page_title: Effects of Hurricane Ike in Texas
section_title: Galveston
hierarchical_section_title: Effects of Hurricane Ike in Texas / Aftermath / Galveston
caption_attribution_description: Airmen conduct search and rescue - Galveston Island, Texas, after Hurricane Ike Sept. 13.
context_page_description: The effects of Hurricane Ike in Texas were crippling and long-lasting. Ike's effects included deaths, widespread damage, and impacts to the price and availability of oil and gas. Hurricane Ike also had a long-term impact on the U.S. economy. Making landfall over Galveston, at 2:10 a.m. CDT on September 13, 2008, Category 2 Hurricane Ike caused extensive damage in Texas, with sustained winds of 110 mph, a 22 ft storm surge, and widespread coastal flooding.
  More than 140,000 residents in the Texas Gulf Coast danger zones in Ike's path had failed to evacuate, partly due to fears of multi-hour traffic jams as during Hurricane Rita, but over 940 were rescued from rising waters,
  and nearly 2,000 rescued afterward.
  As of December 27, 2008, 37 people are known to have lost their lives in Texas due to Ike while hundreds are still missing.
  The storm had come ashore hours before daybreak with 110-mph winds and towering waves, pushing boats ashore, smashing many houses, flooding thousands of homes, knocking out windows in Houston's skyscrapers, uprooting trees, and cutting electric power to millions of customers for weeks or months.
context_section_description: In Galveston, by 4 p.m. CDT (2100 UTC) on September 12, the rising storm surge began overtopping the 17-ft (5.2 m) Galveston Seawall, which faces the Gulf of Mexico; waves had been crashing along the seawall earlier, from 9 a.m. CDT. Although Seawall Boulevard is elevated above the shoreline, many areas of town slope down behind the seawall to the lower elevation of Galveston Island.
  The historic Balinese Room, a former mafia-run nightclub on a pier that had extended 600 feet into the Gulf of Mexico and had withstood many serious storms, was swept away as Ike's eye crossed over the eastern half of Galveston Island. The elevated structure, a pier, which had hosted performers ranging from Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope and George Burns to Groucho Marx and Sammy Davis, Jr., had recently been renovated and returned to profitability after years of neglect and disrepair, and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
  None of the many wooden piers that gave Galveston much of its unique character survived the landfall of Hurricane Ike. In addition to the Balinese Room, Murdoch's, Hooters and the 61st Street Pier were all completely destroyed.
  Murdoch's Pier was rebuilt and reopened in October 2009, while Hooters Galveston (housed in the former Ocean Grill building) was not rebuilt; the site remains vacant as of 2011. (A new Hooters was reopened in November 2017 off 61st Street south of Interstate 45.) The 61st Street Pier was rebuilt and reopened in 2010. Seawall Boulevard, which runs the entire length of the seawall several meters above the popular beaches adjoining the Gulf, was littered with the debris of these and other structures.
  The landmark Flagship Hotel, which sat on deep concrete pylons, was seriously damaged, but no one was injured, and while an early survey indicated the structure would be salvageable; however that proved to be untrue, and the hotel was demolished in 2011. Some of the hotel's siding was peeled off by the storm (this occurred during Hurricane Alicia in 1983), venting at least one top-floor guest suite to the open air, and the elevated ramp permitting vehicles to access the hotel's lower level from Seawall Boulevard fell into the Gulf.
  The seemingly protected back side of the island also suffered heavy damage to tourist areas.  The Lone Star Flight Museum suffered massive damage as the storm surge washed over the airport and though all the aircraft hangars (not just the museums) with about 8 feet of water.  All the airplanes, except those that flew out before the storm, were damaged from moderate to severe, but the worst was the complete destruction of the "Aviation Hall of Fame" with numerous personal items of aviation's greatest pioneers. Conversely, Moody Gardens was built with hurricane storms in mind with strong pyramid shaped structures very high above sea level, so it was able to withstand the worst of the storm and return to operation quickly.
  The Galveston Island Trolley infrastructure was heavily damaged and operations were not restarted after the hurricane, and later suspended indefinitely. FEMA agreed to provide $200 million for repairs in the city. As of 2020 the line has yet to reopen.
  The Galveston Railroad Museum suffered damage throughout its museum and exhibit grounds. Several railcars and locomotives are damaged by the hurricane's winds and flooding# 2 historical EMD F7 locomotives are scrapped after severely affected. The museum's model railroad layout was also destroyed.
  Even though there were advance evacuation plans, Mary Jo Naschke, spokesperson for the city of Galveston, estimated that (as of Friday morning) a quarter of the city's residents disregarded calls for them to evacuate, despite predictions that most of Galveston Island would suffer heavy flooding storm tide.  By 6 p.m. Friday night, estimates varied as to how many of the 58,000 residents remained, but the figures of remaining residents were in the thousands.
  Some people survived by punching holes in attics and carried sick relatives away from the flood. On the 91st Street Pier, formerly a two-story structure r
caption: Galveston Island, viewed during a search and rescue mission
exif: {"Image ImageDescription": "Glaveston Island, Texas, after Hurricane Ike  September 13, 2008.  (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. James L. Harper Jr.)Released", "Image Make": "NIKON CORPORATION", "Image Model": "NIKON D3", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "300", "Image YResolution": "300", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS3 Macintosh", "Image DateTime": "2008:09:14 10:26:11", "Image Artist": "JAMES LEE HARPER JR.", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Co-sited", "Image ExifOffset": "428", "GPS GPSVersionID": "[2, 2, 0, 0]", "Image GPSInfo": "1084", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "1198", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "5112", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/640", "EXIF FNumber": "28/5", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Aperture Priority", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "400", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2008:09:13 16:37:20", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2008:09:13 16:37:20", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF CompressedBitsPerPixel": "2", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "43/10", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF LightSource": "Fine weather", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire", "EXIF FocalLength": "80", "EXIF SubSecTime": "06", "EXIF SubSecTimeOriginal": "06", "EXIF SubSecTimeDigitized": "06", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "3000", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1996", "Interoperability InteroperabilityIndex": "R98", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "1052", "EXIF SensingMethod": "One-chip color area", "EXIF FileSource": "Digital Camera", "EXIF SceneType": "Directly Photographed", "EXIF CVAPattern": "[0, 2, 0, 2, 0, 1, 1, 2]", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Manual", "EXIF DigitalZoomRatio": "1", "EXIF FocalLengthIn35mmFilm": "80", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard", "EXIF GainControl": "Low gain up", "EXIF Contrast": "Normal", "EXIF Saturation": "Normal", "EXIF Sharpness": "Normal", "EXIF SubjectDistanceRange": "0"}