Corps’ barrier plan meets distrust
Despite revisions, coastal residents still wary of dune system
HIGH ISLAND — David Burkett arrived at the High Island High School gymnasium armed with questions.
Burkett, a geologist who lives near Port Bolivar on Bolivar Peninsula, has long been suspicious of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ plan to build a $32 billion, 71-mile barrier system to protect the southeast Texas coast, even as the agency’s proposal has shifted from a hard barrier with levees and gates to its current iteration — a natural dune system from High Island to San Luis Pass with a ring barrier around the most populated section of Galveston and a massive sea gate across the mouth of the Houston Ship Channel.
He hoped that Saturday’s public meeting on the barrier proposal — the first of three such meetings hosted by the Army Corps and the Texas General Land Office — might provide some clarity on the project. A second meeting will be held in Galveston on Feb. 12, followed by a meeting in Seabrook on Feb. 13.
A large map of the proposed dune system for Galveston and Bolivar Peninsula lay on a table near the entrance of the gym, with a
magnifying glass for residents to examine up close. Burkett stood back, eyeing the map warily.
“What are you really trying to protect?” Burkett asked an Army Corps employee stationed near the map. “We haven’t had a major surge event other than (Hurricane Ike) really for a long time. So the idea of saying, ‘Well we need this,’ what do we need it for?”
Burkett’s skepticism is largely emblematic of the reaction from coastal residents since the Army Corps released its tentative plan to protect the Houston-Galveston region from storm surge in October 2018.
That original plan called for the construction of levees that would run parallel to FM 3005 on Galveston Island and Texas 87 on Bolivar Peninsula but behind the dune line. This plan for the harder barrier would have left thousands of homes adjacent to the beach exposed to flooding and likely required extensive eminent domain buyouts.
The backlash to that original proposal led the Army Corps to go back to the drawing board. By late 2019, the Corps had settled on a double dune system — a field of 12- and 14-foot dunes, approximately 185 feet wide, with a runway of 250 feet of renourished beach leading to the Gulf of Mexico.
The public meeting on Saturday in High Island — a casual, informational session with seven stations set up in the high school gymnasium, each with a different focus of the plan — is designed to gauge initial reaction to the revised proposal in advance of a second public comment period this fall.
“We really listened to what the public had to say in our first round of public comments and we’ve tried to incorporate as much as possible in this design,” said Tony Williams, director of planning for the General Land Office’s coastal resources division. “There still could be some tweaks and changes based on public comment.”
‘Don’t have a clue’
The Corps estimates 40 million to 50 million cubic yards of sand over 50 years would be needed to maintain the dune system along Bolivar and Galveston. The Corps is targeting two sand banks in the Gulf to supply the necessary material: Sabine Bank, 17 miles south of the mouth of Sabine Pass; and Heald Bank, 27 miles offshore from Galveston.
Residents at the High Island meeting were left flabbergasted at the scope and magnitude of the Army Corps’ dune proposal.
“It’s gonna take hundreds of acres of (sand) to build those, and they say they’re gonna build them out 200 feet,” said Billy Tomlinson, a retiree who lives in Crystal Beach. “They don’t have a clue how much it’s going to physically take, nor how much it will cost.”
Indeed, if the intention of the meeting was to provide concrete answers to the public about the finer details of the barrier proposal, the Army Corps and General Land Office will need far more information than what they provided Saturday.
An interrogation about the sea gate across the ship channel was particularly illuminating. Azure Bevington, a coastal ecologist who lives in High Island, questioned Lori Thomas, an engineer with the Army Corps’ Galveston district, about whether the gate would infringe on federally protected wetlands areas on Bolivar Peninsula.
“From an engineering perspective, this would be a wall that would intersect with the jetty and then continue through these wetlands which are all part of the Bolivar Flats bird sanctuary,” Bevington said. “Has this been engineered in any way?”
“I don’t know, you’re asking me a bunch of questions
I feel like you’re trying to trap me here,” Thomas responded.
Other residents complained that some of the storm surge modeling the Army Corps presented was out of date, still relying on the original proposal of levees rather than the dune system.
Few answers
Kelly Burks-Copes, the Army Corps’ project manager for the coastal barrier proposal, emphasized the agency is working with the data that the federal budget allows for at this time. She noted the Army Corps is still modeling the sea gates in particular for how ship traffic would navigate the gates and whether the gates allow for minimal tidal flow restrictions between Galveston Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. All of that information
will be in the next draft of the barrier plan, to be released in October.
“We still have to finish the environmental impact analysis, and the (barrier) footprints are gonna change slightly as the real estate gross appraisal finishes,” Burks-Copes said, referring to eminent domain buyouts that could be required to build the dunes.
In the meantime, coastal residents left the school gym with more questions than answers, though some were at least appreciative at the Army Corps’ efforts to be transparent.
“None of it makes me feel good,” said Debbie Cary, a convenience store clerk from Crystal Beach. “But knowing that they’re attempting to answer our questions helps.”