Galveston, TX
Galveston, Texas was where Hurricane Ike made landfall on the US this weekend. Galveston is just south of Houston, and was one of the places Stephen and I visited when we did a tour of Texas last year. The fact that I've actually been to the places that you see on the news makes this natural disaster much more real to me than previous ones. It's probably just my fondness for island and coastlines, but I really enjoyed visiting that part of Texas. We stayed in Seabrook, just north of Clear Lake and northwest of Kemah. We stayed there a couple of days, and spent just a day in Galveston itself.
The whole area is very low lying coastal. Galveston itself is a long low barrier island on the Gulf of Mexico, and was devastated by a hurricane in 1900 that destroyed pretty much everything. After that, it was rebuilt along with a 5m wall along the seaward side, with Seawall Boulevard running along the top of the seawall. Much of the land was raised by fill, but it does slope down behind the seawall to the bay behind.
Although Hurricane Ike only made landfall as a category 2 hurricane in wind strength, it was more like a high category 4 in storm surge. And it was also huge - pretty much the size of Texas itself. The water was overtopping the seawall the day before Ike made landfall.
Despite a mandatory evacuation order, and warnings that people in single level homes faced certain death from the flooding, many people chose to stay. Ike killed 80 people in Haiti and Cuba on the way through the gulf. So far the current death toll in the US is 49, but since rescue teams are still finding people, this is likely to rise further.
Despite the fact that Galveston itself was where Ike made landfall, it seems that it probably wasn't the worst hit, or at least, the eastern, most populated end didn't fare too badly. The seawall did the job it was designed to do and provided some measure of protection. Much worse of are the western suburbs, and the areas to the northeast on the other side of Galveston bay on Bolivar peninsula. Some of those have been completely destroyed.
This powerful set of pictures conveys some of the devastation. In particular, pictures 11 -13 show Crystal beach and Gilchrist on the Bolivar peninsula.
It's quite frightening to see that despite all our technological and engineering prowess, we really are no match for the power of nature.