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

What's left of Hurricane Ivan has swelled into a tropical storm that's expected to assault Texas' upper Gulf Coast this afternoon or this evening.

The storm, packing sustained winds of 60 mph today, is most likely to hit around High Island tonight, according to meteorologist Mike Rehbein with the National Weather Service in League City.

For the Houston area, that means some gusty winds but more significantly, lots of rain, starting by the rush hour, intensifying into the dinner hour and continuing for the next 48 hours or so. 

At 11 a.m. today, Tropical Storm Ivan was located near latitude 29.2 north, longitude 92.7 west, or about 85 miles southeast of Port Arthur. Ivan is moving west-northwest around 15 mph.
Forecasters, of course, can't be sure if Ivan will stall over the Houston area or head further north.

"If it stalls, we're talking about 10 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.

Galveston State Park closed overnight as tides rose and eventually covered the dunes under the foot bridges leading from campsites to the beach. It's taken about a year to build up about 3 feet of dunes washed away last summer by a storm, and now much of that sand is disappearing once again. 

"I'd like to think we won't have much damage, but we already have sustained some beach erosion," said Park Director Angela Deaton. "The effects of these storms are just so unpredictable." 

The park is booked up this weekend, but Deaton said she expects to reopen the park by 7 a.m. Friday.

Elsewhere on Galveston Island, water covered grass lawns in West End neighborhoods, but the houses on stilts remained dry, and no water had reached under the houses. Water barely covered the road leading into the Galveston County Club near Pirates' Cove.  

White waves were crashing over the Kemah boardwalk, but there was no flooding this morning at high tide.

High tides associated with the storm on 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.

Along the coast, tides were already running as much as 2 feet above normal, and Ivan is expected to pile on another 1 to 3 feet of water near and to the east of where the center of the storm makes landfall.

The Weather Service has issued a coastal flood watch for Brazoria, Chambers, Galveston, Harris, Jackson and Matagorda counties. Tropical storm warnings stretch from Morgan City in Louisiana to Sargent, west of Freeport. Eastern Louisiana was dropped from the warning area this morning.


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 tides 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