ANGLETON, Texas – Hurricane Ike’s storm surge was so widespread, so high and so violent that it will take much longer than usual for the Texas coastline to recover, the director of coastal resources for the Texas General Land Office said.
Ike washed millions of tons of beach sand into coastal marshes so far out into the Gulf that some beaches will be changed forever, Eddie Fisher said at a town hall meeting at the Brazoria County Courthouse.
“We’re going to have to do a lot of beach replenishment projects,” Fisher said.
He said about 100 homes on Galveston Island are now on the surf side of the vegetation line – the line used to denote public beaches.
So much vegetation has been stripped away that the Land Office plans to use a line of elevation 4.5 feet above mean sea level to establish the new beach line until vegetation returns, he said.
The first maps of the 4.5-foot line should soon be available on the Land Office Web site at www.glo.state.tx.us, he said. Maps of the city of Galveston will be done first, then Bolivar and Brazoria County, he said.
Mapping Bolivar Peninsula is especially difficult, he said, “because there is so much total destruction. We lost all our benchmarks.”
Coastal residents did get some good news.
Brazoria County Commissioner Dude Payne said the county has approved $1.9 million to build a 16-foot-wide crushed concrete temporary road to replace parts of County Road 257, also known as the Blue Water Highway, between Surfside Beach and San Luis Pass.
He said a more permanent roadway will cost $50 million to $100 million because sand dunes or rock revetments also will have to be constructed to protect it from future storms.
State Rep. Dennis Bonnen, R-Angleton, said a legislative subcommittee will soon start holding meetings on how to help the coast recover from Ike.
Deryl Tumlinson, of CenterPoint Energy, said work teams are rebuilding the power line from Surfside Beach to subdivisions at San Luis Pass and plan to have power to those areas restored by Nov. 10.
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