That's good news - seeing some of the devastation out there just breaks my heart. I can't even begin to imagine what I would think or do if our house just washed away.

There's a picture of a guy who's had a yacht land on his car. I think an dead Alligator might beat that.

You didn't try CPR on it did you?

Good to hear that! The devastation around the coast looks frightening. Something between tsunami and tornado. Can't imagine from my experiences to be exposed for hours in such a strom. Here their attacks last at most few minutes or seconds in "such" high level.
I just wonder how long it will take to get all electrical power installations waterless or at least partly operative.

What do you think, what was the reason for the Alligator's death?

Yikes

Glad you and your family and house are OK, Mr Rocker. Looking on the bright side... if you fell the remaining trees, you'll have a better view of the night sky

Some of the images at the links Hendric posted are incredible; reminiscent of the aftermath of a nuclear blast. The scale of the destruction doesn't really come home until you look at the satellite imagery. It also seems that Galveston in particular had a narrow escape from something worse, which boggles my imagination in unpleasant ways.

I didn't want to admit it at first, but the poor thing died after I tried to administer CPR to it.

I got some great pictures today of the two barges stranded across the four-lane highway near our home. I thought it might be fun to make a Photsynth with them.

I've had people wanting more images of our home and it's environs after Hurricane Ike. I have posted some of the more interesting ones in this web album. I'll add images to the album as I am able. In some ways, this hurricane has been surreal...
---Link deleted, now that it is no longer needed---

We are doing well, and it appears that our electrical power may return sooner than predicted.

From Emily's blog...

http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00001692/

"Meanwhile, it's October and therefore fire season here in Los Angeles. Neither of the two rapidly developing wildfires in northern Los Angeles County threatens The Planetary Society, but one is uncomfortably close to my neighborhood, in an apparent repeat of the fire fun we enjoyed three years ago (though this time, I must say, the wind is much worse). I just checked and didn't find any satellite imagery of the fires yet -- neither TERRA nor AQUA has passed over Los Angeles since these fires started. I'm not sure how much more DPS coverage I'll be able to do today! "

Wish everyone well ....

Craig

Thanks, Craig. It's much closer to Emily than any other member I know of (NE of downtown LA proper;. I can see the smoke from down in Torrance, though), but it shouldn't make it into Pasadena...still a lot of geographic separation there.

On a personal note: Gotta go under the knife this Fri for a hernia, and the damned thing apparently hemorrhaged over the weekend; without being too graphic, trips to the loo have been disproportionately frightening. Going to the doc tomorrow, might be going in for surgery sooner. (Note: Noticed the stupid thing like six months ago, was too busy to take care of it...NOW it hurts, NOW it's scary...you got one of these, don't wait, just go get it fixed!!!)

OK, Tinman! We won't expect many coherent posts out of you on Saturday. But we expect you back in swing by Sunday PM. *
Can't let Doug build up too great a margin.
You're our only hope to catch up with him.

* Demand a recovery room with wide-band Net access.

Nicholas, Be Brave!
We'll be here crossing our fingers!

Youch
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/subsets...ERONET_La_Jolla

(and good luck with the Hernia np - you might come out bionic with the weave matting they use to hold them in place!)

Doug

Thanks for the good wishes, guys; it's much appreciated!

Re bionic: I've been asking them to replace my existing plumbing with dolomite-enhanced PVC for years, but do they listen? Nooo...damn cheap contractors!!!

Yes, nprev... best wishes...

Craig

*cough cough cough* The fire's a bad one, but fortunately it's keeping several miles away from me. There are even blue skies overhead today. But everything smells like smoke. I have friends who live in one of the canyon communities to the west of me, who were evacuated yesterday and are now inhabiting my guest room indefinitely.

Every year there are fires somewhere in the Southland (that's what they call southern California in the local media), and every year I'm amazed and impressed with the preparedness and performance of the firefighters and all the other organizations who support them, from the police to animal control (the latter sends out armies of trailers to go into evacuated communities and grab horses and other large animals and take them to shelters -- the same canyon communities that are prone to wildfire are usually ones with lots of horse owners). These fires have the potential to be a huge and costly disaster, burning hundreds or thousands of homes. But because of year-round preparedness, enforcement of brush clearance ordinances, rules about roof materials and the proximity of large trees, even what species of trees, and the readiness of more than a thousand firefighters, they can let the fire do what it wants with the brushland while protecting nearly every home and outbuilding from being burned. In the areas that are actively burning right now, the TV helicopters reveal that nearly every driveway has a police car parked in it, and a fire truck on the street; tactical teams of firefighters march into the backyard of each house, one by one, defending it as the fire burns past. Spotters on the ground call in the aerial troops, skycranes and super scoopers dumping water on hot spots. If you drive through burned areas in the days after a fire you'll see acre after blackened acre, abruptly bordering lush green backyards and untouched Mission-style homes with bright red clay tile roofs. It's amazing.

--Emily

The response really is amazing as Emily described. The coordination alone is marvelous, considering that you're dealing with city, county & state government agencies; these guys are on the spot in MINUTES if something breaks out, and this is a huge area (maybe 2500 square miles) we're talking about. There's a lot to be learned here about organizational management.

As someone who survived hernia repair 20 years ago, I can tell you that it's not all that uncomfortable -- they work through a relatively small incision, and depending on the location of the hernia, the healing repair is often (and was for me) less painful than the hernia itself is.

Have you heard if the surgery has been moved up? I'm sure I'm not the only one who wants to know when you're going under the old knife.

I've had two full-on operations in my adult life, where I was put completely out with drugs. One was the hernia repair 20 years ago, the other was the emergency removal of my appendix about five years ago. My one best memory from both is the completely relaxed and relief-drenched feeling of waking up in the recovery room, in no pain and with a drug-supplied sense of self-satisfaction at surviving the pain and coming out the other side.

Vaya con dios, my friend...

-the other Doug

Well, all I can hope for would be the best for all of you who are potentially in harm's way, whether it be by fire or knife. As has been noted, it truly is nice to see how well most modern-day emergency responders perform when called upon. Take care.

Hey, oDoug, and thanks for your concern. Nope, ain't been moved up; surgical theatre availability is tight in this quite populous city, and apparently this isn't life threatening for several weeks (still scares me, though.)

On the lighter side, I was able to watch the last season of The Sopranos finally as well as season 5 of Aqua Teen Hunger Force on DVD; dunno what I'm gonna watch after the freakin' surgery now, but that was fun!

Hey, Nick -- tried to leave you a PM and your mailbox is full!

Here's a brief precis of what I wrote (and will send to you once you clean out your mailbox a bit):

Good luck! I'm sure everything will turn out fine!

And avoid watching really funny things for the first week or so after the surgery. You don't want to indulge in a lot of energetic laughter. Trust me, I know...

-the other Doug

Thanks, Doug; cleaning on inbox accomplished!

Just now got back from the hospital; it's done, flyin' on Vikodin now, but it still hurts like hell. I'm thinkin' the the classic gangster movie gutshot might be the most painful thing imaginable; the doc told me that intestines do NOT like to be handled, I believe it!

Thanks again to all for your kind wishes; it's great to have friends!:)

Sorry to resurrect this, but seems appropriate. Are all our UK friends weathering this sudden snowstorm all right? Looked pretty miserable on the news over here in the States!

Don't know about the UK but here in this part of Ireland (just west of Dublin) we've had the first proper fall of snow since January 2001. Now that's only about 10cm which I'm sure anyone used to proper winters would laugh at but we really aren't kitted out for this here, roads are treacherous and we have no snow plows, nobody has adequate tyres for icy conditions and the airports\trains\buses are all grinding to a halt. It's not actually all that cold - -2 to -5C, we had a couple of much colder snaps just before Christmas but they were dry so provided folks have made it home it's not really all that bad. Things are a lot worse in the UK though to be fair.

My main worry is that I'm supposed to be heading off to sunny Madrid later today for a few days teaching the folks in Dell about some of their cool new toys and I was really looking forward to it but it seems there is a risk that Dublin airport is likely to be shut down and I may not escape.

A little ribbing...

Fine here in Kendal... we had about 3"/4" in the end, but you'd have thought we were in the middle of THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW the way some people were whining and panicking. Makes me wonder how people in Siberia and Norway etc cope - oh hang on, no it doesn't, I know their secret - THEY'RE NOT WUSSES!!!!!

Well I'm snowed in here in Wales, but that's not particularly unusual. You won't hear any more of it on the international news once it's cleared up in London.

Sunny Madrid eh?!? Here're a few pictures.
Click to view attachment Click to view attachment Click to view attachment Click to view attachment
The first one is from sunday morning and the remaining ones are from the 9th of January. It's not uncommon to see some snow falling in the Madrid area at least once in the winter. But THAT amount is really out of the scale, specially the storm on the 9th. Madrid's airport was closed for hours, schools closed too, and the traffic jams on the main highways were really huge. I was in Germany part of the week and that day we were supposed to fly back to Madrid but the chances were slim due to the delays and finally no way once Barajas (Madrid's airport) was closed. We would have to spend the night in Frankfurt but finally decided to take a flight to Zaragoza (300km east of Madrid) and make the final leg by train because the railway network was fine. In a normal situation a would be at home at 7pm but that time I was back at 4am.

Getting snowed in can be inconvenient, and I guess that a bump does show up in the mortality rates when they come to collate the stats at the end of the year (due mainly to falls), but it doesn't really compare to proper weather, like what you have over yonder - hurricanes, earthquakes, rains of fish, etc. It makes a nice traditional news event for a few days, particularly if there's nothing much else going on.

I live on top of a hill right on the Welsh border at the southern end. The Atlantic western approaches / Bristol Channel (with prevailing westerly winds) is just down the road, so one of the main weather patterns that produces snow (wet Westerly wind meets cold easterly) tends to dump snow on us more heavily than the relatively flat / low-lying, and apparently more news-worthy, parts of the country. I was driving an unfamiliar loan car home from work on Monday (a heavy diesel Skoda estate car) vs my normal somewhat nippier car*. By the time I got a few miles from home and left the heavily gritted main roads, there was a fair bit of snow lying on the carriageway. As I drove (cautiously! carefully! slowly! Honestly, officer!) down a snowy hill 3 miles from home, without any warning or provocation the thing span 60* or so anti-clockwise, then all the way back to 60* the other way, somehow missing both a row of parked cars and the lorry coming up the hill the other way, before slithering to a halt at a comical angle across the middle of the road. $ABS++ . ...which was nice, although I could almost see the "thinks" bubble above the lorry driver's head :> ) Got home with no further excitement, but around 8pm the power went out. So for the rest of the evening, it was reading stuff called "paper", by oil and candlelight. Power returned overnight, but the DSL didn't! It's finally started working tonight (Trillian: "Did you manage to make some sense of the controls?" Ford: "No, we just stopped fiddling with them.") Electricity I can live without, but the net?! Not so much.

(* '97 Celica, a less boy-racer looking one of these, which I {} BTW!)

Apparently we're due another pasting tonight. Never mind, our Anderson shelter's quite cheerful and homely, and we will drown out the noise with a jolly singsong. Stiff upper lip, chaps!

Though I am not directly affected, we have major bush fires in SE Australia. News just out (http://www.abc.net.au/news/) report that 14 people perished (maybe up to 40) in bush fires near Melbourne, Victoria. It's a beautiful country side were it happened, been there a couple of times. Scorching heat (Melbourne 47, Western Sydney 42, my place 40) and strong winds didnt help the situation. Lets hope it doesnt get any worse, NSW's having a hottie tomorrow.

Edit: not to forget, two states up in Northern Queensland they have a massive flooding event there

It did, in a terrible way...just terrible...
Hope all you UMSFers downunder are OK and let's pray for this to have an end.

It has indeed turned into the worst natural disaster in Australia, and sickest of it all is that some fires were deliberately lit. 108 have perished (there are fears that this number could go to 170) and some towns are still threatened by fires. It's a real tragedy.

The enormous magnitude of this disaster is becoming more and more apparent. I sincerely hope that our Australian friends are safe, and remain so.

Unfortunate to resurrect this thread yet again, but best wishes to and hopes for our fellow UMSFers in Italy after yesterday's terrible earthquake.

My condolencies too.

I'd rather cope with hurricanes any day....at least you can see those coming.
From the pics it looked like a lot of new buildings were ok but the old ones crumbled badly.

Breaking news...We just had a 5.0 (prelim) quake in LA centered about 5 km NW of where I live...quite a sharp jolt! My wife is freaked!

USGS is reporting it as a 5.0 with 3.1 aftershocks.
Hang tight nprev!

EDIT: A friend at JPL just replied saying "What earthquake?!".
He didn't even feel it

No sweat! That was a good one, though; all my neighbors were outside as well (we went to the front doorway immediately).

(Sigh)...My wife's not sleepin' tonight, I'll wager. She hates these things.

It was a mild rolling quake in Santa Monica. It did roll for quite a while, causing me to entertain the possibility that it would get stronger!

edit: I was in LA during the 1971 quake, watched my younger brother's crib bounce across the bedroom. He was all jacked up about it -- "do that again!"

I am in La Crescenta and definitely felt it. Both the 5.0 and the 3.1.

Paolo

Should've mentioned I'm in Torrance. Real strong shake, whole building was creaking.

Hey, guys -- spent a good hour in the basement of my call center here in St. Paul, waiting out tornado warnings. (Actually, spent a half-hour downstairs, got back to my desk and another warning was issued, so trundled right back downstairs for another half hour.)

Nothing hit right near my workplace, but apparently there were tornado touchdowns within about a mile of my house in Minneapolis. I won't be home for another 90 minutes or so, but talking to a friend in the same area, it appears that there was not much damage in my neighborhood.

I'll let y'all know if my home is still where I left it... later. (I wish there was a smiley for the emotion "whew!")

-the other Doug

Oh, crap. Sure hope everything's alright, oDoug.

Tornadoes are scary. Would rather be in an earthquake instead any day.

That was rather selfish of you Doug. Next time would you please lean out the door with a good camera and get some photos for your friends here? You have permission to return to the basement when the first cow flies past.

Isn't St. Paul a city? You might want to make the first flying 4WD the trigger for going to the basement


typical umsf suggestion:

Well, I'm home, everything is just fine here. No damage whatsoever right here. I did drive the mile or so down the road to where there were reported touchdowns, found a nice neat line of uprooted trees (a couple had dropped back down onto adjacent homes, breaking them up a bit), found a local record store closed for tornado damage where the owner reported to me that the roof had lifted off the building and then settled back down -- you could see the front wall of the building bowing out towards the street near the top. Tons of store windows blown out, glass all over the roadway, uprooted trees trees blocking streets, etc.

Apparently, observers in the top stories of the 70-some-story IDS Tower in downtown Mpls saw the funnel (by this time not on the ground) go by, with entrained debris *above* them at their 600-some-foot vantage point. As the funnel collapsed completely, they watched the debris fall out of the sky and onto the streets below. (Sorry, Dan, no cows -- just tree branches and such.)

Overall, the damage was limited to a few very small areas where the twisters actually touched down (on the ground or onto the roofs of buildings), and there have been no reported deaths or serious injuries. I even have power, the cable never went down, etc.

And Dan -- first off, if I thought there was *any* chance I could get a pic of a tornado, I'd be all over it, bosses or no bosses. I have been within a few miles of tornado touchdowns several times in my life, and have never, ever seen a funnel on the ground. It's one of the things I'd like to be able to do before I die. Unfortunately, the actual tornado activity was a good 10 miles away from my workplace, and there was just no way I could sneak out of the building and go looking for it. Especially since no one knew there were actually tornadoes touching down until a good half-hour after the event.

All in all, sort of a fun day!

-the other Doug

Uh...don't take this wrong, dude, but I hope you don't have this kind of fun again for a long, long time!

Glad everything's okay for you.

I too, am glad to hear that all was well, after all. Coincidentally, we had a tornado touch down near here yesterday. It caused some damage and injuries in Beaumont, TX. Curiously, my wife was on her way to do some shopping in the same area hit by the tornado when she decided to take an unusual detour to shop elsewhere. I'm glad she did. She might have ended up in the middle of the danger.

BTW, O'Doug...I was visiting your lovely state in July, and I must say it truly was a pleasant experience compared to the July's down here. I actually had to turn on the heat in our RV on some of the nights. We drove up to the Keweenaw peninsula of Michigan and then followed the shore of Lake Superior to Duluth and then around the north shore to Grand Marais, sightseeing and hunting for Lake Superior agates. Lake Superior and its shores are one of the geological wonders of this planet. We wrapped up the trip hunting for agates in some of the gravel pits near Moose Lake and then saw some amazing agates at Moose Lake's Agate Days event.

We passed through the twin cities rather quickly on our hasty trip back home. The next time I am up that way I'll try to contact you to see if we can get together for a beer or a coffee. There are still several Minnesota rock specimens that I want to collect.

It's fire time again here in SoCal. According to the LA Times, JPL is closed through Sunday night due to the nearby Station Fire; you can get updates from a generated Google map here.

Best wishes to everyone @ JPL, and to Emily & her family in Pasadena. It's gotta be noxious up there; you can see the smoke bank hanging over the foothills even from the South Bay area.

Maybe Spirit sent those fire clouds along...if Spirit's sky is going to be hazy, perhaps she's trying to evoke a sympathetic response in Earth's weather system at Home Base.

Best wishes, all. I was in Santa Cruz 2 weeks ago within a couple miles of a forest fire. Even if you don't feel in immediate danger of burning, the smoke makes even walking across a parking lot unbearable. I never unpacked my suitcase all week, just in case we were asked to get out quickly.

Fire approaching the Mt. Wilson Observatory (webcam from Emily's blog.)

...let's all hope for the best.

This one is nasty. I"m keeping track with friends on Facebook. Only one family I know has been evacuated, and they were pretty close to JPL. Keeping everything crossed - there are some proper heroes fighting this thing up there.