Sept. 23, 2004
By ALLAN TURNER and RUTH RENDON
Copyright 2004 Houston Chronicle

The low-pressure remains of Hurricane Ivan that wandered in the Gulf of Mexico on Wednesday swelled into a tropical storm that's expected to assault the Texas and Louisiana coasts today.

The storm, with sustained winds of 45 mph today, likely will make landfall between western Louisiana and Houston late today or early Friday, said Tom Bradshaw, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service's southern regional office in Fort Worth.

By 7 a.m. today, Tropical Storm Ivan was located near latitude 28.9 north, longitude 92.1 west, or about 95 miles southeast of the upper Texas coast. Ivan is moving west-northwest around 15 mph.
Forecasters are unsure if weather patterns here will allow Ivan to stall over the Houston area or continue north, but most forecasters today are predicting landfall east of Houston, and the Louisiana coast is most likely to bear the brunt of the storm.

"If it stalls, we're talking about tens of inches of rain, but if it keeps on going, it will likely produce under 10 inches," said Dan Meador, meteorologist with KHOU-Channel 11.

High tides associated with the storm Wednesday washed onto low-lying Todville Road in Seabrook and along "The Point," an inlet along the Clear Creek Channel that is home to several restaurants and seafood stores. Several roads near Jamaica Beach on Galveston Island's west end also were flooded.

The Weather Service has issued a coastal flood watch for Brazoria, Chambers, Galveston, Harris, Jackson and Matagorda counties. Tropical storm warnings were issued from the Mississippi River in Louisiana to Sargent, west of Freeport.

Bolivar residents warned

Galveston County Emergency Management officials were keeping watch on Ivan all day Wednesday and were keeping tabs with the National Weather Service for updates every six hours.

The agency also notified residents on the Bolivar Peninsula about the potential for high tides, said Tesa Duffey-Wrobleski, the office's coordinator.

"We're watching to see if something changes that might encourage us to make different recommendations than what we've already made," she said.

The county will keep close tabs until the storm makes landfall. Duffey-Wrobleski said the system has already produced 4-to-4 1/2 -foot tides, which are high enough to reach the dunes.

National Hurricane Center officials had been debating whether the storm in the Gulf was actually associated with the Category 4 hurricane that struck the Alabama and Florida coasts last week.

"After a considerable and sometimes animated in-house discussion of the demise of Ivan ... the National Hurricane Center has decided to call the tropical cyclone over the Gulf of Mexico Tropical Depression Ivan," meteorologists stated on the hurricane center's Web site.

By Wednesday, driven by steering currents in the upper atmosphere, Son of Ivan was back in the Gulf of Mexico ó about 200 miles southeast of New Orleans.

Once offshore, though, upper-level steering currents brought a portion of the storm southward along the coast of the Carolinas and across Florida into the Gulf.

Once over warm Gulf waters, it began to gain strength, showing the telltale circulating pattern found in tropical storms and hurricanes. At 7 p.m. Wednesday, the National Hurricane Center in Miami upgraded the storm from a tropical depression.

Jeremy Nelson, meteorologist with Weather Central Inc., said the storm is in a new life cycle.

'Starting over again'

"Once a hurricane hits land, it weakens to a tropical storm, then a tropical depression and ends in an area of low pressure," Nelson said. "Ivan had gone through its cycle, but it's almost like it's starting over again since it's back over water."

A Category 4 hurricane with winds topping 131 mph for much of its life, Ivan killed at least 70 people in the Caribbean before it hit Gulf Shores, Ala., and the Florida Panhandle about 3 a.m. last Thursday. The storm killed at least 52 people in the United States as it moved through the upper South and into the mid-Atlantic states.

Bradshaw said the storm, which earlier Wednesday had been called Tropical Depression Ivan, likely would be renamed Matthew once it reached tropical storm strength. The name had not been changed by 11 p.m.

Robert Crowe and Rosanna Ruiz contributed to this report.

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/topstory/2810111