House Stands Alone After Hurricane Ike
Posted on September 20, 2008
Hurricane Ike devastated parts of the Texas southeast coast from Galveston to the Texas/Louisiana border. The house above appears as the only house standing in aerial shots of Gilchrist, Texas which was destroyed by the surge from Hurricane Ike.
The lone house did sustain damage as you can see on the before and after pictures on Anderson Cooper's blog. The house also sustained water damage but even so it clearly fared much better than the houses around it.
A CNN story says $300,000 was spent on the house so that it could survive a powerful hurricane. The main feature appears to be very high columns to the get the house's bottom floor well above sea level.
CNN says the owner is a retired electrical designer and had an engineering firm oversee the construction of the new home. The large columns put the house's bottom floor 22 feet above sea level. Some of the surge still made its way inside the home but at least it is still standing.
The house was designed to survive a Cat 5 Hurricane. Hurricane Ike came in as nearly a Category 3 storm but because of Ike's massive size it carried an abnormally large surge with it.
Update: KFDM visited with Warren Adams, the home's owner, four years after the hurricane. Adams says of the region, "In some ways it is better, because what's coming back now is more modern and designed to withstand another storm similar to that or close to that. Before, it took away a lot of houses and it destroyed a lot of people."