Well, Ike is a category 2 hurricane about 200 or so nautical miles south of the mouth of the Mississippi river, moving west towards Corpus Christi or Galveston, TX. It is a massive category 1 storm with a low pressure at its center that says it should be a transitioning from category 3 to category 4. A very unusual and likely dangerous storm.
Ike's wind field is massive, especially on its northern arc, and that means us. We have tropical storm warnings all the way to the Alabama coast.
I was on the telephone at 10AM looking for a fork lift, concrete saw and trenching tool to start trenching for electrical work and reassembling the pods in our Pearlington Village with Jeremy and an electrician. The fellow at the rental store asked me what the water was like in Pearlington. Thinking of Gustav's water, I said we were ok and were just trying to move our pods back into position.
"Well, you ought to check, I don't want to deliver a fork lift into a parking lot full of water."
"Really, what do you mean?"
"Well here in Waveland, MS603 is already underwater, the police have it closed."
Now readers, MS603 is the road that runs from I-10 south to Waveland. It is la little low and Gustav covered it with maybe several inches of water. But, Ike is well south of us, I mean 200 nautical miles south. I expected being on the eastern side of Ike might give us some water, but not two days before landfall in Texas.
Then the weather radio reports that there are 20-25 foot seas in the gulf off the Mississippi coast. That's significant.
I decided I had better call my friend Larry in Pearlington for the situation because he is a long time resident and knows the streets. Gustav flooded him about eight inches.
"Hey, Mr. Henry, how's it going?"
"Larry, I heard 603 is underwater, what is it like over on the Pearl River side of 604 at our village?"
"I don't think you have water over there, yet... Water is over a lot of the small streets and my wife and I are working hard to get all our stuff put up high because it looks like we are going to take some water."
"Well, Larry I better let you go I don't want to slow you down."
***
You may have read about Larry in my first seven pieces. Katrina washed away Larry's place. Before that he had never seen water that high in Pearlington. Gustav did not wash his home away but it soaked everything.
A couple days after Gustav came through and we got back to Pearlington, I stopped over at the Pearlington Recovery Center with an American Red Cross volunteer from Ohio to talk to him. Larry said he and his wife were talking seriously about fixing up the place and selling it.
They have had enough. I'm sure he'll say that again for the last time if Ike floods him.
Significantly, Ike is to take a hard right turn north about the time it encounters Texas.
I will not rest easy until that happens because a little change in the weather in the mid-west could make Ike turn a lot sooner than we think. I would fear for New Orleans.
Even so, I worry for the folks in Texas. I remember what that poor woman in Pearlington said about hoping it hit there instead of somewhere else (see Day 151).
I guess you can only fight with Nature for just so long before you realize you can't win.
Somewhere in Psalms the writer says, "If we rely in our own strength, we are lost."
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