"Missing and Presumed Dead After Ike"

[phantom power]

I've been seeing occasional rumors about thousands of people killed by Ike, casualties who aren't being reported. My first impression was that these were baseless. But they keep appearing and I'm beginning to wonder if there's possibly something to it, so here you go:

One week after Ike, electricity is returning, water and sewage is still a problem, and authorities are worried about disease if people try to return too soon. But one question is nagging at me more and more each day: where are the folks who tried to ride it out in the towns that disappeared?

A clergy friend of mine in the Houston area told me that he and other pastors are holding their breath, expecting the death toll to be big -- eventually. After Katrina, the searchers found plenty of death waiting for them in the Lower 9th Ward from the flooding and destruction. After Ike, however, the dead are going to be very hard to find, if they get found at all.

In the brutally blunt words of one of his native Texan friends, "many of the folks who tried to ride it out are probably either feeding sharks in the Gulf or gators in the bayous."

We're going to get the death toll when the Postal Service figures out a system to deliver mail to addresses that no longer exist, and no one comes to claim that mail. We're going to get the death toll when businesses reopen and people not only don't show up to work but don't get in contact with their old boss. We're going to get the death toll when banks discover that formerly active accounts are suddenly dormant.

They've set up a "Missing Persons" hotline in Galveston, and those who want to help can find a lot of good suggestions here.

But prepare yourselves now: if my friend and his clergy buddies are right, the words "Missing and Presumed Dead" will become very, very familiar.

http://firedoglake.com/2008/09/19/missing-and-presumed-dead/

[jkshaw]

1. Here at home we've been discussing this

I remember hearing a young man saying to a reporter -- this was right before Ike hit -- that it was only a "cat-2" and he thought he could ride it out.

We know the authorities were begging Galveston to evacuate, everyone should evacuate, and perhaps the authorities felt they did all they could. But I wonder if at least some of the fault lies with the naming of hurricanes. This was a category 2 hurricane, just short of a category 3, but it was 600 miles wide and it was going to be the water that would be the killer. And it turned out that way.

I wonder if NOAA, the weather bureaus, some entity concerned with such things, should add a modification to these hurricanes. For instance, a Category 2A or something, to emphasize the danger of a very large Category 2?

[aquart]

2. Jeff Masters blog discussed that.

There is another factor to be added in. Oddly enough, the acronym is IKE. I don't know what the first word is, but the second is Kinetic and the third might be Energy.

[Ghost Dog]

3. Immense?

[phantom power]

4. Integrated Kinetic Energy.

Basically, the total kinetic energy of the wind-field of the storm. Ike actually surpassed Katrina by a little bit, using this measure.