Prepping for Ike

[Andy Carvin]

I know it's a little absurd asking this as Hanna is dumping torrential rains on my house, but I wanted to make sure everyone is paying attention to Hurricane Ike. Ike was supposed to head to Miami, but now it looks like it's gonna flank Florida to the left and make a beeline to the Gulf Coast.

The last thing the Gulf Coast needs is a hurricane potentially bigger than Gustav, but we have some time to prep for it. It probably won't affect the Gulf Coast until the end of next week, and we've already built out a number of resources for the region because of Gustav.

So I wanted to create a discussion about what we can do better to improve upon the content we pulled together for Gustav (and Hanna). Is there anything we should do differently for Ike? Anything we should keep exactly the same? Do any of our teams need more volunteers to do their jobs? Do we need new teams to form around certain projects?

I know this has been tiring for all of us, but hopefully the work we've done so far will make it a lot easier to proceed. Thanks again for all of your hard work. -andy

[Ruth Blakeslee]

As this thread title says "I'm preparing for Hurricane Ike" by editting shelter pages with info gleaned from Google News searches...since Texas seems to have no agencies websites that post shelter lists. I received info that there is a new website Texas Shelter Network that was to have come online yesterday but can't seem to find.

Ben Tremblay said:

Red Cross Claire said:

Looks like Ike is going to make landfall on Saturday somewhere on the Texas coast-- probably near Corpus Christi. [...]

Here's a snipped of text from NHC "Forecast Discussion" today (#38):

USERS ARE REMINDED THAT THE AVERAGE THREE DAY FORECAST ERROR IS NEARLY 200 MILES.

Ike is now moving at only 8 MPH, so there should be lots of warning.

[Ruth Blakeslee]

Hi Earl,
That would be great to put the Texas shelters on a map...now that I have quite a list going (I think for Ike I'm the only one working on editting shelters yet). I have added Mapquest links & addresses to most of the shelters so no problem if you can't map them all together. Thanks!

Earl McGehee said:

The Interactive Maps page has links to the maps created by the team, including the shelters map. We had been putting pins on the map for shelters, but that is an overwhelming job and a complete duplication of your shelters pages. We should get more done working together instead of independently. Let me know if you would like the map team to come behind you on the shelter pages and put map links on the addresses. That should give your team more time to find and list shelters.

Now that the categories are setup if we carefully pick categories on each page there should be no reason to have all the cross links.

Part of the problem is we are not working as a team or teams now. Few of us know the others, we don't know who has what skills, and we don't have clear direction or communications. Not a complaint just an observation - this site has come a long way in a short time. I created a discussion page on the Wiki and a mail distribution list for the map team but have had very little interactive discussion there. Mostly just people acting on an idea and then adding it to a page somewhere. If we were not always in the middle of a storm maybe we could have time to work on our processes and structure.