CNN news 2012-09-01 加文本

cnn news 2012-09-01

Relentless waves of rain, some serious and dangerous flooding and more than three quarters of a million people without power. That is the impact of the storm named Isaac had along the U.S. Gulf Coast. This is what it looked like. These are images of the storm that were taken from the international space station. When Isaac made landfall on Tuesday night, it was a category one hurricane, it was downgraded to a tropical storm yesterday, but that didn`t mean that things eased up on the ground.Part of the reason is that Isaac is moving really slowly, and the slower it moves, the longer it has to pound the Gulf Coast. Check out the conditions that some of our reporters were in from Tuesday night through Wednesday morning.

The wind is just whipping these trees, a huge danger of flying debris. I`ve got to kind of keep an eye out. My brave photojournalist Ken Tooey and I are going to be taking you through some of the -- an illustration of some of what they are dealing with here.

You`ve got a huge warehouse behind the camera, you`ve got the huge ballroom to my left here, and kind of the outdoor part of the facility is this canopy structure, which is coming apart with the winds of this storm.

Right now, I feel like I`m being attacked by a swarm of bees, the rain. It`s coming in really strong, it`s just stinging as it blows up against you and hits your skin.

This city has been buffeted ever since last night, but definitely with sunrise it has gotten harder and heavier to stand out of this weather.

In a lot of areas around New Orleans, the levy system that was rebuilt after Hurricane Katrina helped deal with the all the downpour, but water went out over the top of one levy that wasn`t part of that upgrade. That led to sever flooding and more than 150 calls from people needing to be rescued. Ed Lavandera was in another house that was trying to hold back the rising waters.

We`re in the midst of going through Hurricane Isaac here in Grand Isle, Louisiana. We`re going to come and give you sense of the conditions that we are battling against. Right now we are in the garage of Dean Blanchard`s  home. This is ground level. And you can see now the storm surge and the water is now starting to come into the garage here, and this is where things start getting a little bit dicey. And this is what the water does, it moves slowly. Look right over here, as each wave kind of comes in, it gets - creeps closer and closer.

This is the entrance into the house, into the ground floor.I wanted to show you this shot. You can`t keep this door open very long, the wind is just too - too much. What we are dealing with here is the water gets - creeps closer to where we are, it`s hard to keep this door open, work with me, but this is the storm surge. This is the - ah, sorry. See how fast moving the water is all around us. We probably got another two feet here before water starts coming inside the house. It`s hard to keep the door open with the wind, but just look at how powerful that water is coming across the yard. We gave you the ground level view of the storm surge and the water pushing by the house, but this is what we needed to stay away from, we just don`t know how high this is going to get. And obviously being on the ground floor is too dangerous, and being down there with all our equipment is not smart either. And then one last thing I`m going to show you, I`m going to show you the one - the room that has basically kept us on the air and able to do all the reporting we`ve done all day.

We took one look at this generator here, we knew that we`d be in good shape. This generator is able to power up the house and keep it on. No problem here, it`s absolutely amazing. It`s gone out a couple of times, you know, kind of been struggling a little bit, but you can`t complain. We`ve been able to stay up through the worst part of this storm. So, thank God we have that with us.

Ed did that report at about midnight on Tuesday. For the next morning he said the house did flood. There were three to four feet of water in the garage.

This week we`ve talked about Isaac. Its projected path, its wind speeds, when it might turn from a tropical storm into a hurricane. These are some of the people who helped figure all that out, the hurricane hunters. They work for NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and this animation shows what they do. These hurricane hunters fly into the storm and then they fly all over around it, crossing over the eye, hitting the outer bands, you see all those labels here. What the hurricane hunters are doing, as they fly around, is dropping off probes, they measure things like temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction. And then the probes use satellites to send that information back to forecasters on the ground.

All right. We are going to leave the Gulf of Mexico now, and travel across the Pacific Ocean to eastern Asia. In this part of the world, hurricanes are called typhoons. And right now, the Korean Peninsula is recovering from a major one. We told you about Typhoon Bolaven earlier this week, as it moved across the Japanese island of Okinawa. That island made it through the storm without too much damage, but it was a different story in South Korea. You can see of the damage from Bolaven strong wind and rain, at least 16 people were killed. And hundreds of thousands of people lost power. A lot of transportation was cut off as well.