Hurricane Harvey
The tropical storm that was Harvey has graduated to a full fledged hurricane. As I write this, Hurricane Harvey is a minimal Category 1 on the Saffir-Simpson Scale with winds in excess of 75 miles/hour. Harvey is expected to make landfall at or about Corpus Christi, Texas sometime tomorrow as a Category 3. That is a real hurricane. A Cat 3 has winds in excess of 110 miles per hour. By comparison, Hurricane Alicia that hit Houston head on in 1983 was a Cat 3. Superstorm Sandy (2012) was a Cat 3 when it pounded Cuba and had dropped to a Cat 2 by the time is slammed into the northeastern US.
We are often put on notice of bad weather by our local tv weather teams that doesn't ever happen. Hurricane Ike was a no-show out here as were Hurricanes Rita and Katrina. All of those storms at one time or another was predicted to hit us and didn't. All those storms produced lots of damage and heavily impacted portions of the Gulf Coast but gave us nothing but a slight breeze or a bit of rain. It looks like Harvey will be very different.
Corpus Christi is a beautiful city down the coast from us and importantly west of us. Because of the counter clockwise spin of our hurricanes, the eastern side is always the "dirty" side. That's where the bulk of the rain happens and where the potential tornadoes are more common. They are talking about 18-20 inches of rain here and high winds. We won't know for sure until Harvey arrives. Hurricanes almost always move to the east or the west as they approach the coastline and there is no way to tell in advance exactly where they will come ashore. That said, we are firmly in the cone of uncertainty and absolutely on the dirty side of the storm.
We have battened down the hatches here. The two things that are the most likely are loss of power and heavy rain. This storm has been described as a rain-maker and not so much as a storm surge or wind damage storm. That's not to say that both can't happen but we are not close enough to the coast to worry about storm surge. We have had as much as 15" of rain before with no serious problems except for our partial driveway cave-in. Our culvert has been replaced so this will be its first real test. We don't expect any issues.
With the power off we will have no lights, no air conditioning and no water. To that end, I have filled all the water troughs although the rain will probably do that for us anyway. Most of our windows have screens so we may be functioning in the heat but hopefully with a breeze. I have filled up four muck buckets in the dye studio with water so we can scoop small buckets of water to keep the toilets functioning. We have bottled water and lots of food we can eat that doesn't need refrigeration. Thankfully, our propane stove works just fine without power so we can cook as needed.
All the vehicles are full of gas. I have cash in case ATM's are without power for a while. We all have enough of our regular medications to last a month which is way longer than we should need even in the worst happens.
We have plenty of feed for all the livestock as well as the cats and the dog. We will put out hay in all the shelters this evening so if the goats won't venture out in the rain for several days they will have something dry to munch on.
We are ready.