Despite a downpour, nearly every seat in the board room of an office building in the Houston suburb of Clear Lake was occupied on the morning of January 21. Seated at a conference table littered with coffee cups and Diet Coke cans, board members of the Gulf Coast Protection District shuffled through documents in preparation for a key discussion and vote.
After a short executive session, the board’s 11 members unanimously voted for contractors to begin the preliminary engineering and design work for the Galveston Bay Barrier System – commonly referred to as the Ike Dike, in a nod to 2008’s Hurricane Ike. This officially started the process for the wildly ambitious and possibly unworkable project aimed at protecting Galveston Island and surrounding areas from the next great hurricane. The two master design contracts were awarded in November.
The district, established by the Texas Legislature in 2021, oversees the Coastal Texas Project – a nearly $35 billion planned system of barriers, gates, dunes, ecosystem restoration and replenished beaches covering the entire, 367-mile-long Texas Gulf Coast – along with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Texas General Land Office. The largest portion of that funding – just over $31 billion – is meant for the Galveston Bay Barrier System, including a 82-foot-tall, two-mile-long gate at the mouth of the bay.
Since its conception in 2008, advocates have called the project, with its giant gates and heightened dunes, the best rejoinder to the threat of extreme weather in Galveston. Critics of the project, however, note that it is decades from completion, and federal funding has been slow to arrive. They point to other, natural solutions to help protect Galveston Bay and what they say are flaws in the proposed barrier’s design; it may, for example, protect only against mid-level storms.
Everyone, regardless of their position on the Ike Dike, is daunted by the prospect of a Category 4 or 5 hurricane barreling toward the island. It could come this summer, or in 10 years. It could level much of Galveston, as did an unnamed hurricane in 1900, or bypass the city completely. Rob Thomas, the protection district’s chief program manager, told Public Health Watch he was reassured by one thing: The barrier is one step closer to construction.
“Our number one concern is getting this built before the next storm,” Thomas said. “Unfortunately, we don’t control when the storm comes, so we’ll do our very best to go as fast as safely possible.”
Galveston Bay Barrier System
A big idea with little time
Hurricane Ike devastated communities stretching from the Louisiana coastline to Kenedy County, Texas, including Galveston Island. In response, climate researchers, largely led by marine and coastal scientist Bill Merrell with Texas A&M University, began developing a plan to protect the island from storm surge.
The plan mirrored the gates and barriers built to shield the Netherlands from flooding in the late 1990s. In 2015, the Corps of Engineers partnered with the General Land Office to begin researching the feasibility of the Coastal Texas Project. The agencies finished their study in 2021, finding that “vital resources critical to the social, economic, and environmental welfare of the nation are at risk. Historically and currently, the Texas coast is vulnerable to tropical storms and hurricanes that take human life, flood homes and businesses, and damage coastal ecosystems. The damages from hurricanes and tropical storms could become more severe as wind speed is projected to increase with higher sea levels and rising ocean temperatures.”
“This will potentially be the largest engineering project in the world,” said Jim Blackburn, a Houston environmental lawyer, a professor at Rice University and a consultant for the protection district.
The Corps will build the system in seven segments, including gates, barriers and seawall improvements. The design contracts approved in November will cover construction of a two-mile-long gate system stretching between Galveston Island and the Bolivar Peninsula, and a beach and dune system on Bolivar and West Galveston beaches – assigned to Jacobs Engineering Group Inc. and HDR Inc, respectively. The board vote in January directed the two contractors to begin working on specific tasks.
Blackburn said the system could take at least 20 years to complete. In the meantime, Galveston Island is mostly defenseless from a storm. Delta Works, the over $7 billion project in the Netherlands, took just over 40 years to construct.
Toni Addison, the Corps’ mega projects division chief for Galveston, said the agency and the protection district are looking for ways to accelerate the timeline. But the project’s design phase alone will take a couple of years, and a staggering amount of funding must be secured to make the full project happen.
Accounting for inflation, the Corps says, the Coastal Texas Project’s ultimate cost will be about $57 billion rather than $34.4 billion, as was estimated in 2022.
To date, the Texas Legislature has appropriated $950 million to the protection district for coastal projects. But most of this funding went to the Sabine Pass to Galveston Bay Coastal Storm Risk Management Project, which includes a 26.7-mile levee system in Orange County. Just $220 million went to the Coastal Texas Project, including the Galveston Bay Barrier, coastwide ecosystem restoration and South Padre beach nourishment, according to the district’s 2024 annual report.
The federal government, which is committed to cover 65 percent of the Ike Dike’s total cost, contributed only $500,000 in 2024 and another $5 million in early 2026.
“The real problem is money at this point,” said Bob Stokes, president of the Galveston Bay Foundation, an environmental group. “They’re going to need $2 billion a year in federal money for 20 straight years, and they’ve been able to maybe get $5.5 million at this point.”
In a statement to Public Health Watch, U.S. Rep. Randy Weber, a Galveston Republican and an avid supporter of the barrier, said, “These efforts take time because they must be engineered correctly, built to last and be responsible with taxpayer dollars. We live in a reality of hurricanes, storm surges and flooding, and we know the importance of getting major coastal protection projects done the right way.”
Thomas, from the protection district, said funding has been coming as needed. The district requests appropriations every two years from the state Legislature for work it will do in that biennium. Requests to the federal government are made annually.
“This isn’t uncommon, the way we’re funded now,” Thomas said. “It’s more uncommon to get all the money at once. We’ll just need more in the future; obviously, construction is very expensive.”
Will it be enough?
Galveston Bay is the seventh-largest estuary in the United States, home to marshes, oyster reefs, wetlands and hundreds of marine and wildlife species. The bay’s mix of fresh and saltwater is a perfect breeding ground and nursery for migratory birds, shellfish and certain fish.
“However, the bay’s ecological significance also makes it extremely vulnerable,” said Arsum Pathak, director of adaptation and coastal resilience for the National Wildlife Federation.
In a 2024 report on climate resiliency in Galveston, Pathak emphasized the impacts of sea-level rise, high-tide flooding, subsidence and development on the future of Galveston Island. She expressed disapproval for “hard infrastructure” projects versus nature-based solutions, like stabilizing coastal edges to protect against storms or expanding wetlands, which can slow storm surges.
The Coastal Texas Project includes coastwide marsh restoration and oyster reef creation, and the addition of sediment to the beaches at South Padre Island. But Pathak said this is a small portion of the total project cost, and more could be spent on such measures.
While the Galveston Bay Barrier System is estimated to cost $31.2 billion, the coastalwide ecosystem restoration and the South Padre Island nourishment project together cost one-tenth of that amount: $3.18 billion.
“In the end, with a project like [the Coastal Texas Project] you are just chasing water forever,” Pathak said. “You’re not structurally changing anything, you’re not building true resilience, like changing policies to build in a floodplain and managing natural features. How much of that Band-Aid is going to stay when the water keeps rising?”
As a federal agency, the Army Corps is limited in what it is authorized to construct, Blackburn said. The Corps can only analyze the economic and environmental aspects of any project for up to 50 years. This, Blackburn said, means the agency can only design for a 50-year storm or smaller. A 50-year storm is an event that has a 2% chance of occurring in any given year. A 100-year storm has a 1% chance.
As a result of climate change, experts predict, 100-year storms will become more frequent.
“We’re not quite sure what a 50-year storm of the future will look like, but it will likely be very different from the old 50-year storm,” Blackburn said. “But then all the design is based on the old 50-year storm.”
Simply put, because of Corps criteria, the project is designed to protect against Category 2 storms at most. Category 2 storms have sustained winds between 96 and 110 mph and storm surge between four and eight feet. After meandering through the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, Ike made landfall near Galveston on September 13, 2008. It killed more than 100 people and caused nearly $30 billion in damage in the United States, mostly in Texas. Ike’s winds were classified as Category 2, its storm surge Category 4.
Stokes, of the Galveston Bay Foundation, offered a warning: “We should all be asking ourselves this: If we build this thing, will it actually even work for the big storm?”