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Next Tuesday, November 18, 2008, I will be presenting a lecture to the Bastrop County Audubon Society on the impact of Hurricane Ike on the preserves on the Upper Texas Coast. I will be speaking and showing photos from most of the private reserves as well as National Wildlife Refuges but will be focusing on the roll of the Texas Ornithological Society. Bastrop Audubon will be holding a fundraiser at the meeting to help raise money for TOS Preserve recovery.
For more information on time and location though not much more detail, check out the link here.
It won’t all be doom and gloom as some of the area weren’t hit all that hard. See the above image for an example of an area of Houston Audubon Society’s Smith Oaks that was impacted mostly by fallen limbs and trees. The storm surge did not reach here, leaving flowers to bloom and a fair amount of greenery elsewhere.
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McFaddin National Wildlife Refuge has just finished a brand new visitor center and office building when Ike hit. It was so new that they hadn’t even finished installing all of the interpretive exhibits. The above image is what the facility looks like now. What is even more amazing, is that this was primarily water damage. You can’t see it from here, but the roof is entirely intact, including the solar panels. Across the road is the Gulf of Mexico and during Ike, the storm surge simply swept through this brand new building. To give you an idea of scale, it is 14 feet to the base of the second floor.
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The town of Sabine Pass was located on the really bad side of the storm and took a really hard hit. This was especially devastating as this area had only just been able to recover from Hurricane Rita in 2006. I don’t have any data to back this up, but after visiting Sabine Pass twice now, I don’t believe there are more than a handful of buildings in the area that are still structurally sound.
Just outside Sabine Pass is a small patch of woods, Sabine Woods, owned by the Texas Ornithological Society (TOS) and protected as an important migration stop for songbirds as they reach the Texas coast after crossing the Gulf of Mexico during spring migration. Like the preserves at High Island, this small patch of woods is often the first trees the birds can land in to feed before continuing north. The second panorama above is taken in Sabine Woods. Here the damage was different from that at High Island. There was very little debris: a couple hoses, a couple big anchor lines, some small trash. A few large trees were down, but mostly the big trees did fine. During my first visit, Ron Weeks (president of TOS) and I had 7 or 8 species of warblers feeding in the few remaining green oak trees. What was so impressive though was the power of water. I know I say it a lot, but it blew me away. Small shrubs, grass, and other undergrowth was devastated. The few small ponds were now filled with saltwater and required pumping. However, overall, the woods weren’t too badly damaged and should once again be a haven for birds this spring.
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After Hurricane Ike barreled through the towns of Bolivar, Glaveston, Sabine Pass, and other areas along the Upper Texas Coast, we were all inundated with photographs and video of the devastation to homes, business, and other manmade structures throughout the region. What didn’t receive much attention was the impact of Ike on the numerous natural areas scattered along the coast. I set out to try and document some of this impact and will continue to create images as the areas recover from the damage.
Click and Drag within image to explore the scene. You can zoom in and out with Cmd/Ctrl and Shift.
Part of this project is to use traditional still photography but I am trying to incorporate a new technique as well, spherical panoramas. I first began this technique this past summer in Costa Rica while working on Canopy in the Clouds and am continuing to expand on my skills. Spherical panoramas capture the world in a unique way and I am especially interested in how this type of imagery can be used as a teaching tool. I will write much more about this technique, my setup, and my plans for how I will use it in the future, but today I just wanted to show you a few images.
The top image is taken from what remains of Front Street in High Island. The huge debris pile is on the edge of the Texas Ornithological Society’s Hooks Woods Bird Sanctuary. Much of the debris, including the side of the house came from the lots on the other side of the street (towards the sun) where there is no longer anything but a concrete slab.
The lower image is Highway 87 just past the entrance to McFaddin National Wildlife Refuge outside of Sabine Pass. The section of the highway between Sabine Pass and High Island has been closed to traffic for several years because of movement of the dunes. However while the road may not have been maintained, it has not completely collapsed but rather been buried by sand. The storm surge associated with Hurricane Ike simply ate into the dunes, undercut the road, and you see what remains. Previously, where you see water by the side of the road was a fragile, yet complete, dune.
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.
