killer storms, see a wonderful collection published last week on the Boston Globe’s The Big Picture blog.

Enough fawning over pictures. Now to the serious business at hand: If you think those photographs merely depict awesome natural forces at work, you’re sadly mistaken. No. Just like Katrina before it, those who see world weather as a giant conspiracy have declared that Hurricane Ike was a storm on behalf of (someone’s) scheme for global domination.

First, there’s this: An alert from Kevin Martin, a self-described meteorologist in Southern California, that “chemtrails” (a type of evil aircraft condensation trail) were detected last week in areas of the United States along Ike’s forecast path. Whoa. If you’re not sold on the forecaster’s credentials after reading that, check out his public plea for letters of recommendation so that he could be admitted Mississippi State’s online course for would-be TV weathercasters. (There’s more to Kevin’s story, too: one of his inspirations, it turns out, is that he was once struck by lightning.)

Then there’s this: Scott Stevens, formerly of Pocatello, Idaho, TV weatherman fame, announced before Ike’s landfall that “this entire storm is manufactured.” Scott, like Kevin, also saw dark doings overhead in the Midwest before the remnants of Ike got there. Faceless Global Dominators were manipulating weather to fill all the region’s rivers and streams before the moisture-laden ex-hurricane arrived. The motive behind the storm and associated “tweaking,” apparently, is economic chaos. As if we need any more help.

My one and only question to the World Weather Conspiracy folks would be: In olden times, before the advent of high technology–or maybe I should say human high technology, because the Faceless Dominators could be extraterrestrials or Greek or Norse gods unhappy in their retirement–who was responsible for all the floods, droughts, hail storms, heat waves, cold snaps and other weather catastrophes that beset us?

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Lipstick & Dipsticks

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Exclusive coverage of media coverage of Hurricane Ike’s rampage in Texas. While so-called serious journalists continue to document our looming presidential disaster, here’s a little video editor humor for you: At midday today, CNN showed a montage of storm damage in the Galveston area. They flashed some shots of downed power lines in the parking lot of a business called Lipstick; upon further perusal, the sign on the building reads Lipstick Gentlemen’s Club. There is a “topless entertainment” establishment on Texas Highway 146, listed variously as in Kemah or Bacliff, just outside Galveston (Google street view here).

OK — no worries. Even lap-dance palaces can be terrorized by rampaging storms like Ike.

But the very next shot in the montage showed a big sign saying Dipsticks. I can’t place it exactly, but it looks like it could belong to an automotive shop about 100 miles north of where the first shot was taken. Just a hunch, but I’d guess some CNN editor got hold of the tape, saw the Lipstick and Dipsticks, and couldn’t resist splicing them together. It’s one of my storm coverage highlights.

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‘Este Poderoso y Peligroso Huracán’

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Hurricane Gustav turned out to non-calamitous to the United States. Its greatest fury was focused on western Cuba; the storm was a Category 4 hurricane, with sustained winds up to 150 mph, when it hit the island. A few days before the storm, I overheard a colleague who has been to Cuba more than once say that the government doesn’t mess around there when it comes to getting people out of harm’s way of a lethal-looking storm. An evacuation is ordered, and that’s it.

That doesn’t do much about property damage, though, and Gustav devastated the areas it struck. A country as rich and principled as ours can’t be caught aiding people ruled by a dictator, so the only help the United States has offered has been a relative pittance, $100,000, to be transmitted to aid groups rather than the Cuban government. Cuba’s answer: thanks but no thanks–if you really want to help, lift restrictions on travel and trade so we can buy what we need. (Yes–both the offer and response were political. But you have to wince a little when you read that the vast and boundlessly prosperous nation of East Timor kicked in $500,000 to help the Cuban recovery effort. I guess that’s what happens when you don’t have strong principles like ours.)

Cuba’s facing worse now: Another Category 4 storm, Hurricane Ike, is nearing. If it follows the forecast track, it may travel much of the length of the island (here’s something I didn’t know: Cuba is 700 miles long from Guantanamo in the east to Pinar del Rio, the province most heavily damaged by Hurricane Gustav, to the west; the greatest north-south width is about 100 miles; its area is 42,803 square miles, virtually identical to the state of Virginia. But I digress). The official word on Ike, quoted in the post title, is that it’s a powerful and dangerous hurricane.

Ike is expected make landfall in Guantanamo Province (but not in the immediate vicinity of our navy and detention base there), then spend 48 hours crossing from the northern to the southern coast, then curving back to the northwest and out over the Gulf of Mexico. With a path like that, it’s easy to imagine that it will affect virtually all of the island’s 11.4 million people.

I didn’t start out to write a plea for aid to Cuba–or for Haiti or the other islands and nations devastated by the recent storms–but how can one avoid it after you start to look at what’s going on. Donating to the agencies that might help is not as straightforward as going to the American Red Cross. But there are options:

The Canadian Red Cross, for one, is active in providing relief to Cuba and the rest of the Caribbean. It takes donations from us Yanks.

I also did come across a current list of U.S.-based agencies that take donations and operate in Cuba (see message 17 in the thread). Without having done any homework, they all sound reputable.

More later. (Oh, and that picture at the top: It’s a NASA image of Cuba after Hurricane Gustav passed. If you click on the image to look at the larger version(s), you can see the Isle of Youth off the southern coast, which was devastated by the storm. The milky turquoise color along the southern shoreline is sand stirred up the hurricane’s passage.)

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