July 15, 2003 7:42 AM

There goes my tee time....

Hurricane Claudette expected to go coastal this afternoon


We've just had our first tornado warning, in Chambers and Galveston County. Claudette may already have claimed her first victims. A house apparently collapsed at about 530am in Surfside, trapping a man and a boy inside.

Galveston Island is already reporting wind gusts of up to 55 mph, tides seven feet above normal and spectacular waves crashing across all lanes of the seawall. Galveston is close behind Port O'Connor and Freeport on the National Weather Service's landfall targets. Emergency officials are saying it's too late to evacuate. A hurricane warning continues to stretch 200 miles from Baffin Bay, south of Corpus Christi, to High Island, north of the Bolivar Peninsula.

At 6 a.m. today, Claudette was 80 miles south of Galveston and moving at 12 mph. It was expected to take a more westward tack toward Matagorda Bay today before making landfall.

But forecasting landfall is not an exact science.

Duh....

Just getting into my office this morning was an adventure. The wind obliterated my brand-new $7 umbrella (%#$#!!), and I got soaked. Outside of a lot of standing water, though, it's not too bad out there. Of course, Todville Road is flooded, but it always floods in high wind and water conditions.

In Texas, authorities cannot forcibly evacuate residents, but they can strongly suggest that people do so. There are coastal counties that are at that point now.

This ought to be an interesting day....

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This page contains a single entry by Jack Cluth published on July 15, 2003 7:42 AM.

Claudette decides to pay us a visit was the previous entry in this blog.

Yeah, it could have been a lot worse is the next entry in this blog.

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