9:27 PM EDT: This is bad:

Any hopes for Galveston and communities along Galveston Bay to avoid a catastrophic storm surge may well be over.

The latest model runs offer those areas little comfort. Far from bringing Ike inland to the east of Galveston Island, both the HWRF and GFDL models bring the hurricane over the island’s west end.

… [A] landfall on Galveston’s west end should bring enough surge to likely overtop the city’s seawall. I expect it to all but destroy most non-concrete structures not behind the seawall.

The storm surge at Galveston’s Pier 21 has already reached 8.5 feet this evening, and we’re still probably six hours from landfall, and nearly seven hours from high tide.

The storm surge will reach maximum levels, well above 20 feet most likely, along the coast of Galveston Bay. This will especially be the case on the west and north sides of the bay.

This landfall location also increases the likelihood of hurricane-force winds across more, if not most, of Harris County.

It also increases the likelihood that these people are going to die.

Meanwhile, I’ve created a page — really for my own reference and convenience, more than anything else — that displays all of the relevant tidal gauge information in one place, in an easy-to-view format. Unfortunately, it appears NOAA’s “tides and currents” servers are getting hammered right now, and are buckling under the stress. The tidal graphs, whether viewed on my page or otherwise, are incredibly slow to load, and often fail to load at all. Argh.

UPDATE: The NOAA server seems to have recovered for the moment. Of course, I suppose all of the gauges will stop transmitting when they lose power anyway (right?), so maybe I should stop fretting about this.

P.S. Ubu Roi at Houblog is vigorously liveblogging.

So is Dr. Melissa Clouthier.