Hurricane Rita had 3 separate eyewalls

I know that Katrina has fallen off the national radar, and Rita barely made a blip. But I'm doing what little I can to remind people of the devastated areas and that there is still a great need in the affected areas.

Rita was one hell of a storm even though she was mostly downplayed by the national media. It will be interesting to see what the final report on the storm says. If they actually do downgrade katrina to Category 3 status, I'd say they both had to be very powerful 3s- and I'd really hate to see what a 5 could do in this day and age.


http://www.southeasttexaslive.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=15354694&BRD=2287&PAG=461&dept_id=512588&rfi=6

As Southeast Texas communities continue cleaning up the destruction left by Hurricane Rita two weeks ago, weather watchers sift through data about wind speeds, barometric pressure and the like to determine exactly how powerful this powerful storm was.

Roger Erickson, meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Lake Charles, La., said the hurricane had not one, but three eye walls packing tornadic winds.

Erickson described the innermost eye wall, which hit parts of Orange and Newton counties, as five to 10 miles across. The second was 20 to 40 miles across and pounded Beaumont and Jasper. The largest, at about 80 miles across, hit all of Southeast Texas, Erickson said.

Each of the eye walls brought a five-mile-deep band of intense winds up to 20 miles stronger than elsewhere in the hurricane, Erickson said. Gusts in the storm, which made landfall as a Category 3 hurricane, hit 120 mph.

As devastating as the storm was, it would have been much worse for Southeast Texas if it had not made a last-minute northeastern turn.

-snip-

"We're just lucky the thing didn't devastate every home," Navejar said.

(And that luck for SE Texas was awful for Cameron Parish, LA- those folks really got hit hard! Please don't let the so-called media convince people that everything is just fine and dandy down here- so many people still need help)

BIG SANDY - Last summer, 76-year-old Benny Griffin was offered $94,000 for some of the best hardwoods that grace his 300 acres of rare, untouched East Texas forest, what he calls his "pride and joy."

Griffin, a retired electrician who now raises cattle, said he turned down the offer so he could leave a place for the squirrels and deer, and to avoid disturbing the sanctuary he and his family have enjoyed for more than 50 years.

"We wanted to leave this with nature," Griffin said recently as he walked through the forest near this community in Polk County, just east of Livingston. "Nature's taken care of it, didn't it?"

www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/special/05/rita/3389268

This will hurt the logging industry. And it's also hurt those who want to save their trees....

Timber industry takes big hit

Danny Elder stomped over snapped limbs and dead leaves last week to measure the hurricane damage on his 250-acre tree farm in Magnolia Springs.

"It got me pretty bad," he said after seeing swaths of the Jasper County land cleared by Mother Nature.

Landowners in Hurricane Rita's path have come upon similar, if not worse, damage to timber that makes the East Texas landscape unique.

The Texas Forest Service estimated that 771,000 acres, valued at **$833 million**, were damaged. (empahsis mine)

-snip-

http://www.southeasttexaslive.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=15354710&BRD=2287&PAG=461&dept_id=512588&rfi=6

can be determined. Keep in mind the region has multiple petrochemical facilities, which will continue to emit, and the trees won't be around to help clean the air.

Mom had several 40 to 50-year-old oaks in her yard. They were uprooted by the winds. One-hundred-foot tall pines were snapped like a toothpick at the trunk. Apparently the tornados -- or tornado-force winds -- didn't touch the ground because the houses did not sustain roof damage.

She's in Orange County. Just returned home Friday. Barely any trees of reasonable height left standing <i>in the entire county.</i>

And it is like this for nearly a hundred miles inland north (all the way to Jasper).

Orange county got hit very, very hard. I'm just glad that it sounds like she's ok (from your post anyway). :)

Entergy is saying that they expect power to be 100% restored by early next week, so we'll see. The biggest problem really isn't power, though, so much as it is actually cleaning up and trying to find someone you trust to do any needed repairs. That is what is going to take some time, especially with some people trying to take advantage of the situation. We were told by the contractor we prefer that it could be another 3 months before he could even get to our house, but that he hopes he can start on it in a couple of months.

Good luck to your mom! I hope she comes out of this ok.


and on edit- It also depends on what part of the county she lives in, since the Jasper Newton Electric Co-op also services part of the county. And they said the other day that they only have about 1/3 of their customers back on line so far. Apparently their infrastructure took a big hit. If she lives in the city of Orange, she might be luckier than those in the north parts of the county and actually get power back soon!

She evacuated to Nacogdoches. Her biggest complaint -- besides the power being out for a few days, thus no A/C -- was that she had to buy underwear at Wal-Mart. :rofl:

No trees on the house but she has an underground water line ruptured by a falling tree. She's staying at her friend's house in Beaumont, who has a small hole in her roof but also electricity. Her friend is a professor at Lamar, which still hasn't resumed the fall semester. How are they -- and all the other schools -- going to make that up? :shrug:

From what I understand, the schools are looking at cutting a few days from the Winter break and maybe adding some days at the end of the school year. As I'm sure you know, Texas public schools have 10 "free" days of absences each year, and the districts are talking about using those for this too. But that could be a problem, since those are the days that many students use for extra-curricular activities. I know that I used those days for tennis, golf and UIL academic tournaments, so I think that would really hurt the students if the school took those days. It would be better just to extend the school year into June, IMHO.

But also, so many of the schools haven't really had a chance to think about those things yet. Many of the area schools have yet to even decide when they'll return, much less how they'll make up the lost days. Though some of them have talked about the football schedules- of course! :)


I'm so sorry your mom had damage. We had 2 trees through our roof, so I can certainly sympathize. And I hope she's applied for the FEMA and Red Cross funds, especially since she is still out of her house.