Tornados and Hurricanes

I'm in Laredo again. And this time I'm spending my 34 hour reset here so I decided, now on my eighth visit, perhaps it's time to actually see the town rather than just hibernating at the England facility. It's 104 degrees out "but it's a dry heat" (actually it's a 34% humidity level so it's a bit sticky), but I rode the bike the nine miles to downtown and went through a half gallon of water doing it. Had I not spent last summer in similar temperatures in South Carolina, I know I wouldn't be able to handle this.

I've now found a television and am watching the news about the tornado in Joplin Missouri. I've been through Joplin a half dozen times over the past few months. Apparently the Flying J truckstop I've fueled at there was destroyed.

Over the last week while driving down from Virginia, I passed through five tornado paths, one an exit on the highway in Alabama that looked just like the photos I'm seeing now of Joplin. Trees stripped of foliage and many snapped in half 30 feet above the ground. A few trees, big ones, strewn about with their root balls intact. And buildings unrecognizable piles of rubble. The other tornado sites were just bare spots in the forest with a few highway signs left as twisted chunks of metal. Pretty frightening.

I also spent a night in Crystal Beach, Texas. This barrier island town, across the Houston bay from Galveston, was completely destroyed by hurricane Ike a few years ago. Completely. More than twenty feet of water washed over the island wiping out 3500 homes and killing more than 100 people.

Today all the new buildings are required to be 22 feet above sea level which means most of them have been built upon nearly twenty foot tall stilts.