Tag Archive for: forecast

Buzzing The Mouth Bar: Low Altitude Flyover at 30 MPH Takes 1 Minute 9 Seconds

It’s hard to get a feeling for the enormity of the West Fork mouth bar in a still photo. Something more than half a mile long is reduced to 1200 pixels. That fundamentally alters the scale between nature and humans. Instead of being a thousand times bigger, it’s a hundred times smaller. That does not produce the same emotional impact. It’s like looking at a picture of a mountain instead of standing at the base of one and feeling dwarfed as you look up.

Video Comes Closer to Capturing Imensity

However, tonight, at sunset, I flew a drone over mouth bar and captured the entire flight on video. At 30 miles per hour, it took 1 minute and 9 seconds to get from one end to the other.

The rapidly vanishing San Jacinto West Fork mouth bar. Mechanical dredging reduces the size a little more every day.
Looking south from Scenic Shores in King’s Point across mouth bar toward FM1960 Causeway downriver.
Looking west toward West Lake Houston Parkway.
Excavators working western tip of mouth bar. They shaver one row after another off, as if they are nibbling an ear of corn.
From the upstream to downstream tip measures more than half a mile.
At the eastern end, it almost look as if a bored dredging is carving his initials in the bar so that they can be seen from outer space.
Looking south across the eastern edge toward the FM1960 bridge again.

Tonight, as we watch Tropical Storm Cristobal dump torrential rains on Mexico, it’s hard to escape thinking of Hurricane Harvey. It dumped torrential rains on Houston and formed this monster mouth bar almost overnight. Remember, like an ice berg, the part you see above water is only a tiny percentage of what you can’t see below water.

Thinking of Cristobal, Remembering Harvey

As I look at the cloudless skies and soft sunset, I can’t help but wonder. Will Cristobal miss us. Or is this just the calm before the storm?

Cristobal has produced life-threatening flash flooding in Mexico and Central America. The National Hurricane Center forecasts it to move northward across the Gulf of Mexico on Friday. Risks include storm surge, rainfall and wind impacts this coming weekend across the US Gulf Coast from Texas to Florida. NHC reiterates that it’s too soon predict the exact location, timing and magnitude of these impacts.

Posted by Bob Rehak on 6/3/2020

1009 Days since Hurricane Harvey