Hurricane Ike Skirts Florida

Once again, we were very luck here in Tampa, and were bypassed by Ike. Unfortunately, islands in the tropics, and Cuba weren’t so lucky, and Texas is going to take a pretty good wallop. Some areas have received a bit of rain from outer bands of Ike, and there’s been some coastal flooding during high tides.

Ike decayed significantly when passing over Cuba, but has made it back to Status 2 storm. It’s had a little trouble getting reorganized, and hopefully won’t strengthen much more before landfall, but it’s still going to do some damage along the north western Gulf Coast. It’s a wide storm with hurricane force winds out 100 miles, and lots of rain on the “land” side of the storm.

Here in Tampa, we have a few mild showers that may be part of very outer bands of Ike, and during high tides, there is some flooding in low lying areas. I took these two pictures yesterday along Gandy Blvd. on the St. Pete side of the bay. The water at high tide is normally just barely under those mangrove bushes. You can see here, it’s well up over the dirt road that runs along this area.

So once again, we got off light here in Tampa.