Hurricane Isaac (2012)

[Juston Drake]

I'm assuming Simon is with Juston Drake. From Juston's Facebook wall yesterday:

Simon was indeed with me in Grand Isle. We both drove down from our hometowns and met up in Slidell, LA Sunday night. Slept at the rest station on I-10 there and then decided we were gonna get to as close to the coast as possible Monday morning. Even though the models were still all over the place about the eventual landfall of Isaac, we decided to try to get Grand Isle since that would be the hardest possible place to get to out of any of our choices, and if the hurricane looked like it wasn't going to make landfall there then we could just leave. We were worried that we weren't even gonna be able to get on the island since by that point mandatory evacuations had been issues. I called a few places and found out that we could get on. I also found out the owner of the Sand Dollar Motel was gonna ride the hurricane out at the marina and we could stay there.

We arrived in Grand Isle Monday night around 6:30 PM. At that point, we didn't know if we were gonna ride the hurricane out there still because the models were still showing landfall anywhere from around Port Arthur, LA to the southern MS coast. We made the decision to wait until the 06z models came out and then make a decision from there. We REALLY liked our location on Grand Isle in the motel since it was right next to the bay so we were keeping our fingers crossed that we didn't have to leave. A majority of the 06z model runs showed Isaac making landfall in Grand Isle or very close, so we decided to take a chance and stay there. We parked our cars at the Fire Dept. that was on higher ground in the middle of the island, since a couple firemen said we could leave our cars there and they would be safe.

The highest wind gust we measured during the duration of Isaac making landfall was 69.9 mph with the handheld anemometer, but we are pretty sure there were higher gust than that as the anemometer itself starts to have errors once the ball bearings in it start to have issues after continuous use. Luckily, we had a Rainwise anemometer up with a data logger keeping data the entire time. It will be interesting to get all the data off of that and analyze it. We spent a lot of time out in the winds, and some of those gusts felt like they could easily have been in the 80+ mph range. The storm surge at its highest point got up our shoulders, so the surge was anywhere from 5 to 6 feet at our location. It is quite possible it was higher on other areas on the island. It was quite a sight being completely surrounded by the Gulf. There were vehicles in other parking lots that were floating around us while we were out in the surge. Also, there were six dumpsters at the side of our motel and four just floated away. Three ended up who knows where in the gulf....I guess a ship will get to see them sometime later on lol...and the other one actually washed up on the island that was NE of the motel. While we were in the eye of Isaac, we measured a central minimal pressure of 969.2 mb.

The water receded enough so that we were able to leave the island by Thursday afternoon. While leaving that entire area, we saw multiple areas with a lot of downed power lines/poles. At a couple points on Highway 1, there were parts on the side of the road that had been washed away.

 

[Skip Talbot]

Here's 680 scans of level 2 base reflectivity when Isaac impacted the Gulf Coast that I put together for the Convective Addiction page. You'll get quite a bit more detail switching to the 1080 HD version:

Watch video >

 

[Joshua Nall]

I drove down to New Orleans for Isaac. I’d never been there before and I was surprised to see the wall with water on one side and houses lower on the other side. I knew how it was there, just a tad creepy to actually see it. I left. At around 5 PM water was already coming up into the parking lot of a boat ramp on the North side of Pontchartrain. Since there was a curfew for the county at 6 I headed to LaPlace and parked at the Intersection of 10 and 55. Spent the night in a parking lot listening to the wind and watching lights blink on and off. Lights went off for good at about 3 AM. At daylight I decided to pull out to the road for a different view. As soon as I did I was surprised to see water rapidly filling the ditches pushing a little pile of debris and flowing down the road. At first I thought it might be run off due to some heavier squalls that had moved through, but there was so much water I soon recognized it as surge from Pontchartrain. I tried to quickly go up the road towards the surge to get on I-10. Met 3 trucks fleeing the rising water…. water was already flowing down the road fast making small waves and it looked too deep to continue even though I was only 100 yds or so from the ramp. I turned around in the middle of the road and headed in the opposite direction around town to get back on I-10 at another exit. Except for this incident my trip was mostly uneventful. This was a reminder to me that even a weak hurricane can create problems. I thought since I was well off the coast and right next to elevated I-10 I was being especially “safeâ€￾… far enough from Pontchartrain that any surge would be rather slow to come up. I even looked at topo maps trying to get a feel for elevation where I was compared to the lake. It was no big deal but if I had not of driven out to the road when I did at around daylight, I would have been stuck there for days. No real danger of being flooded out because the parking lots around there were built up higher than the road. But if I had waited even 10 minutes longer to drive out to the road… I would not have seen the rising water and most likely would have been trapped. Was prepared to stay but wasn’t planning on it, so I was relieved with how things worked out. Only later on did I learn of all the flooding in LaPlace, and it left me wondering how high the water actually got there at the little group of hotels and gas stations and eating places where I parked for the night.