Hurricane Ike: TOS Hook’s Woods
About two weeks ago, I joined Texas Ornithological Society president, Ron Weeks, for a tour of the sanctuaries owned by TOS on the Upper Texas Coast to survey the impact of Hurricane Ike. We visited the sanctuaries both in High Island as well as those further up the coast near Sabine Woods. The impact was substantial but it could have been far worse. Most of the large trees survived. Much of the underbrush is gone due to the storm surge. Debris was nearly absent from Sabine Woods, but will require extensive cleanup at Hook’s Woods in High Island where the sanctuary was the first line of trees for the oncoming storm surge.
I took numerous photographs of all the sanctuaries, including some interactive panoramas that I will be posting in the coming days once I figure out how to include them in the blog software. However, tonight, I just wanted to post this single image from Hook’s Woods. The flag may make it a bit cliche, but it is quite symbolic. What you see here are the remains of several homes that once stood across the street. This is essentially a wrack line, like the high water mark on a beach. These trees were the first obstruction that the oncoming water faced after the storm surge crossed the Bolivar Peninsula. The debris from the homes along Front Street, and likely those on the Bolivar, ended up in the woods here. The debris piles included entire walls, a boat, a trailer still attached to a pickup truck, and a corvette as well as numerous heartbreaking objects of everyday life.
This is just the beginning of a series I will be posting over the coming weeks and months as I document how the natural areas of the Upper Texas Coast react and recover to the impacts of Hurricane Ike’s winds and storm surge. Stay tuned for more images and reports.
Tags: devastation, High Island, Hurricane Ike, Texas Ornithological Society
