In the last few weeks since Ike struck the coast of Texas, you have heard a lot about my thirteen days without electricity, entire neighborhoods without power and water and massive havoc wreaked on the infrastructure of Galveston and the Bolivar Peninsula. All that pertains to man made edifices of modern living. Ike was a Cat 2 hurricane but with a huge span. Although it produced maximum wind gusts of around 110mph, it hovered over the region for a long time and the winds blew in a sustained manner for several hours. Its prolonged presence over Texas damaged not just buildings and electric poles but uprooted hundreds of thousands of trees, eroded beaches and mucked up bodies of fresh water. It will take mother nature a long time and several years of calm summer climate to repair the battered coastal terrain, making life very difficult for plants, marine life, birds and other animals who make their habitat in southeast Texas.
Thousands of migrating warblers pass through the Bolivar Peninsula about this time every year, making one last stop for food and water before their 600-mile flight over the Gulf of Mexico.
But the warblers and other migratory birds might not be able to find refuge for a while on the remote and particularly vulnerable place. Hurricane Ike stripped the birds’ favorite mulberry trees, leaving little fuel for their long journey ahead — one of the sobering consequences of the storm.
Even without a major oil spill, Ike caused widespread environmental damage to Southeast Texas, ripping through the region’s barrier islands, washing debris into Galveston Bay and the Gulf, and imperiling animals, fish and plants by pouring excessive amounts of saltwater into marshes.
"The extent of the damage won’t be known for a while," said Larry McKinney, executive director of the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. "But it’s possible that we’ve had 20 to 30 years of damage at once."
The upper Texas coast is already under stress because of development, rising seas and sinking land. The conditions have led to the rapid erosion of the shoreline, with as much as 10 feet washing away each year, by some estimates.
The dunes and marshes matter because they act as a speed bump, reducing the strength of wind and waves and robbing hurricanes of the warm water that fuels them. Without the buffer, storms can move ashore unimpeded and do more damage.
Amidst the damage and debris, weird things showed up after the storm. We saw surreal pictures on TV – of boats atop trees, terrified animals on roof and tree tops, cars cut into two with falling debris, refrigerators floating on water, hundreds of gallons of ice cream melting on a sidewalk before a convenience store, a seventy five story sky-scraper in downtown Houston with every window blown out on the east side. Last Saturday I heard about a truly unusual and whimsical piece of nature’s "art." A friend of mine who owns a beach house in Galveston dropped by after having inspected her partially damaged house the previous day. The house sits on seventeen feet high stilts, so the damage to the main living quarters was not extensive. But downstairs everything that was not nailed down got washed away without a trace leaving behind three feet of mud and silt. But one item, a crab bucket, remained. It was upside down and stuck fast to the dry concrete. When my friend’s husband pulled it up, the bucket was full of water that had stood on dry ground for a week. An upside down tower of water! What a neat idea for installation art!
The soaking hurricane has also left people with a dry sense of humor. My friend joked that when she and her husband are old and debilitated, a quick and painless way to die will be to take a couple of deck chairs and a few martinis to the beach and wait for a hurricane to strike.
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