Galveston, Oh Galveston

We drove down to Galveston yesterday to see the damage from hurricane Ike, which hit last summer. It is still a mess down there. Not as bad as New Orleans, but there are a lot of houses with blue tarps on the roof as you drive into town and a lot of signs that have been blown out. When you get on the Island, there is a lot of damage in the poorer part of town, where the construction is not very good. We drove along the seawall out to Pirates beach and the larger high rises all look pretty good. it is hard to tell if they were undamaged or if they were repaired quickly. Some of the older looking apartment complexes were more badly damaged with a lot of siding off and the lower floors flooded out.

When we got out to Pirates it was strange how some houses looked very badly damaged, and the ones right next door were fine. One thing that was universal was the ground floor storage rooms were all flooded out. If you had a garage it is gone. When we got up to the waterfront the damage was much more obvious. Almost every house had sustained major damage and looked like it would have to be rebuilt as the foundation was gone. However, this maybe hard to do as the beach seems to have been washed away and the water was almost coming up to the first pilings of the houses. There were a lot of large trucks pushing sand back towards the beach that had washed up onto the land. Because of the tidal surge all the vegetation in the area was dead, making it look even more stark.

The bay side seemed to have less wind damage, but you can tell they had a big tidal surge too as the ground floors are all damaged and being rebuilt. There are a lot of very expensive houses in this neighborhood and the construction projects seem to be moving along faster. Maybe they got faster payouts from their insurance.

On the way back from Pirates to downtown things got worse as you travelled east. The captains Table, a well known local haunt that has been there for years was totally destroyed. The nicer hotels seemed to do OK, the San Luis and the Galvez were both open and looked like they were doing good business. The Flagship Hotel out on the pier was closed and had a couple of huge holes in the side and the foundation of the pier looked like it was crumbling. UTMB looked like it did OK as well as the port, where there was a large Carnival cruise ship. The streets around UTMB did not fair was well. There was a lot of damage and it did not look like any rebuilding had begun. In fact UTMB has laid off half their staff and there is not longer going to be major medical services available in Galveston, all the more reason to leave the next time a hurricane comes through.

The last place we stopped was the Strand. Almost all the stores and the bars looked like they were closed. Most troubling, Col. Bubbies, "The free world's only surviving AUTHENTIC military surplus store," was closed. I checked the web site http://www.colbubbie.com/ and it is up and running, but there are no store hours. Another troubling site was the Tremont Hotel, the nicest hotel in Galveston, did not look open. The website says it only sustained minor damage and will be opening in early 2009. So the strand was very quite, I even heard people were out selling stuff on the sidewalks during the Dickens Christmas shows as the stores were not open.

On the way out of town we saw a few more positive signs. One, all the historical old houses looked undamaged. The Moody Mansion looked fine as did most of the buildings around it. We also saw that the renovations on the Galveston Daily News building were almost complete and that they will be moving back in soon. Started in 1842, this is the oldest newspaper in Texas. The bad news is there is not going to be as much to write about when they do get up and running, as I think Galveston will go the way of New Orleans and be a smaller city in the future.