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.
