Friday we watched as the storm moved northwest towards Corpus Christ. As the storm moved north, our winds shifted to the north, but no rain.
They had been threatening to close down the Queen Isabella Causeway when winds got up to 45mph, and finally about 3pm on Friday it happened. They shut down the Causeway and anyone still on the island would have to stay there until it re-opened. But as the storm continued to trek northward, the winds fell back below 45mph and they opened it again after only a couple of hours.
We watched helplessly as Harvey slammed into the Texas coast very close to Rockport. The good thing about this area is that it is thinly populated. Much of the barrier island in that area is either a state park, a protected seashore or wildlife refuge. Most of the communities are on the mainland and not on the barrier island. A little further north, Matagorda Bay is notorious in history as taking blow and blow from big storms and wiping out community after community.
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| Category 4!! |
By Saturday morning, blue skies had returned to most of the Rio Grande Valley, so we drove back to SPI with much trepidation. There was surprisingly little damage on the island. Lots of boarded up windows and turned over signs, but no real structural damage that I could see. There had been only about a 2' storm surge, a level the island can easily deal with.
As for our house, besides a bunch of debris in the swimming pool, we were unscathed. Such a tremendous relief.
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| Harvey the blue crab |
We have lived on SPI for only about eight months now and have already had to worry about two tropical storms. The peak of hurricane season is still to come in September.
The forecasters predicted very well where Harvey would hit and they also predicted that the storm would linger in the area for a while, then turn back south, go back out to sea, and then go east again. Amazingly, that's exactly what it did.
I had never seen a hurricane make landfall and just sit there, and then go back out to sea! WTF?! and all the while dumping trillions of gallons of water on Houston and Harris County.
The city of Rockport was decimated. Some buildings were just gone. Most had damage of some kind. It reminded me of Hurricane Ike in 2008 when much of the Bolivar Peninsula was scraped clean of homes that had been built there. At least in Rockport, there was a lot of debris. At Bolivar, there was no sign that there had once been hundreds of homes.
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| 2008 - Bolivar Peninsula before and after Hurricane Ike |
On Saturday afternoon, the weather was nice on the island, so we went to the beach and walked aways up to the Wanna Wanna Beach Bar for dinner. As we sat under the breezy canopy eating some fried shrimp and drinking a beer, huge rain clouds suddenly formed and dumped a lot of rain on us. A quick look at my radar app and it was obvious that a giant feeder rain band had formed in south Texas and began its march out over the Gulf of Mexico and made it up to Southeast Texas.
The thought of Harvey affecting our weather this dramatically while we were 200 miles away from landfall is pretty amazing.
A simple lesson: do not fuck with hurricanes. If you can, get out of the way.
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