Maj stories and events
Hurricane Ike hit Texas eight years ago, wreaking havoc and killing 74 people.
GALVESTON — A minor weather disturbance midway between Africa and the Caribbean gained enough strength on Sept. 1, 2008, to be deemed a tropical storm and given a name: Ike. The storm, moving at about 16 mph, would grow to a monstrous size before its center careened up the Houston Ship Channel on Sept. 13 — one of the most destructive storms ever to hit the GalvestonHouston area.
Ike was one of 16 tropical storms in 2008, five of which grew into major hurricanes in one of the decade’s worst hurricane seasons. Six consecutive storms struck the United States, including Hurricane Dolly, which ravaged South Texas more than two months earlier.
By Sept. 9, Ike had grown into a hurricane and forecasters were warning that it could come ashore anywhere from Mexico to Louisiana. The Houston area already had dodged two storms in previous weeks, with Tropical Storm Edouard turning north at the last moment and Hurricane Gustav curving into Louisiana.
Ike toppled buildings in the Bahamas and killed 61 people in Haiti and four in Cuba as it churned toward Texas, where it would be even deadlier.
Houston-area officials held off on issuing evacuation orders as Ike kept changing direction, first heading for Corpus Christi, then up the coast. A flurry of evacuation orders went out two days before the storm, but Galveston officials hesitated. The memory was still fresh of Galveston residents caught for as long as 30 hours or more in a massive traffic jam caused by evacuation orders in 2005 for Hurricane Rita.
Galveston officials also were hoping that Ike would strike farther west, but it kept moving up the coast and a mandatory evacuation order was issued on the evening of Sept. 11. Residents had only a day to leave before the high winds and tides from the massive storm slapped the island.
The National Weather Service warned that coastal residents outside the protection of a seawall “face certain death.”
Alice Mellot, then 52, was in her Galveston loft when she got a text message early Sept. 12 from Houston friends.
“They told me it was really coming and they would come and get me if I didn’t get out,” Mellot recalled.
Streets in Galveston were already flooding and winds were buffeting the island as Mellot crossed the Galveston Causeway and headed for College Station and refuge at a house owned by friends.
About 20,000 Galveston residents failed to evacuate, and about 140,000 remained in the most dangerous areas of the storm’s path. Some would pay with their lives.
Ike made landfall at about 2:10 a.m. Sept. 13, its center crossing the tip of Galveston Island at the entrance to the Houston Ship Channel.
The storm was nearly 300 miles wide with sustained winds of 110 mph, just shy of becoming a Category 3 hurricane. A storm surge of 13 feet and higher swamped Galveston, damaging about 75 percent of all structures on the island.
But Galveston was lucky in being west of the storm’s eye. Hurricanes rotate counterclockwise, so the worst damage is always on the side of the storm facing the wind, which was slowed after it hit land and circled to hit Galveston from behind.
The Bolivar Peninsula was not so lucky. It was on the “dirty” side of the storm, where winds were fiercest and the storm surge was more than 20 feet in some places. The surge scoured the communities of Gilchrist and Caplen from the map, ripping concrete slabs from underneath houses.
Delores Brookshire, then 72, who lived with her disabled son, Charles Allen Garrett, 42, telephoned her cousin as the rising water surrounded her small wooden house on the Bolivar Peninsula a few blocks from the Gulf of Mexico: “I just called to tell you bye and I love you … I’m going to die. Me and Charles Allen are going to drown.” They were among 74 people killed by the storm, most of them in Harris and Galveston counties.
As Ike surged up the Houston Ship Channel, it pushed 20-footplus walls of water into communities along Galveston Bay like Kemah and Seabrook. Stormwater sloshed over the 17-foot high Galveston seawall and pounded its two fishing piers into rubble. The seawall, built on the Gulf side of the island after the Great Storm of 1900, offered no protection from the surge that came in from the bay side.
Winds smashed out windows in Houston high-rise office buildings, including the 75-story J.P. Morgan Chase Tower, as sheets of glass crashed down onto downtown streets. Reliant Stadium (now NRG Stadium) lost part of its roof, and thousands of trees were felled, many onto rooftops. Vast areas of the city went dark, and some residents were without power for a month.
The storm was so wide that it caused damage along the Gulf Coast all the way to Louisiana.
Ike rampaged through 26 Texas counties, causing near $30 billion in damage before turning north. The storm’s winds then damaged homes in St. Louis, Mo., and parts of Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Ike’s rain caused flooding in Chicago.
In its aftermath, nearly 16,000 Texans were living in shelters. Galveston was without water, gas or electricity and for a day was cut off from the mainland because the causeway was jammed with debris, including a number of large boats.
The full effect of the 2008 economic crash hit two days later, and national attention was diverted from the suffering of Texans.
Congress appropriated about $3 billion in disaster aid, nearly two-thirds of it to rebuild lowincome to moderate housing destroyed by Ike.
Recovery has taken years. As recently as 2015, 2,000 Texans were still waiting for their homes to be repaired or rebuilt; that number was down to a few dozen, most of them in Houston, in 2016. The Galveston wastewater treatment plant ruined by the storm took eight years to rebuild at a cost of $85 million and was to reopen in the fall of 2016.
The battered island has made a spectacular comeback. Real estate prices have rebounded, and tourism, one of the island’s most important industries, is booming. The largest employer on the island, the University of Texas Medical Branch, laid off nearly 2,000 employees after the storm but has bounced back, opening a new hospital on the mainland and acquiring a hospital in Brazoria County.
The snail-like pace of rebuilding after Ike led to calls for changes, including ways to slice through regulations, a new housing design and local advance planning assisted by state-supplied experts. Those changes are expected to be addressed in the next legislative session, which also will look at reports from a special panel created to look at protecting the coast from another Ike. A six-county panel has recommended building an $11.5 billion storm surge protection system, dubbed the Ike Dike, to protect populated areas of the coast from Orange County to Brazoria County. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is doing a study required to get federal funding for the project.
Like many storm victims, Mellot spent weeks in federally sponsored housing before returning to Galveston. Ike destroyed her real estate business, and the bank foreclosed on her rental home and her loft. Mellot joined 10,000 other Galveston residents who left or never returned. She now is a successful communications consultant in Atlanta.
“It took a huge psychological toll,” Mellot said, adding that like many, she overcame the stress and financial loss and survived.