Perspectives

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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.

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.