Update on south Texas disaster

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With all eyes on New York and Washington on the recovery efforts, many of us are unaware of smaller disasters. This is one of them that has received some attention.

Early Saturday morning, a tugboat with four barges carrying steel, struck the Queen Isabella Causeway, stranding a community of 2,000 permanent residents and an untold number of tourists / vacationers on South Padre Island. Five are known dead, four are still missing and presumed dead.

Apparently, approximately 2 a.m. Saturday morning, the barge struck the concrete pillars of the bridge, knocking down a 250 foot long section of bridge. Some vehicles were using the bridge at the time and plunged 80 feet down to the water, approximately eight to ten feet deep.

The community stranded is without hard wired telephone service, has only one functioning water plant and thus is hard up for water. It has NO way of getting groceries for the residents, restaurants, hotels and various other businesses in resort communities. There are some horse rental businesses that will be especially hard hit; no way of transporting hay to them as of yet.

TEXDOT (Texas Dept. of Transportation) reported this morning that repairing the bridge will take at least FOUR MONTHS of repair work to date; they cannot stabilize the bridge as of yet because of current rip tides and winds. They haven't been able to even recover the bodies known to be in the water for fear of the remaining bridge collapsing for this reason.

There is a temporary ferry service right now (only for people), with another ferry with vehicle ferrying capability being lent to us by the city of Corpus Christi. Until then, people can come and go on the ferry, but their personal vehicles stay on the island. Tensions between residents and vacationeers(sp?) is very high; the only supermarket on the island has been virtually stripped of supplies. The vacationers who have hotel reservations have a place to stay; otherwise, they are on their own as far as having a place to sleep, eat and otherwise.

Just a little more information on the goings on down in south Texas.

-- j. r. guerra (jrguerra@boultinghousesimpson.com), September 17, 2001

Answers

Hey j.r. where abouts in south texas are you from. I have a crazy mexican friend who lives in Corpus-Christie.

-- r.h. in okla. (rhays@sstelco.com), September 17, 2001.

Hi Russell.

Corpus Christi is about two and one half to three hours northeast of where I hang my hat. If you have an almanac, and want to know where I'm at, follow the Rio Grande River (the border between the United States / Mexico), to the mouth of the river where it exits to the Gulf of Mexico. Go upriver about 60 miles, plus or minus, you probably see a city named McAllen. If you have a magnifying glass,focus on the city dot; see me waving at you?

The place where the disaster happened is at Port Isabel, about 20 miles north of the mouth of the river. Kinda funny how things work out; we were supposed to attend the AIA (American Institute of Architects) conference this coming weekend when the disaster happened friday; one week later and we would be stranded on the island too.

-- j. r. guerra (jrguerra@boultinghousesimpson.com), September 17, 2001.


The video clip I saw showed that the damage was done to the causeway, not the bridge. The collision took out two spans of roadway.

-- Dennis Virzi (den2007@swbell.net), September 17, 2001.

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