Coulda been a lot worse ....

[unixronin]

Looks like Texas just dodged a bullet.  Small consolation for Louisiana, though, with Lake Charles getting pasted and the Ninth Ward under five to eight feet of water again.  It probably shouldn't have come as any surprise to anyone that the emergency patches to the levees didn't all hold when another hurricane came through; part of it, as has been reported elsewhere, was that storm surge from Rita simply overtopped the levees again -- and Rita's center never came within several hundred miles of NOLA.

This should be telling us something about the wisdom (or lack thereof) of rebuilding NOLA as it is, in the same spot.

GET OFF THE BELOW-SEA-LEVEL GROUND, people.

CNN's David Mattingly said he had seen little damage in Galveston following landfall.  The city's roads remained passable, although some places had minor flooding.  Its 17-foot seawall was high enough to keep the predicted 7-foot storm surge back, Mattingly said.

It's going to be bitterly ironic if it turns out the evacuation of Galveston and Houston ends up costing more lives than the hurricane would have.  But hindsight usually at least approaches 20/20, while foresight is almost always "as through a glass, darkly".