The Inland Echo

By FEMA News

When Hurricane Ike was bearing down on his town in late summer 2008, Mayor Charlie Everts knew it would be Tiki’s toughest test.

The town, whose 950 homes are perched on stilts, had been working for years to prepare for a Hurricane Ike. “We’ve worked hard to build above and beyond the standards for coastal construction,” said Everts. “Hurricane Ike proved it was the right thing to do.”

Storm winds topping 100 mph blew waters from the Gulf of Mexico across the island, causing surges of 10 to 12 feet. The first blast came from the gulf, across nearby Galveston Island. After the eye passed, a second surge, blown from the opposite direction, soaked the island.

“We had a Category 2 hurricane from the standpoint of wind speed, but because Ike was so large, we had a surge as high as usually expected with a Category 4 storm,” said Tiki Island Emergency Management Coordinator Tim Cullather.

The result?  “Everything appeared to work as planned,” Everts said. “People evacuated when we asked. Nobody died. Nobody was injured during the storm. Nobody is missing from Tiki Island.”

Working as planned meant that all that remained at ground level were the stilts and columns that supported houses.  “The breakaway walls on one house took out the breakaway on the next one,” Everts said.

Volunteers with front-end loaders followed the storm, clearing the streets of debris. “We lived here for several days without water, sewer or power, living on the candy bars we brought,” Everts said. “But, overall we did pretty well. I am really proud of how it turned out here.”

Tiki Island was created in the 1960s around a nub of land named Wilson’s Point. Developers dug canals and used the materials to elevate the land. At first Tiki was primarily a small fishing camp, later a place for weekend homes, then a village that incorporated in 1983, and now home to about 1,250 people. At an elevation between 4 and 10 feet, the town’s 1.5 square miles are a lacework of canals, where almost all of the upscale homes are on the waterfront.

Building safe houses here requires special care. In the town’s early years, Tiki stayed in hot water with the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) over a tangle of floodplain management compliance disputes.

“Tiki had a terrible reputation in floodplain management circles then and probably deserved it,” said FEMA’s Dale Hoff, who worked with the community for years to try to resolve the compliance issues. He credits Everts with turning the situation around.

When Everts took office in 1992, Tiki was on probation with the NFIP, in danger of losing the availability of federal flood insurance for its citizens. “We were concerned that we would have no insurance, no mortgages, no future,” recalled Alderman Phil Hopkins.

“We were all pulling in different directions then,” Everts said. “It took years of building community consensus. Now I think we’re all pulling together, everybody has come together.”

The village is not only off probation but has progressed so far that the NFIP gives Tiki citizens a 10 percent break on their flood insurance premiums.

“We’re very proud of our building standard,” said the mayor. “We try to go above and beyond the minimum standard set by FEMA and the standard coastal codes. I think we do it better than a lot of other areas.”

Everts’ own experience in Hurricane Ike is typical of others on Tiki.

To show the depth of the surge at his house, Everts stretched his hand high above his head and said, “If I had been standing on my dock, the water would have been over my head.”

The good news is his lowest inhabited floor was above the surge. Rain came through a broken window, damaging a section of wall board, and the garage-level walls broke away as planned, but otherwise his home survived in good shape ? like Tiki Village overall.

The mayor’s house, built in 2002, is typical of the Tiki building standard in several important respects.

* He built the living area of the house above the base flood elevation, the level of high water that is calculated to have a 1 percent chance of occurring during any given year.
* The building is supported on reinforced concrete columns driven 20 feet below the ground. “If there is erosion, the house will still be there,” Everts said.
* The ground-level floor is not inhabited and its breakaway walls are designed to give way to the force of the water without taking down the rest of the building.
* He used extra-sturdy materials, including extra heavy 7/8-inch reinforcing rebar, stronger “6-sack” concrete mix and plywood sheathing.
* Metal fasteners and clips hold the house together.

“At every turn, Tiki opts for the higher standard,” the mayor said. “Every house built on Tiki is engineered, from the first thing that goes into the ground to the last nail.”

Tiki is especially glad that FEMA and the state provided funds for shutters over windows in Tiki’s public safety and water district buildings. The funds came from FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Grant Program. The shutters were installed just before the storm. They protected the buildings, allowing Tiki to manage the disaster and launch recovery operations quickly.

“Those hurricane shutters worked!” Cullather said.

While they know that a larger storm could have caused more damage, Tiki leaders are delighted that their hard work paid off in Hurricane Ike.

“These kinds of building programs demand long-term commitment,” said Cullather. “We hear of the recovery problems other communities are experiencing ? having to cut back services and staffing. One of our neighboring towns estimates that they lost one-third of their tax revenue because of the impact of Ike on their community.”

“Here is another good example of why you need preparedness and hazard mitigation to have your community ready for a disaster. We won’t have to spend the next decade trying to recover from this storm.”

“When you get right down to it, in any community like this, property value is very important, and people have just about everything tied up in their properties,” Hopkins said. “So whatever we can do to keep this place strong, safe and able to withstand something like Hurricane Ike helps us all. Look what we can do. We can survive.”

Related posts:

1. Take a Voodoo Vacation on Zombie Island at Tiki Oasis 8
2. Flood insurance can be a wise investment
3. Before-and-after Hurricane Ike photographs show near total destruction of Texas neighborhood
4. HGTV to air Tiki Office episode
5. Sunny Alameda has shopping, pirates, and a Tiki bar. Wanna live here?