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=6As 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.
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"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)