Collectible Lighthouses

Weather and Lighthouses go hand in hand. Without lighthouses, much of what America today, wouldn’t exist without the help of light in the distance to guide a lost ship. I love lighthouses and collect them. I found a nice little site that has mini lighthouses for auction.

Collectible Lighthouses From Scaasis

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An unusual cluster of February twisters touched down across Oklahoma, ripping off roofs, littering roads with downed power lines and killing eight people in a small southern town.

Emergency responders searched into the night in the hardest-hit community of Lone Grove, where eight people died and 14 people suffered serious injuries on Tuesday, said Oklahoma Department of Emergency Management spokeswoman Michelann Ooten.

Rescuers found one woman injured but alive under an overturned mobile home, but eventually they suspended efforts until daybreak because of numerous electricity lines down.

Structures have been damaged or destroyed throughout the town of about 4,600, some 100 miles south of Oklahoma City, said Chester Agan, assistant emergency manager for Carter County.

A twister also touched down in the Oklahoma City metropolitan area, where homes and businesses were damaged, but only three minor injuries were reported. A tornado also was reported in north-central Oklahoma and six homes were destroyed near the Oklahoma City suburb of Edmond.

In Edmond, a body shop and the vehicles inside were twisted into a ball of metal after a tornado moved through.

“It’s just surreal,” shop manager Michael Jerry said. “You just don’t believe it. Especially knowing you were just there minutes before. The steel girders are in a ball.”

Tornado watches were issued Wednesday for Mississippi, north-central Louisiana, southeast Arkansas and parts of Missouri and Tennessee.

In northwest Oklahoma City, the twister apparently developed near Wiley Post Airport and then headed northeast before damaging several shopping centers and restaurants at a major intersection.

One wall of a Chuck E. Cheese restaurant collapsed, windows were blown out, and a piece of the eatery’s awning was thrown into a tree alongside an adjacent restaurant. Signs were stripped and cars were damaged in the parking lot.

It then moved through the Boulder Ridge Apartments, a spread of two-story units surrounding a courtyard.

Shawn Tiesman, 33, moved to the apartment complex from Iowa about four months ago and got his first taste of Oklahoma’s notorious weather but without the same protection of his former home.

“Where I’m from, we’ve got basements,” Tiesman said. “I’m amazed that there’s no basements here.”

Instead, he invited his upstairs neighbors into his apartment and then used his futon mattress to barricade them into a walk-in closet. When he emerged, he couldn’t believe the wreckage.

A large section of roof was blown off an apartment building and part of a wall was blown off another. One apartment had a gaping hole knocked in its side.

Parked cars were shifted by the wind and smashed into each other. A line of fencing and a light pole were knocked to the ground where the twister moved into the backyard of two neighboring homes, leaving tree limbs, children’s toys and a smashed air conditioning unit strewn in its path.

Tornado sirens went off in the area to warn residents that the storm was approaching, but some were still caught off guard.

“I can’t believe we didn’t hear it. You know how you normally hear it coming,” said Traci Keil, 37.

In between downpours of rain, some residents wandered out to snap pictures of the wreckage with their cell phones. Neighbors helped clear pieces of plywood that had blocked in some of the cars in the parking lot.

“My kids are still in the closet and won’t come out,” Keil said as a third wave of downpours approached the apartment complex, more than an hour after the twister hit.

Power lines littered an intersection where motorists were told to stay in their cars until crews could clear the lines.

Oklahoma Gas and Electric reported about 8,900 customers without power, nearly 3,500 in Lone Grove, according to its Web site. Less than 1,000 Oklahoma City area customers were still in the dark. Eighteen power poles were snapped.

The Oklahoma County Election Board was preparing to tally votes for a school board election when a large area north of the state Capitol lost power about an hour before the polls closed.

Election board secretary Doug Sanderson said without electricity, election workers couldn’t count the ballots. Election materials will be locked up overnight and workers will start the process on Wednesday, Sanderson said.

Besides the tornadoes, strong straight-line winds caused damage in southern and central Oklahoma, according to state emergency management officials.

Tornadoes are most numerous in Oklahoma in the spring, but can occur at any time, National Weather Service meteorologist Rick Smith said.

Winds of more than 60 mph caused dust storms in western Texas that reduced visibility so much some roads have been closed, the National Weather Service said.

The National Weather Service reported wind speeds reached 88 mph in parts of Texas, leaving behind downed trees and power outages late Tuesday night.

Emergency responders all the way from the Dallas-Fort Worth area to the Texas Hill Country said they would have to wait until daylight to assess storm damage.

In the closing minutes of the Dallas Mavericks game Tuesday night, the public address announcers suggested to fans that they stay in the building while the storms were passing through the downtown area.

The driver of an empty 18-wheeler was unable to cope with wind gusts as high as 70 mph and it flipped over Tuesday night in Bruceville-Eddy, a town of about 1,100 people nearly 106 miles south of Dallas.

“He was driving down the road and a gust of wind blew him over,” Bruceville-Eddy Fire Chief Randall Sevey told The Associated Press. “He was just shook up.”

Hurricane Omar strengthened into a major Category 3 storm as it raced toward Puerto Rico and the small islands of the northeastern Caribbean, threatening to bring torrential rains that could trigger dangerous floods and mudslides on Thursday.

The 15th tropical cyclone of a busy Atlantic hurricane season, Omar formed north of the Dutch island of Curacao on Tuesday, briefly disrupted oil operations in Venezuela and shut down processing units at a refinery in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Omar was a Category 3 storm on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale of hurricane intensity, with sustained winds of near 120 miles per hour (195 km per hour) as it passed between the Virgin Islands and the northern Leeward Islands, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.

Omar was moving northeast near 20 mph (32 kph) and was expected to continue in that direction for the next couple of days. “On the forecast track, the center of Omar will pass just east of the Virgin Islands in the next few hours and near the northern Leeward Islands early Thursday morning,” the Miami-based center said.

In the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, home to about 4 million people, schools, government offices and most businesses shut down. The seaside Capitol building was empty by early afternoon and a usually bustling shopping center was secured with hurricane shutters.

Residents flocked to supermarkets to stock up on drinking water, canned goods and other supplies.

“I’m not too worried, but I went out and bought water, candles and gas,” San Juan resident Kevin Mead, 35, said. “I paid with my bank card. I’m keeping my cash.”

Local National Weather Service director Israel Matos said there were fears the storm would affect the same areas hardest hit by heavy rains three weeks ago, when 30 inches (76 cm) of rain caused severe flooding.

“The ground is saturated, which increases the possibility of flooding and mudslides,” he said.

On Vieques, an island smacked by hurricanes Hugo in 1989 and Georges in 1998, residents rushed to board up houses and fill their cars with gasoline.

By 1 a.m. EDT/0500 GMT, Omar’s eye was about 25 miles (45 km) east-northeast of St. Croix, the hurricane center said.

On its current track the storm would head into the open Atlantic after passing through the Leeward Islands, posing no threat to the United States.

TROPICAL DOWNPOUR

Omar brought heavy rains to the Netherlands Antilles islands, and parts of Venezuela and Colombia, and could douse Puerto Rico and the northern Leeward Islands with up to 20 inches (51 cm) of rain, the hurricane center said.

Storm alerts were posted a wide area of the northern Caribbean from Puerto Rico to Guadeloupe.

The storm briefly prevented Venezuela from loading tankers with crude oil and knocked out power at the OPEC nation’s 200,000 barrel-per-day Puerto La Cruz refinery.

Processing units at the 500,000 barrel-per-day Hovensa refinery on St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands were being shut down ahead of Omar’s arrival, Hess Corp said.

Hovensa is a large supplier of gasoline and heating oil to U.S. East Coast markets.

Separately, a tropical depression had moved inland over Honduras on Wednesday, but did not strengthen enough to become Tropical Storm Paloma.

The 2008 hurricane season, which officially ends on Nov. 30, has been active. An average season spawns 10 storms, of which six become hurricanes.

This year, Hurricane Gustav hit near New Orleans, the city devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and Hurricane Ike hit Houston. Both threatened oil rigs off the U.S. Gulf Coast, which supply a quarter of U.S. domestic oil.

In Haiti, more than 800 people were killed in flooding caused by Fay, Gustav, Hanna and Ike, while Cuba suffered $5 billion in damage after being raked by Gustav and Ike.

Hurricane Kyle to hit upper New England and Maine.

Hurricane Kyle strengthened into a hurricane off the east coast of the United States on Saturday as it churned on a path toward Maine and Canada’s Maritime provinces, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.

Kyle, which developed as a tropical storm Thursday, had top sustained winds near 75 mph and was forecast to make landfall near the Maine-New Brunswick border early on Monday.

Kyle was a minimal Category 1 hurricane on the five-step hurricane intensity scale and some additional strengthening was possible, the Miami-based hurricane center said.

At 5 p.m., Kyle was about 485 miles south of the island of Nantucket, Massachusetts, and moving north at 23 mph.

The hurricane was spawned by the 11th named storm of a busy and destructive Atlantic hurricane season.

Forecasters have predicted the six-month season, which runs through November 30, could produce up to 18 cyclones, and the warm sea temperatures, low wind shear and other factors that contribute to the formation of hurricanes are still in place.

The disturbed weather system from which Kyle developed drenched Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and Caribbean island of Hispaniola before it moved north into the Atlantic.

Authorities in Puerto Rico, a U.S. island territory, said at least four people were killed and scores of homes were flooded.

Kyle was the first tropical storm to form in the Atlantic-Caribbean region since Tropical Storm Josephine on September 2.

Hurricane Ike Damage – U.S. Coast Guard Survey

Three people were rescued by the Coast Guard after they spent the entire storm on a pier. They were very lucky. Hurricane Ike damage their home.

Hurricane Ike Footage

In this video by the U.S. Coast Guard, an Air Station Houston HH-65C rescue helicopter crew conducts an overflight of the southeastern Texas coastline scanning for residents needing assistance and documenting flood waters.

This is amazing U.S. Coast Guard footage. B-roll of Air Station Houston HH-65C rescue helicopter crew pulling citizens out of flood waters on a rescue mission along Bolivar Peninsula during Hurricane Ike along the south eastern Texas coast line. Scenes include rescue worker being lowered from a helicopter to rescue civilians trapped by flood waters.

A little trivia for you: After Hurricane Katrina, the only U.S. government entity rescuing the victims within minutes after the storm was the U.S. Coast Guard. They were the first to rescue victims and they never let up.