The Long Reach of Ike

While news coverage of the devastation from Hurricane Ike has somewhat been in competition with election and financial news, and the problems are less dramatized than with Katrina, it's important to consider how broad a swath of the country has been impacted by this storm. While Hurricane Katrina effectively wiped out infrastructure from southern Louisiana to central Mississippi, the rapid movement of Ike brought major problems all the way up to the Canadian border. This is shown dramatically by the 24 hour radar-estimated precipitation through Sunday morning.



The combination of flooding and high winds have left millions of people homeless or without power as far away as western Pennsylvania! On the other side of Ike's (fourth!) landfall, the rebuilding process is challenging the residents of Grand Turk, Inagua, Haiti, eastern Cuba, and western Cuba. The wipeout of Galveston should be compared to the destruction that Grand Turk has sustained from when the hurricane was still a Category 4 on the Saffir-Simpson scale, or the misery of Gonaives, Haiti after being inundated by four tropical cyclones in a row.