Prized Dunes Gone With the Wind

An apt symbol for the fortunes of this island is the sea grass planted to strengthen the sand dunes that offer thousands of homes their only defense from storms rolling in from the Gulf of Mexico. There are two types: morning glory and bitter panic.

It is time, once again, for the latter.

As Texas began digging out Wednesday from Hurricane Claudette, it became clear that the storm’s legacy would not be the splintered buildings or sunken boats, the trucks that floated 10 blocks or the snakes and jellyfish that littered streets like some sort of beachfront apocalypse. Claudette’s most enduring legacy may be that many of Texas’ prized beaches -- a good chunk of them anyway -- are gone.

In tiny Surfside Beach, concrete slabs that once held stilted houses in place vanished when the sand underneath them was sucked out to sea, leaving some damaged beyond repair, officials said. In Indianola, state officials feared that a $2.5-million beach replenishment project had been swept away in a single morning.

And on Galveston, a 33-mile-long barrier island of aging Victorian homes, new vacation condos and bustling surf shops, many dune lines were removed by powerful waves that sent streams of seawater 40 feet into the air during the height of Tuesday’s storm. Although assessment teams are still making their way to badly damaged neighborhoods, some beaches here are believed to have shrunk by 50 feet, authorities say, not an insignificant figure considering the island is only 1 1/2 miles wide at some points. Several streets and driveways, no longer resting atop stable sand, collapsed.

On the island’s western end, Lance Giese could be found walking through the backyard of his family’s vacation home, shirtless and carrying a splinter of a door, still attached to a doorknob but no longer attached to a home. Giese, 32, a teacher and athletic director at a high school in College Station whose family has vacationed here since he was 7, wasn’t sure which neighbor the door used to belong to.

He tossed it into a growing pile of debris left behind by Claudette -- seaweed, porch chairs, a mattress, a blue cooler, a pink child’s shoe, a bottle of tanning lotion. Behind him, a front-end loader, beeping incessantly as it rumbled down the street in reverse, carted off someone’s washing machine.

Giese’s family bought the home, in an enclave called Acapulco Village, two weeks ago. The home, which survived with minimal damage, is fourth in line behind the beach. Sadly, Giese said, it was probably a better investment than he realized. “We’ll be front-row soon -- beachfront,” he said. “It’s amazing to see this happen.”

Residents of Galveston, lashed only by the northernmost reaches of Claudette, had pooh-poohed it as it approached.

After all, the modern version of the island -- once home to bootleggers and pirates, later a getaway for the wealthy -- was literally built on the remnants of the biggest storm of them all. A hurricane in 1900 destroyed two-thirds of the structures on Galveston Island and killed so many people that searchers had to be plied with whiskey to dull the horror and mask the scent. It remains the deadliest natural disaster in the nation’s history. Two people were killed in Tuesday’s storm, both when tree limbs fell on them; more than 6,000 people are estimated to have died in the 1900 hurricane.

After that storm, in a public works project with remarkable scope for the time, authorities picked up most of the remaining houses and raised the island by 16 feet. They then built a 10-mile-long seawall, to protect the island from future storms.

But the seawall protects only the eastern portion of the island, leaving the western section, where pricey homes are being built at a rapid pace, exposed to storms and erosion. Jetties built to protect a shipping channel off the northern tip of the island have only increased the rate of erosion farther south and west.

Some spots lose 10 feet of beach per year even without a storm, and the average erosion on the island is more than five feet per year, according to a recent study by the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and Environment, a Washington nonprofit group. An endless stream of beach “renourishment” projects has helped, but Claudette wiped away much of the recent progress.

“Any time Mother Nature destroys her own, you hate to see it,” said Lois Harris, who lives north of Galveston but came to the island with her husband to view the damage to their local beach. “Every part of the country has its own natural disaster. Like it or not, this is ours.”

Lindsey Jasso, 20, of Carthage, Texas, has been vacationing on Galveston for six years; as many as 7 million tourists come here annually. Each year, Jasso has watched the beach shrink.

“We had dunes two days ago,” she said. “Now, we’ve got nothing. If we have enough storms like this one, it’ll be gone for good.”

Texas has 367 miles of coastline, a strip of sand that generates, mostly through tourism, $12 billion annually and employs more than 200,000 people. All of it is public land -- and almost half is eroding badly.

The Heinz study found that erosion rates in Galveston County and neighboring Brazoria County might be the worst in the nation; analysts believe that Galveston Island will eventually be cut in half if nothing is done.

Still, in the 95 years that the U.S. government has been giving states money to fight erosion, Texas has received just 1% of the pot. Florida, by comparison, has received 32%, according to the Texas General Land Office -- a seeming disparity that has spurred a renewed effort here to secure more funds and launch more projects, some controversial, to strengthen the coast.

For example, a 1.7-mile-long “geotube” -- a giant sock filled with sand -- erected along a stretch of western Galveston Island appears to have protected the houses behind it during Claudette. Supporters, who funded the project with private money, say more should be put in place; some argue that the government should begin paying for part of that effort.

Others are pushing for breakwaters offshore, part of a project that could cost more than $100 million. Some analysts said Wednesday that damage from Claudette could be several times that, although officials have not yet totaled up the damage.

“The beach is the principal asset of the Texas coast. That is particularly true in Galveston,” said Sidney S. McClendon III, owner of a home on Galveston’s bay side. “The island is eroding away. One way or another, we’ve got to save that beach.”

Others argue that structures such as breakwaters change the coast’s dynamics and steal migrating sand from other beaches.

Like many coastal states, Texas bans construction of “hard” protective structures, but backers of the sand tubes got around that ban by declaring them “soft.”

“Slam your face into it, buddy, and tell me if it’s hard,” said Ellis Pickett, head of the Texas chapter of the Surfrider Foundation, an environmental organization. “They only benefit people who own $600,000, front-row beachfront homes -- not the 20 million Texans who don’t. You can’t spend public money to protect someone’s big, expensive house.”

Researcher Lianne Hart contributed to this report.