impressive storm surge

[LCHIEN]

It's still hard to imagine what a hurricane can do. How big is a 17 foot storm surge?
this beach house is in seabrook, tx, 20 miles North of Galveston, on the shores of Galvestion bay. You can see the height of the storm surge damage.
I'm somewhat amazed the stairs are still there.

Here's where Seabrook is on the map.
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=e...4,1.09314&z=10

[gsmittle]

Probably less resistance to the water, since the stairs are open. Wow. What a mess.

My thoughts are with everybody affected by the hurricane.

g.

[crokett]

I woudn't want to be standing on those stairs unless they are cantilevered. From the pic it looks like they are.

[pelligrini]

Looks like a piece of the top guard got taken out. Or it might have been to a wrap around deck. The placement of the electrical box & meter seems unusual. Doesn't seem to be much reinforcement in the CMU walls though.

I wonder if there were block walls under the slab? In a house we did in FL I had to do a bunch of calculations for flow-thru openings and do some other break-away walls. A lot of the ground level walls were designed to fall away if a storm surge hit them. Still had to do a certain amount of openings for water flow though. The stair design was challenging too.

[dbhost]

Have I mentioned how grateful I am that my neighborhood is in as good of shape as it is? Seabrook is not that far from me... And pics like that made me wonder if I had a house to come back to!

[crokett]

Wait a minute, something else I just noticed.... are those concrete block walls? It sure looks like they are.

[Kristofor]

Two of the folks that work for me at our Webster office live in Seabrook. One had some fence damage, downed trees, extended power outages and such, but no major flooding. The other was not so lucky, several feet of water in his house (though apparently it all drained before they were back). With extended power outages they couldn't even run AC or fans to try and dry things out. Not much fun.

Kristofor.

[BobSch]

... The other was not so lucky, several feet of water in his house (though apparently it all drained before they were back). With extended power outages they couldn't even run AC or fans to try and dry things out. Not much fun.

Kristofor.

It's got to be so frustrating to have damage like that, knowing it's getting worse while you stand around unable to do anything to fix it.

[dbhost]

I know it's not much help now, but I have contacts with folks that have Generators to loan since their power is back up...

And yeah, that was a concrete block wall...