Although efforts have already begun, it will be many days – perhaps even weeks – before boat owners and insurance appraisers begin to tally the damage to thousands of vessels and dozens of marinas in the Houston area wrought by Hurricane Ike.
Many of the worst-hit communities are still locked down, and many more have 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfews, hampering accounting efforts. What is clear is that the impact was significant, even though the storm didn't live up to worst-case forecasts. As one official put it, "there is some pretty terrible damage."
U.S. COAST GUARDAs one official put it "there is some pretty terrible damage," referring to the boats that were tossed ashore or sunk.
Photos and footage show boats that were sent to the bottom, tossed on shore or tangled hiddeously in their marinas, where winds topping 100 mph and a storm surge of 15 feet in some areas pounded vessels together.
While the U.S. is no stranger to terrorizing hurricanes, the impact of storms like Ike can be vast and enduring, as owners and insurers struggle to cope with the damage.
Steve Croft, a spokesman for BoatU.S., which insures thousands of Houston-area boaters, said Tuesday that their catastrophe team had just reached the Galveston area and was setting up a basic triage operation to begin accounting for and categorizing the damage. Croft said BoatU.S. has already received several hundred claims, including those from areas as far away as Pennsylvania and New York, where Ike-related flooding had overwhelmed many already-sodden communities.
TALLYING THE DAMAGE
The first job for BoatU.S. and other insurers is to identify a boat yard that can be used to store wrecked boats. A fleet of cranes, trucks and towboats must also be assembled to begin the laborious process of moving boats that were physically displaced by the storm. While no official tally exists, officials say there are many.
Mike McCook, a salvage coordinator for BoatU.S. who is organizing the effort in Texas, said he and his team have seen "many hundreds" of boats submerged, "everything from small sailboats to large motoryachts." McCook said there are several marinas that appear to have been wiped out entirely.
"One of my guys said the Houston Yacht Club is just gone," he said. If confirmed, the fate of the HYC would be a sad irony. According to BoatU.S., it had been the model of hurricane preparedness for a marina.
McCook said that his team is also seeing something they don't often encounter, which is severe damage to boats stored inland on trailers, many of which were hit by falling trees and houses. The BoatU.S. team of 11 surveyors, three trucking companies and a myriad of towboats, tugs and barges has begun assessing the damage and will soon begin recovering boats.
McCook said one of the challenges for his company is to coordinate with other insurance companies. "If you have a pile of boats stacked up, and [some of the] boats are represented by other insurance companies, you can't just move [them] to get to ours."
Commander Kenneth Manning, head of the Galveston Bay U.S. Power Squadron, described discovering a 34-foot powerboat on the lawn of his condo near Clear Lake. In a telephone interview, Manning said there were several boats sitting on U.S. Route 1, the NASA Parkway, adjacent to Clear Lake, which was one of the harder-hit areas. He said he saw a 40-foot sailboat on the other side of the Parkway. Clear Lake, which is connected to Galveston Bay by a waterway, has one of the largest concentrations of marinas and boats in the country.
Manning also said the damage was uneven. Canvassing his organization's members, Manning said he found some who experienced no damage at all to their boats, but who had flooding damage to their homes. Some of these people are now living on their boats.
Manning said the damage to marinas also varied widely. Some news reports and second-hand accounts said several well-known marinas were completely destroyed. That appears evident in news agency photos of the area, but specific marinas cannot yet be identified. Several of the largest, including the Nassau Marina and the Houston Yacht Club could not be reached by phone yesterday because telephone service is still shaky in many areas.
Manning and others said one of the critical issues right now is lack of electrical power. He was charging a laptop at his office and using it in the evening to coordinate communications for his members. As a result, the Power Squadrons in southern Texas this week have resorted to using an online blog to exchange information on the whereabouts and condition of their members.
THE WORST HIT
In Galveston Bay, north of Galveston Island, most of the damage appears to be flood-related. Manning and others said they thought that was because they were directly under the center of Ike, whereas locations slightly to the east were affected more by the heavy winds and an even greater tidal surge. Manning estimated the surge in the Clear Lake area at about 13 feet.
Galveston Island, along with some of the other barrier islands, was among the places where devastation was greatest. Galveston was still closed to outsiders at mid-week and residents were required to show photo I.D. and proof of residence to be allowed back on the island for a few hours.
In order to help residents who evacuated begin to evaluate damage to their property, Galveston city officials obtained new, high-resolution satellite photographs of the island and surrounding areas and posted the images online (see link). The destruction is evident in the images, which show only remnants of structures and vehicles remaining after the Ike blew through.
U.S. COAST GUARDA fleet of cranes, trucks and towboats must be assembled to begin the laborious process of moving boats that were physically displaced by the storm. Officials say there are many.
