Sayonara, Dean

Above: a screen shot from Sandy Feet's "Sandcastle Inn" webcam where we just fixed the camera angle. Below: Sammie and one seagull on the beach.

Hurricane Dean just went inland at 20.5 degrees latitude near a village called Poza Rica (1:00 CDT). It’s all over now except a few waves coming ashore, not as impressive as the surfers hoped, but maybe eight to twelve feet on the outside – and I’m not swimming out there to check for ya!

The Island is nearly deserted now, and most of the government stuff has been ordered to “stand down” and head back north. The list is rather impressive – and before I go further, some people did object to my last posting about the bureaucrats but as I said, it was the weather model arguments and not the great emergency preparation itself, from top to bottom.

· Six C-130 military cargo planes

· Activation of all surrounding Coast Guard and Navy helicopters and vessels

· 3,000 urban transit and school buses

· An unknown number of Texas National Guard troops (perhaps 1,000 vehicles)

· 80,000 barrels of gasoline

There is much more than this list, such as the overtime from local officials, the TxDOT, and all Border Patrol. The 80,000 barrel statistics sounds a little funny – perhaps gallons is more like it because that much fuel would be 3.4 million gallons, or about 420 semi truckloads of gasoline. Regardless, I’d like to thank all the officials and worker bees.

Now could somebody please tell all the tourists it's OK to come on back?