Island Fema Map

If you have never found yourself in the path of a raging Texas floodwaters consider yourself lucky. The power of fast moving water blasting downhill through the Texas Hill Country where topsoil is thin and limestone-lined box canyons form natural funnels that can send deadly walls of water moving at speeds so fast there is no escape. 

In the mid-1990s I interviewed a man outside of Luckenbach who had been rescued from a tree who said he was standing beside the Guadalupe River when he heard what he thought was the low hum of an oncoming rainstorm quickly followed by a roar and by the time he saw the wall of water coming at him it was too late to run. 

In 1987 our news crew in Chopper 5 found themselves hovering over a group of campers near the site of the recent Kerrville flooding and began dropping lines to bring them up out of trees where they were stranded. As in the case of the recent deadly floods there the way out of the camps was across low water crossings where nine inches of rushing water can lift a vehicle off its wheels and send it down stream. Rushing water is nothing to mess with. 

Texas is especially vulnerable ranking seventh in the country, with about 800,000 properties, or roughly 6.5 percent of the state’s total, sitting in a flood zones and we have had three 100-year flood events in the past five years. 

Closer to home

On a barrier island flooding due to rainfall is not much of a danger since we have no box canyons and there are plenty of places for rainwater to go. Our problem is one of rising water due to storm events and as anyone who has lived here very long knows each storm that finds our shores is different from every other storm depending on its direction, location of landfall, and duration. Some are wind events and some are water events; some like Hurricane Harvey in 2017 are both and the length of time they spend over the coast determines the damage. 

Hurricane Ike in 2008 pushed an eight-foot surge tide sending waves breaking over the Michael J. Ellis Seawall but passed through relatively quickly barely raising the water level in Island canals. While Hurricane Allen in 1980 took its time and pushed about the same amount of water as Ike but wrecked the seawall, island bridges, and 1100-feet of Island bulkheads in its rush to get back to the gulf. 

In 2017 Hurricane Harvey raised the water level in the canal behind my house on Gunwale Dr. to six feet, three feet below the Base Flood Elevation of nine feet which was the standard under the release of flood maps four years ago which resulted in the raising of BFE to eleven feet. 

Nine feet and a FEMA speech

Not long before Harvey’s arrival the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was in the process of reworking FEMA floods maps which had not been revisited since the aughts and a FEMA official spoke to the Island Strategic Action Committee. The biggest question was what is the likelihood of a storm pushing water above nine feet and into Island homes and the answer was surprising. Remember, at that time there was no water outlet under SPID so outbound water, like in Hurricane Allen, had to flow over SPID to get to the gulf which it did through the canal located next to Mikel May’s restaurant. 

But what the FEMA officials said that day was that unless the rising water hit all at once for Island homes at nine feet of elevation to flood it would have to flood into Corpus Christi proper north as far as Greenwood Drive. He said his studies showed that an incoming flood tide would wind its way up Oso Creek through low lying areas to the flatlands around the Crosstown Expressway and would likely drain back into the bay or the Laguna Madre without pushing water in Island canals higher than the crucial nine-foot level.