Misconceptions

Sorry to be anti-climactic here Mr. Haines, but a hurricanes wrath is a gradual process.

It is not uncommon for an area to lose power hours before the hurricane ‘actually’ comes ashore. Galveston had to have been battered for a significant amount of time before these webcams (Galveston as a whole) lost power, fourteen to sixteen hours before Ikes eye wall ‘officially’ hit at around 2am on the 13th.

The eye wall is not a determinating factor as to who loses power and who doesn’t. As witnessed by the hundreds of thousands of people that were flooded, suffered wind damage and/or lost power east from the Galveston/Houston area, back into western Louisiana.

While the eyewall has dangerous conditions associated with it, the outer bands of the storms can cause significant damage in and of themselves. Ikes sheer size caused problems days before land fall, with flooding along Louisiana’s gulf coast south of the New Orleans area. You could follow the flooding and/or power outages west from there, without Ike ever officially making land fall in Louisiana.