Fitch said:
MAS444 said:
"Houston as we know it would be be pretty much gone."
Isn't that a little (or lot) dramatic?
My family lives in Dallas not far north of where the tornados tore through Preston Hollow last October. Winds there were 140 miles per hour and even driving through there as recently as this past weekend it is still recovering. Trees wiped out, roof and whole houses being rebuilt. Shopping center and schools still rebuilding.
Not too dramatic to say that IMO, given the scale difference b/t a blocks-wide tornado and miles-wide hurricane.
I'm not trying to imply this isn't a dangerous storm, but it's about more than just category/wind speed.
Katrina was a category 3 (125 mph winds) when it hit land the first time in LA. It weakened slightly to 120 mph when it made landfall the second time at the MS/LA border.
But it kicked up a 27 foot storm surge that went 6-12 miles inland. The storm surge wiped out about 90% of structures from Bay St. Louis to Ocean Springs, which is over 50 miles of coastline. Flooding extended all the way to Pascagoula, which was 75 miles from landfall. I-10 was also flooded and damaged in several places, including the section over the Pascagoula River, which is nearer to the MS/AL border.
Harvey was bad, but that water came up fairly slowly. The thought of a 27 ft wall of water hitting the coastline scares the poop out of me, and I grew up on the MS Gulf Coast. We honestly never imagined anything that bad.
The "saving grace" of that storm was that, at the time, the population of the three coastal counties and three counties to the immediate north was less than 400k people. So, a relatively small number of people were affected.
But the damage was truly horrific, and I don't even want to think about what it would look like if that kind of storm surge hit Galveston Bay.