The real Hurricane Ike losses?

[John Kettler]

Am intensely curious and concerned regarding the matter discussed in this thread here (KHOU TV's viewer forum) and in two I found on a link from it. Saw a blurb from the former and backtracked it. What's touched on in the first is gone into in considerable detail in the last two. Would welcome info from anyone who knows anything concrete about Ike fatalities, what's known officially, and what we're not being told.

http://www.khou.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=27523&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

Long post with many links. LOS ANGELES TIMES is asking embarrassing questions about some 20,000 apparently still missing people. Galveston mayor gags all city employees, Coast Guard tells people they didn't see bodies floating by, media no-fly zone, etc.

http://snarkfood.com/coast-guard-fly-over-of-galveston-island-texas/

Oil refinery executive and trusted friend of above blogger reports seeing 1500 bodies in one area alone!

http://thepoliticalcarnival.blogspot.com/2008/09/hurricane-ike-news-blackout-1500-bodies.html

Frankly, I hope there are just lots of math incompetents involved, but this doesn't look good at all. I think we may be looking at higher fatalities, in the Galveston area alone, than were caused by the deadly 1900 Galveston Hurricane.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galveston_Hurricane_of_1900

If so, it would seem to explain many things people are reporting.

Regards,

John Kettler

[Boris London]

interesting... can you find some more links

Boris

London

[John Kettler]

Boris London,

If I do, I'll doubtless be excoriated. But then, that's already happened!

Regards,

John Kettler

[Wilhammer]

The Internets - the only place to find The Truth .

[Wilhammer]

Well, FoxNews chimes in on this;

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,424303,00.html

[Lars]

So we got...one?

[Subvet]

From the Fox News article: "Nobody is suggesting that tens of thousands died"

I wouldn't say "nobody"...

[Wilhammer]

Ok, 'nobody that matters'.

[SgtMuhammed]

Well I'm in Houston and there are no bodies floating around in the bay or the Gulf or in any of the bayous.

[Runyan99]

Kettler, isn't the real question which U.S. government agency used their weather control devices to create this hurricane in the first place, and why?

[SgtMuhammed]

Well that goes without saying doesn't it?

[SgtMuhammed]

It is true though that there were a bunch of bodies floating around. A bunch of caskets popped out of the ground when one of the cemetaries flooded. Talk about creepy.

[Bigduke6]

Strangely enough, I was in the Houston area when Ike's eye passed through.

Personally, I saw no dead bodies. In fact, from what I can tell most if not all the hurricane-related deaths weren't from wind or flood, but dealing with the the cleaning up - people zapped by downed power lines, dudes hit with heart attacks as they cleaned up brush from their yards, more car accidents because the stop lights weren't working, the outpatient running out of a critical medicine, differences of opinion between marauders and armed homeowners; that sort of thing.

Last I heard 'bout 25 persons were listed dead as a direct result of Ike, of whom something like 3-5 were drowned or killed by flying debris. Another 150 or so, mostly in Galveston, are whereabouts unknown. Most no doubt bugged out but a few of those probably drowned as well.

Don't get me wrong, it was a pretty serious storm, the high winds lasted for about six hours, then even ripped up one square foot of my parents' roof.

But the tidal surge was not enough to overcome the Galveston seawall (15 foot surge vs. 17 foot wall), so the areas that really got inundated were south Galveston which isn't covered by the wall, Surfside island just to the South of Galveston, and Bolivar peninsula which is a former secluded beach house know colloquially known as Bolivar Island. One of the beaches and hinterland on Bolivar, Clear Beach, was washed pretty much clean, the before/after pictures look almost like Hiroshima or Dresden. But that was a pretty small area and only property damage, you can't count up Ike kills for smashed waterfront housing.

Also as it happens I talked to a kid from Humble (that's out by the Intercontinental airport) who said flood waters raised his grandmother from the grave, so there's a first hand account of at least one floating coffin.

But hundreds or thousands of dead, well, I never saw any sign of that. Of course, maybe FEMA just tricked me and about 4 million other eyewitnesses.

[Stalins Organ]

So you're prepared to accept the Govt line then, based upon nothing more than your own observation of the actual situation?

Sheesh....

[SgtMuhammed]

Tragically the first death attributed to Ike was a 10 year old boy who was hit by a limb from a tree his dad was trimming so it wouldn't hurt anything when the storm came through.

[John Kettler]

Bigduke6,

You do get around! Regarding the seawall, the CNN correspondent, who was on the third floor of a reinforced concrete parking structure overlooking the seawall, said that not only had he seen waves go over the seawall, but over the tops of the palm trees just behind the seawall. Later, ISTR he was showing how the seawall and the road behind? it had been inundated. Basically, the water was now at the base of the row of palm trees and was remarked upon as evidence of the power of the storm surge.

I believe what you say about Houston, but the claim of bodies everywhere concerned Galveston, and I find it very interesting about the no-fly zones, gag orders, media restrictions and so forth, not to mention the flyover covered only the relatively intact end of Galveston Island.

That claim, BTW, was made by a close personal friend of the guy who does the Snark Food blog, so close he'd "trust his kids" to the man. Given the man's position, I see nothing to be gained by making such a claim, and everything to lose.

SgtMuhammed,

Any place with a high water table is subject to the casket pop up phenomenon. I've heard stories of just this happening in Arkansas, where the paternal side of my family is from. The water table's so high in New Orleans that all burials are above ground, hence the crypts.

Regards,

John Kettler

[Bigduke6]

John,

The waves certainly went over the seawall, they were breaking over the top a good six hours before the eye hit. When the eye hit, certainly some of the big waves managed to splash as high as a palm tree overlooking the beach.

That isn't the same as a tidal surge, which as noted came up to some 1 - 2 meters of the top of the seawall. A simple check of the buildings along Galveston's Seaside Boulevard makes clear the tidal surge - i.e., a sustained flood of water - basically didn't get there. Speaking generally, lower stories are maybe damp from street flooding due to rain, upper stories are mostly intact, and the buildings most importantly are still there. There are heavy buildings right on the seawall that survived the 1900 hurricane (when there was no seawall), and they did fine in Ike. The Flagship Hotel, which is this big building built right in the surf on hundreds of piles, also went through Ike with little damage more than a few busted windows.

Contrast this result with adjacent Bolivar Peninsula, where there is no seawall, where a tidal surge pushed something like 7 meters of water over buildings 5 - 7 meters high (including the piles they were built on), and it's pretty obvious why seawalls get built. Portions of Bolivar peninsula were wiped close to clean.

As to alleged mass death in Galveston, well, let's not forget that some 100,000 persons at a rough estimate seem to have remained on the island to ride out the storm, that media access has been open throughout, that Houston newspapers and television (unlike the nationals such as CNN) have been reporting Ike as their top story for about the last two weeks and continue to do so, that rescue and repair people are working in Galveston just like everywhere else in the region. With all those people - many if not most of them Texans not really friendly to the central government and quite happy to point out the difference between what the feds say and how things really are where they live - on Galveston Island it seems very improbable to me a large number of them could see hundreds of dead bodies, and keep quiet about it were the central government to claim there were in fact no dead bodies.

I am not clear about your point on the alleged no-fly zone over Galveston, as Houston media has been running helicopters over the island on a daily and if you put all the TV stations and police and emergency flights together probably on an hourly basis, since about the second day after Ike left. Perhaps the Feds shut down all that air activity while the Pres was in the area, but as we know that was just for the photo op, and after he left the local choppers resumed their rendition of LZ X-Ray.

I think the evidence is pretty much overwhelming that the reason there are no reports of mass deaths in Galveston as a result of Ike, with the exception of what appear to be a few web sites making unsubstantiated claims, is that in fact Ike did not kill many people in Galveston.