Even though we are around one hundred miles from the gulf coast you always keep your eye on the gulf during hurricane season.  Hurricane season starts June 1 and ends on November 30 and historically our peak season in this part of the coast is mid August to mid September, but as we all know, hurricanes do what they want and when they want.  Since 2002 we have been impacted by two hurricanes, Rita in 2005 with a long power outage and some tree loss and Ike in 2008 with a short power outage.  Hurricane Harvey in 2017 was devastating to Texas from the coastal bend to the upper gulf coast and while we had heavy rainfall we did not suffer any flooding or power outages.

Below is our story from both Rita and Ike, along with some pictures of the effects of both hurricanes.  We hope to never have to add to this page again!

Hurricane Rita

Rita started on September 17 as a tropical disturbance.  Rita was the 18th depression to form in the busy 2005 season and became the 10th hurricane and achieved category 5 status and holds the record as the 4th most intense hurricane in the Atlantic basin.  Rita came ashore at Sabine Pass on the 24th as a Category 3 and basically traveled up US-96.  The peak wind gust at the weather station located on R-255 was 100 mph before the instrument failed and we received about 14 inches of rain.  Our power failed before midnight on the 23rd and remained off until the 29th.  We lost about 20 trees in the park and had no damage to the buildings in the park.  We would like to thank our friends and guests who stayed with us for checking on us and helping us recover.

Hurricane Ike

Ike became a tropical storm on September 1 and became the 5th hurricane of the 2008 season.  Ike was expected to become a strong storm reaching category 3 or 4 but never became stronger than a category 2, however Ike developed into a sprawling storm with a wind field 275 miles across and hurricane winds 120 miles across.  Ike was very unpredictable and had landfall potential from Brownsville to Sabine Pass or basically the whole coast of Texas.  Final landfall happened on September 12 at Galveston, Texas.  While Ike was devastating to the Houston/Galveston area the impact at the park was some hurricane and tropical storm wind gusts as well as a power outage of 36 hours.  We lost 2 trees in the park and as with Rita a tremendous amount of leaves and branches down in the park.