CRYSTAL BEACH, Texas — Wednesday night was tense for Wendy Dozier and Scott Wright. The Crystal Beach residents rode out Hurricane Laura away from their stilted coastal home. Dozier was inland staying with friends, while Wright went to be with his son and grandchildren in nearby Kemah.
The couple, who has lived in Crystal Beach full-time since 2018, expected the worst, as weather reports augured doom for the tiny coastal town on the Bolivar Peninsula. Their home was built to withstand up to a Category 3 hurricane, and Laura was upgraded to a Category 4 Wednesday afternoon as it hurtled toward the Golden Triangle area of the Texas coast. Headline writers all over the country seized on the National Hurricane Center’s warnings of an “unsurvivable storm surge.”
Wright was initially planning to stay but conceded the Weather Channel convinced him to leave the coast. Wednesday evening, as Wright helped line the windows of his son’s house with corrugated metal, he worried about the home he and Dozier have owned since 2013.
“We were expecting at least to not have a garage downstairs,” Wright said. “And if it would have gotten as big as they were predicting, maybe even not a house. We thought one of the older houses might collapse and damage ours.”
At around 11 p.m., the storm lurched east toward Southwest Louisiana, sparing the area the worst of the damage. Most of South Texas experienced 50-60-mph wind, a far cry from the 150 mph winds the storm brought to bear at landfall.
Though many cities, including Crystal Beach, lost power in Laura’s wake, the damage was minimal. Standing water occupied the yards in some of the low-lying homes throughout the Bolivar Peninsula, and trash was festooned around the surrounding landscape. Rocks covered the roads into Peninsula, but they were quickly cleared early Thursday morning.
Many of the area’s residents have yet to return to their homes, so Dozier and Wright are checking in with neighbors.
“We dodged a huge bullet,” Dozier said. “It was nerve-racking. I was anxious up until I saw where it was going into Louisiana. Then I knew we’d be OK here.”
Beaumont-based attorney Mark Faggard said he’s been hearing from friends in Southwest Louisiana who weren’t so fortunate.
At a friend’s house near the Texas-Louisiana border, “a tree fell on his roof and it trapped his wife in one of the rooms,” he said. “They had to cut her out with a chainsaw. It was really bad.”
Faggard, who was staying in Lake Conroe near The Woodlands during Laura’s landfall, said he was surprised by the lack of damage the storm brought, even considering its late-night directional shift.
“Even though we were on the west side of the storm and we were in such close proximity to the eyewall, I’m still shocked that there wasn’t worse damage in Beaumont.”
Neighbors who checked on his house told him everything looked fine, aside from a few fallen tree branches.
“The Golden Triangle area just really got lucky, and I hate it for Southwest Louisiana,” he said. “But you know Texas is going to help Louisiana get though this.
“Storms are a way of life in this neck of the woods,” he continued. “But they never get easier.”