Hurricane Ike: Slide Show 
My Frail Island
Looking for lessons in the wreckage of Galveston.
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Let’s start with the first group. Here is the reality: Ike was a bad storm, but there are worse storms, and sooner or later one will make landfall at Galveston. A category 4 or 5 storm that strikes the Island will bring a surge in excess of twenty feet. It will top the seawall, inundate the entire city, swamp the west side of Galveston Bay all the way to Interstate 45, and, in the upper regions of the bay, flood eastern Harris County as far west as Beltway 8. Such a storm will leave hundreds of thousands of people homeless. Rita could have been the big one had it not diminished in strength as it veered to the east and made landfall in extreme southwestern Louisiana. If you have a hankering for beach property and you have a gambler’s nature, you might reflect that 47 years passed between Carla and Ike, and maybe the odds are against another big storm in the immediate future. (Alicia, a small but intense category 3, struck Galveston in 1983; it inflicted wind damage and tore up power lines but resulted in no serious flooding.)
Individual decisions to abandon damaged property could have serious fiscal consequences for the entire area affected by Ike. Already, candidates for the state Senate district that includes Galveston are urging that damaged homes be reassessed to reflect diminished values. Homes that go unrepaired will be lost to the tax rolls, leaving Galveston without sufficient revenue to rebuild its aging infrastructure. (A relatively small number of residents had purchased federal flood insurance.) It is too early to know whether there is a resale market for vacation property that suffered damage, or whether, as Thomas speculated, “the west end may return to pasture.” It is possible—indeed, it’s likely—that a year from now Galveston will be a much smaller city, just as New Orleans shrunk after Katrina.
The geologists are even more pessimistic. Rice University’s John B. Anderson, author of The Formation and Future of the Upper Texas Coast (a book with a large following at the land office), writes that the global sea level has been rising at a “relatively slow rate” of between 1.5 and 2.0 millimeters per year for around five thousand years, as ice sheets melt. (He eschews the debate over global warming and its consequences.) Meanwhile another process is going on, and that is subsidence of the land surface. Subsidence is caused by the weight of tens of thousands of feet of sedimentary strata. Other contributing factors are oil and gas production offshore and the pumping of water by industries along the Houston Ship Channel. Anderson’s assessment is that the upper Texas and Louisiana coasts “are the most rapidly subsiding coasts in the United States.” Subsidence means that tomorrow’s small storms could do the damage of today’s big storms. Galveston isn’t going to sink into the sea anytime soon, but “a significant portion of the upper Texas coast will be submerged in the next century.” My children will be able to see geologic change on Galveston beaches take place in their lifetimes, as I have seen it take place in mine.
It is a terrible thing to come back to one’s hometown and see it in ruins. My friend of longest standing in Galveston—our mothers were best friends—invited me to stop at his house for lunch. He and his wife sat out Ike in Houston and came back to find furniture and clothing “totaled,” as the insurance adjusters say. The interior, which I remembered as immaculately decorated, was strewn with water-damaged furniture. On the dark kitchen tiles was a thin imprint of dried mud. We sat on plastic chairs in the garage. He opened up a cooler and produced two sandwiches and some soft drinks. “I’m so sorry you have to go through this,” I said. “We were one of the lucky ones,” he said. “We only had about two feet of water.” While we ate, we watched workmen carry contaminated Sheetrock out to the front yard. I asked one of the workers how he had fared. He started to answer and then walked off. When he returned, his whole face was quivering. “We lost everything,” he said, barely getting out the words.
My friend, a lawyer with the Moody interests, suggested that we go for a ride. He directed me to the next street over. It was awful. Every house had a towering mound of debris in front—the accumulations of a lifetime. Appliances large and small. Living room furniture. TV sets. A mud-covered basketball. One home had a large sign that was prominently displayed: “Owner with gun.”
If you just looked at the damage, you might doubt Galveston’s ability to come back. But it has become a destination city, not just a weekend extension of Houston. For a town of its size (at least until flood victims decide whether to leave or stay), it has the makings of a diversified economy—a medical and biohazard research center; offshore oil service and repair; a port, including a cruise ship terminal and all the supporting business that requires; a Texas A&M campus; and the headquarters of American National Insurance and the Moody financial empire. The immediate threat to the economy is that the University of Texas Board of Regents decided when, without consulting any state leaders or budget writers, to downsize the hospital, greatly reduce the technological capability of the emergency room, and lay off four thousand workers. Some serious politicking ensued, which has temporarily forestalled the plan. But the future of the medical complex, the city’s major employer, is grim.
There’s always tourism, of course, though for much of the twentieth century, locals despised the tourists. It used to be said that Houston’s day-trippers would drive down to the beaches “with a dirty shirt on their backs and a five-dollar bill in their pockets and never change either one.” I have friends who still will not drive on Seawall Boulevard during the tourist season. But I also have friends, from elsewhere, who used to constantly ask for suggestions about what to do here (ride the Bolivar ferry; try the stuffed flounder at Gaido’s; take a walk on the beach at sunset; go to the Galveston history room at the Rosenberg Library; see the penguins at Moody Gardens; drive around the east end north of Broadway looking at old Victorians; explore the Nicholas Clayton buildings downtown). Now I have to wonder how much of the Galveston I knew will still exist.
The biggest problem is how to rebuild in a way that makes its people feel safe. The city made a mistake, years ago, in allowing canals to be built into the heart of the Island. As in New Orleans, water is the enemy. It was one of these canals that brought the storm surge into a part of town known as Havre Lafitte and contributed to the destruction and flooding in my friend’s neighborhood. That canal should be gated (as has been done in New Orleans) so that storm surge can be kept out. The geotextile tubes filled with sand are a bad idea as well. They make it impossible for natural forces to reestablish the beach and should be outlawed.
Maybe the way to ensure safety is to change the style of construction on the Island. At one of the mayor’s press conferences in the days after the storm, a city official suggested that any house that had had as much as four feet of water in it would have to be rebuilt on stilts so that it met FEMA’s recovery guidelines. I don’t know whether this proposal will fly—who wants to carry the groceries up the stairs?—but I think it is on the right track. The goal is not only to protect life and property but also to prevent home values from going into a tailspin whenever the next storm hits.
The General Land Office has a role to play too. Houses on the public beach are not only illegal but are also a hazard to their neighbors as they deteriorate. In the long run, the answer is not to remove these houses through litigation but to prohibit construction so close to the water. Setback rules should bar any new construction seaward of FM 3005, or any road that hugs the coast. Finally, the land office is going to have to undertake some beach-nourishment projects—not just in Galveston but wherever erosion is occurring along the Texas coast. Texas actually has plenty of offshore sand, in the long-drowned valleys of the Sabine and Trinity rivers. Unfortunately, it’s covered by eighty feet of Mississippi River mud. Beach nourishment is an expensive proposition. The least expensive method (and it isn’t cheap) is dredging and pumping the sand onto the desired beach. A more efficient method, using a hopper dredge both to extract and carry the sand, is around four times as costly. Politicians may object to the process, because nourishment is only delaying the inevitable; it can’t stabilize the beach and will have to be repeated, again and again, at no small expense.
Contemplating the past and future, I have come to realize that I love Galveston more from afar than up close. Wherever I might live, I will always consider myself to be from Galveston. But I can’t escape the feeling that its existence is fragile—that the erosion, the subsidence, the lack of sand, the overdevelopment, the memory of the 1900 storm, and the turning of the calendar to the next hurricane season is nature’s way of saying that cities don’t belong on barrier islands two miles offshore. And that we all know in our hearts the sea will win in the end.
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