Beach Bonanza on Galveston's Seaside Wonderland, or Surf's Up on Galveston's New Beach, or Fun in the Sun on Galveston's New Beach Page: 4 of 8
This text is part of the collection entitled: Randy Mallory Papers and was provided to The Portal to Texas History by the UNT Libraries Special Collections.
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trapped sand then piles up on East Beach, the island's easternmost tip.
(McComb, p. 57-61, 205; Cartwright, p. 15)
To counter the natural west-to-east transfer of beach, work crews now
haul sand during the winter from East Beach and spread it back onto eroding
sections of the 51-block-long new beach. "All along, engineers said we'd lose a
certain percentage of sand each year," notes the Park Board's Wendy Dehnert.
"We expect to put back an average of seven percent (about 50,000 cubic yards) of
sand annually to keep the beach nice."
Ironically, maintaining the beach means fighting not only the forces of
nature, but also the city's signature shoreline feature--the seawall.
As early as the late 1800s, city leaders worried about beach erosion, David
G. McComb writes in his authoritative book, Galveston: A History. Early records
show a natural loss of 300 feet of beach from 1838 to 1897. (McComb, p. 205) The
great hurricane of 1900 pushed the beach back another several hundred feet
(McComb, p. 6) and flooded the island, killing at least 6,000 people. (Cartwright,
p. 5) (A panoramic, multi-image documentary on that catastrophe shows year-
round at Galveston's harborside Pier 21.)
To avert future calamities, in 1902 Galveston began erecting a massive
wall 17 feet high. (Cartwright, p. 15, p. 190) On the island side of the wall, crews
spent six years hauling in an estimated 11 million cubic yards of sand to raise the
city's elevation an average of 13 feet. On the Gulf side of the wall at its base,
workers dumped four-foot-square granite blocks to keep waves from
undermining the structure. (Cartwright, p. 189-90) Expanded in the early 1960s
to more than 10 miles, the seawall now protects fully one-third of the barrier
island.
But how do you protect the seawall and its beach? Over a period of
decades, the Army Corps of Engineers drove rows of wooden pilings into the
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Mallory, Randy. Beach Bonanza on Galveston's Seaside Wonderland, or Surf's Up on Galveston's New Beach, or Fun in the Sun on Galveston's New Beach, text, June 1997; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1924070/m1/4/?q=%221838~%22: accessed August 15, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; crediting UNT Libraries Special Collections.