Hurricane Ike - Taken aback at Watergate, Clear Lake, and Surrounding Areas

I need to apologize to anyone I may have sent an email to saying that things had been over hyped down here and that all was well. It really wasn't the case. The truth is that I did luck out as did most people in Waterford Harbor Marina. The damage there is negligible compared to most the other marinas around town.

I took a walk today through Watergate to check on boats there in more details and determine how to handle my office. Well, much of my office and much of Watergate are both total losses. It seems that the close you get to Galveston Bay the worse it is. Additionally, the north side of Clear Lake got hit much harder than the south side. If your boat was at a fixed dock then odds are you'll have some damage. If it had not been prepped for Ike then you almost certainly will.

Fixed piers have accounted for the vast majority of damage to boats. Short piling fixed piers have washed away completely and long fixed pilings often ended up on the wrong side of the boats as the settled back down when the surge started to subside.

I've gotten a lot of requests to check certain boats and I am sorry I haven't been able to respond better. I've been overloaded and moving around is just not that easy. Many areas are still inaccessible. The video camera was lost while trying to reach my boat so still shots only from here out.
One of the piers across from the swimming pool by the restaurant in Watergate. Boats came lose, piled up, and came down on the wrong side of the finger piers. Many sung outright. Carnage is the only word that came to mind.

These are not small boats that got tossed around. The surge picked these vessels up and took them inland before dropping them down in many varied places. People were crying, many were laughing surprisingly, and life carries on. The ducks didn't know what happened.

One of the dealers thought that his boats would be better on the hard than in the water. That might be right when you don't get hit with a 13+ storm surge. The boats were floated up and off of thier jack stands. They landed all over the place.

Hard to believe all these boats have so far been from Watergate. It's crazy how they end up. Chaos. How do you even begin to start cleaning and recoving from this?
Found it. Now what? Watergate Marina drive next to the main office.

This last shot if of Clear Lake Marine Center on the North Shore of Clear Lake on Nasa Road 1. It was a total and complete disaster. Baots sunk, got tossed on the road, and crushed as they came to thier resting places. Many business will be impacted. Homes in the area are often in the same condition.


So far we are one of the lucky ones. The house we are staying in has had the water pressure come back on, but we are in the vast minority. The city is predicting weeks before power may be restored and days still before water is restored. Neither exists at Waterford. What amazes me is that FEMA hasn't started providing resources to anyone. They are still trying to figure out how to move supplies from the staging areas to distribution centers. I can't count how many times today I heard radio voices telling me that they were trying to figure out how to give food to people. Give me a #^%$ break.

Houston is in a bad way. Far worse than I thought. My friends and I are donig great supporting one another and luckily have about 5 friends who just went out of town. We've been restocking from their freezers as needed saving the presishable foods. We don't need the relief just yet, but some do. There is no gasoline anywhere in the city and Ice is extremely hard to come by.

Weathering Ike wasn't so bad. Weathing the full brunt of the aftermath is what's starting to scare me.