The Dike

The Dike

Unless you grew up in Galveston County, you would think this post had something to do with Hans Brinker.  But in Galveston County....everyone knew about The Dike.   It is a long pier-like road that goes five or so miles into Galveston Bay.

When my parents first married and moved to Texas City from Oklahoma, being close to the water was an incredible novelty.  Their first house was four houses down from the original seawall.  Mom said she would take me, as a small child, for walks along the seawall.  She found the water to be wonderful and calming.  It was not unsual for us to get in the car in the evening and drive to the end of the dike and back just for fun.  I learned about the birds, watching seagulls and pelicans fish in the bay.  I still feel nostalgic going out there.

My dad had been in “304 days of Combat” during World War II.  That also was rephrased to say, “I went on a picnic  for 304 days”, “I went camping for 304 days,” and so on, all meaning that he would never do those things again.  So I was pleasantly surprised when Mom announced that we were going on a picnic on the Dike with our friends the Faulks.

Mr. Faulk had been in WWII as well, but in the Navy. According to my dad, sailors always had a bed, and meals. Dad made WWII in the Navy, with bombs blowing up ships and sinking them in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, seem generally very comfortable.  

Dad had agreed to go on the picnic at the Dike because the Faulks had chairs and a table from camping.  And for the first time we packed up the picnic basket Mom had gotten when they first got married.   My next door neighbor, Jimmy, was going with us too.  Dressed in our swimsuits, slathered with smelly suntan lotion, we packed the car. Jimmy had blown up his air mattress float before he came over.  Dad made him press the air back out, to fit it in the car.  As we drove over the seawall, Dad told us to be on the lookout for the Faulk’s 1959 red chevy stationwagon.

When we spotted them, Mr. Faulk had already set up a tent, a table, chairs and had the grill going ready for hot dogs.  Their son, Butch, had gone further down the beach with some friends from school.  Their daughter, Judi, was three years older than me, and was stuck with us two little kids.  Grudgingly she helped us blow up the float.  We pushed it on the water as we walked away from the beach.  I wore a life vest since I couldn’t swim, while, Judi and Jimmy held on to the sides of the float.  We had been playing for 30 minutes or so in the water, when Jimmy realized if he let go of the float, he could no longer touch the bottom, Judi told him not to be afraid, it was just because he was short.  Judi tried to touch the bottom and discovered that she couldn’t touch the bottom either.  

Jimmy could swim, but not for very long.  Judi could swim but she didn’t swim in water over her head.  At first I started to cry, but Judi quickly told me, “You’re the one with the life jacket, it is Jimmy and me that will drown!”  We started waving our arms and yelling but our parents couldn’t hear us.  They were busy talking, never dreaming that the water was over our heads.  Judi started talking about how if we floated out to sea, a boat might pick us up.  That was it for me, and I started crying again.  Judi then decided that if we all yelled at the same time someone would hear us so we started to yell together.   

About that time we noticed several men wade fishing just to the side of us and they were standing on the bottom.  Judi once again tried to reach the bottom to no avail.  The fisherman saw us and yelled for us to paddle towards them. By this time, Dad and Mr. Faulk had seen us.  As they ran through the water to us, it was like they stepped off a cliff and disappeared under water, bobbing up, having to start swimming.  As we paddled over to the fisherman, suddenly our feet were once again touching the bottom.  Feeling sort of silly for making so much commotion, we walked the float back to the beach.

As it turned out  the city had dredged out the area where we had been floating to add sand to the beach, leaving a deep hole that you couldn’t see in the water.  We got back to our camp where hamburgers and hot dogs were waiting.  We were starved, and spent the whole meal talking about our adventure of Being Adrift at Sea. I commented I couldn’t wait to tell my friends what had happened, when Judi quickly reminded me, “You are the one that shouldn’t have been afraid, because you had the life jacket.”

Most days of my childhood days ended with my Daddy saying to my mother,  “Honey (or Dear), you wanna go for a little drive?” to which my mother would reply, 
“Let me get my purse.”  

Then, we would get in the Buick and head down Palmer Highway, make a little jog to the right at Bay Street, over the seawall and on to the bumpy road of The Dike.  With my back window down I could feel the salt air on my face, hear the ever scoffing calls of the gulls and the lapping of the water as it hit the big, square, granite ballast rocks, that lined the road. We would make the loop around at the end, where the pelicans floated lazily, after a long day of fishing, and experience it all again as we headed home.

I can still feel the comfort of climbing into bed, with those soothing sounds and smells lulling me to sleep.

*If you want to share your memories or comments about "The Dike" please scroll down to the “comments” section at the bottom of the blog.  They will be included for everyone to enjoy!

Reference for the following information:www.texascity-library.org/history/growth/dike.php

The Texas City Dike juts out into Galveston Bay on the easternmost end of Texas City. The dike is parallel to and north of the 50-foot deep, 600-foot wide Texas City Channel, which allows shipping traffic to access the Port of Texas City. The dike's structure consists of a 28,200-foot-long (approximately 5.34 miles) pile dike paired with a rubble-mound dike that runs along the south edge of the pile dike (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 2007). The Texas City Dike was built to protect the Texas City Channel from cross currents and excessive silting, although the channel must still be dredged frequently to prevent shoaling in the waterway.

Originally authorized by the River and Harbor Act of 1913, construction of the dike was sponsored by Texas City but was built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Galveston District. The first version of the dike was timber pile construction, built for a cost of $1.4 million and completed in 1915. After construction, material collected from dredging the Texas City Channel was repeatedly deposited on top of the timber pile dike, but it eventually washed back out into the water; to prevent this problem, the Corps added a rubble-mound formation to the supplement the existing dike in 1931-1932.

Col. Hugh Moore and other Texas City leaders continued to try to convince the Corps of Engineers to build permanent bulkheads that would prevent washout and allow the dike to be used as a public beach and recreation area. The Corps of Engineers was not amenable to his requests, so Moore's wife, Helen Moore, who was a member of the Texas House of Representatives, took up the issue with the Texas Legislature. In 1931, she gained passage of a state bill that patented a 1,000-foot-wide strip of land with the old U.S. Corps of Engineers timber pile dike at its center to the City of Texas City. The patent included all submerged lands and tidal flats located within the 1,000 foot strip.

In the late 1930s the Works Progress Administration paid for some dike maintenance and built a roadway on the dike. Colonel Moore continued to lobby the Army Corps of Engineers to improve the dike so that the city could use it for recreational activities, without much success. The City of Texas City and the Works Progress Administration continued to patch the dike, at times filling in eroded areas with scrap automobile bodies, rock, broken brick, and waste from the city dump in an attempt to break wave action and prevent further erosion to the dike, but their efforts were only temporarily successful.

An application to build a new retaining wall and dike was submitted for review in September 1945 because of the continual erosion on the north side of the dike (Texas City Board of Trade, personal communication, September 1, 1945).

In 1957, the City of Texas City leased approximately 13 acres of land on the eastern tip of the dike to Clyde Ragsdale, who formed the Texas City Dike Corp. for the purpose of developing the area. A lighted fishing pier, a bait camp, a warehouse and a refreshment stand were eventually built in the area. In 1963, the Texas City Dike Corp. was sold to the Texas City Dike and Marina, Inc., when Mr. Ragsdale died.

There were continual renovations made to the dike over the next three decades, including patenting an additional strip of land at the eastern point of the Dike in 1963. In 1977 a plan was put forth to widen the channel from 100 feet to 1,200 feet; deepen it from 34 feet to 40 feet; and widen the entrance from 250 feet to 400 feet (Vander Bosch, 1977, p.2). By 1995 there was a 600-feet lighted fishing pier that offered "some of the deepest water pier fishing on the Texas coast" (Acker, 1995, p. 21). Many tourist advertisements claim the Texas City Dike as the world's largest fishing pier. The Texas City-La Marque Hurricane Flood Protection System, an interconnected system of levees, pump stations, dike and seawall sections, was dedicated in 1987. On March 25, 1995, a historical marker was dedicated at Anchor Park for the Dike.

On Sept. 13, 2008, Hurricane Ike made landfall at Galveston (Drye, 2008, n.p.). The storm travelled up Galveston Bay with 110-mph winds and a 25-foot storm surge. Although the Texas City Dike remained structurally intact and was cleared of debris immediately after the storm, the recreation and business facilities were washed away by the storm surge. The pilings for the dike remained, but much of the road and shoulders were washed away. Texas City and Galveston County worked with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to obtain federal funding to repair and renovate the Dike and surrounding areas (Tompkins, 2008, n.p.). The Dike was closed to the public for two years after the storm while the structure was repaired.

On Sept. 11, 2010, the Texas City Dike re-opened to the public. A $5 entry fee for non-city residents was instituted to assist in defraying the cost of maintenance and future improvements to the Dike. The cost of the effort to clean up storm debris after Hurricane Ike totaled $1.5 million. City staff restored many of the boat ramps and picnic shelters at an estimated cost of $250,000, while the $4.1 million cost of repairing the dike road was covered jointly by FEMA, Galveston County and the City of Texas City. Subsequent to the storm, Galveston County signed over all rights and ownership of any easements and rights to the road to the City of Texas City.

The dike currently boasts four boat ramps, ten concrete picnic shelters and one wheelchair accessible pier. The city installed solar-powered lights and performed additional repairs on piers and ramps with the assistance of a grant from the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. Prior to its closure after Hurricane Ike, the Dike's Samson-Yarbrough ramp was the busiest on Galveston Bay (Aulds, 2010), and the dike as a whole was the second-busiest boat launch site in the state.