If you live in or around Corpus Christi, Texas, be aware that you are in great danger. You are the least prepared Gulf coastal community with the fewest evacuation options and the most in jeopardy. Those places that were once worse than you have been recently educated or eliminated. Take heart--Brownsville might be worse.

What is wrong with Corpus Christi?

Primarily, your barrier island has been compromised at a time when hurricanes have raised the storm surge bar considerably. The old bar was 24.5 feet above mean sea level, set by Hurricane Camille back in August of 1969. Katrina set the new bar at 34 feet, but Hurricane Wilma, had she made first landfall anywhere on the Texas coast, could have topped that. There is not much land in Corpus that is more than the current bar with most being way less. The downtown area is twenty feet less.

The world record is 44 feet, but 50-60 feet might be the potential for a megacane with optimal conditions of tide, forward speed, and direction of approach. I personally think that Corpus will set the new world record and be above 50 feet. I go on record when I post this to my website sometime today, March 28, 2007.

I don't do this flipantly as making a public prediction that doesn't materialize is the surest way to lose credibility, if making predictions isn't the surest, but since being so right about Waveland and never going on record with my very strong gut feelings, never trying to alert the community, then being onhand to witness the tragic result and horrendous loss of life, I cannot in good conscience remain silent about this gut feeling, for this feeling is as strong with far more lives and property at risk. If I turn out to be dead wrong this time, I will go back to keeping gut feelings to myself and all who listened to me will have to live with being too prepared and hurricane aware in a hurricane zone.

Global warming food for fret:

Rita was bigger and badder than Katrina. Wilma was bigger and badder than Rita. The feared 2006 season storms were killed by El Nino, which will not be affecting the storms of the '07 season. Will the next be bigger and badder than Wilma, and will it hit the place that is most overdue and least prepared?

I think it will and in the '07 or '08 season. I got a gut feeling, but my last hurricane gut feeling was for Waveland, Mississippi. I took up residence there and waited (6168 South Beach Blvd...still on my driver license). I wasn't wrong and didn't have to wait long. Prior to that, I took up residence in Pensacola to await Ivan the Terrible. I was in Del Rio for Gilbert, the U.S. point of entry in 1988 on my birthday, September 19th.

Gilbert was the megacane prior to Katrina and held the record as the most intense hurricane until Wilma. The one before Gilbert was fifteen years prior to my birth, the great Labor Day Hurricane of 1935. There have only been five megacanes in my lifetime. Three of the five took place in the last eighteen months. I now want to take up residence in Corpus to see and survive number six.

I hope people get nervous when the Hurricane Man takes up residence in their community. No one in Waveland would listen to me, because they weren't nervous, and they all think they are hurricane people, proud because FEMA community inspectors gave their community a passing grade, the only coastal community in Mississippi to pass. They failed my test miserably, and they failed Katrina's disasterously. No comment as yet from FEMA, but I wish my comment could be:

I TOLD YOU SO!

Now, I am telling the good people of Corpus Christi. Please listen.

There isn't much time to prepare and not much can be done to build back your barrier. You may assume you have no barrier, because you don't. You can thank the developers and the proponents of Pacary Channel, not that making that little cut will make much difference. That was like leaving the door open in a house with no front wall. Your dunes were never big enough to begin with, but you could have made it better, not worse. The point is, there is no time to correct this problem that is not entirely man made. There is time to make corrections to the community and plan for a mass evacuation of areas thought to be unsafe. I am telling you,

THERE IS NO SAFE AREA IN CORPUS!

The good news is, some areas and some structures are less hazzardous. Bad news is, downtown isn't one of them. The Lexington threatens that and a worse place to park a huge war ship could not have been found. I predict she will first take out your bridge. Then she will be headed downtown. Vertical evacuation should be ruled out for Corpus, because we don't yet know exactly where the Lexington is going except inland downwind. It might take out Sunrise Mall and come to rest on SPID.

Aside: As of this writing I have not yet reviewed the city's disaster plans for hurricanes or seen the engineered solution for mooring the Lexington and making it hurricane proof. I presume both are inadaquate and driven by financial expedience, very likely based on a "normal" hurricane with luck factored in. I will share what I find in a special area of the site dedicated to the Corpus Christi warning, which will remain up until the all-clear in the late fall of '08 when I will admit that my gut is full of sh*t and no better than any other gut. You may hate my guts at that time, but prepare to get in a long line of those who didn't wait.

Casinos on barges were very bad to park in front of a city. At least the Lexington isn't a battleship, but it is much worse than a barge. On the other hand, an aircraft carrier on land should be a bigger tourist draw and might be good for the mall.

Flour Bluff will go underwater to the third floor of the base hospital. Nuff said. Evacuate Flour Bluff and the island well ahead of any hurricane threat. The rest need to stay put until this can be accomplished. The rest need to plan on being trapped, but the rest are far better off. To avoid being trapped and clogging highway evacuation routes, go west and go north any way you can.

For those who choose to stay, plan on losing your home and all your stuff. However well built and designed, all around it are homes filled with sh*t that are temporarily not debris. They will raft-up and bulldoze you and your good neighbors. As I told this one Wavelander homeowner, "It doesn't matter what you do if all around you do as they please." Months later, we stood on his slab seeing how true that statement was.

Corpus, like Waveland, is debris in organized forms, emergency managed by people with little or no experience, guided by FEMA but ruled by special interest concerns similar to those that pushed down dunes to put up stick-built and chipboard-clad housing, then cut a channel so their boats could get through. Those inappropriate structures and boats will bulldoze Flour Bluff and form the base of the debris raft that will flatten much of the city that the Lexington doesn't plow through.

Those who stay will get to see that, but very few of them will be there to tell us what that was like. I plan to follow the Lexington in my kayak and record the final voyage. Your plan needs to be better than my plan, and I need a much better kayak.

Take heed, Corpus. You are next, and this will not be your grandmother's hurricane. These new storms are megacanes, Biblical storms, and they are not to be taken lightly. There are more where those last three came from. The globe isn't getting any cooler. Your city isn't rising any higher. Your dunes aren't getting bigger. Your leaders are no smarter or any less specially interested. It can't happen here is a hope not a fact, a political promise, not a real promise.

Don't follow people who won't get real until they are knee-deep in rising sea water, and don't stand ground that won't be ground. I include a Google map that I have marked the standable ground on. This is just a guesstimate that roughly follows the 50' contour line, and I guess at that being ground a person could stand on throughout a megacane event, assuming a person could stand there. The important thing is the questionable ground short of my green line. You probably live in something that would be short of a 30' line in a house better suited for Dallas.

The debris raft threatens everything short of the line that the surge makes like a ring on the bath tub of Corpus Christi. We won't know that line until we begin sifting through it for the bodies of those who thought the line wouldn't be that far inland. Start making your plans and preparations. Pray you have until the late fall of 2008, but plan on late summer of 2007.

My gut says September 7th, 2007, not a prediction, just a gut feeling. My gut tells me that Corpus Christi will be totally destroyed east of SPID and south of Staples. The Lex will get bogged down in the downtown, suggesting a landfall ten miles south of the Bob Hall pier--the worst case scenario.

I am telling you so.

George "Sonny" Hoffman
The Hurricane Man