GALVESTON, Texas — Nearly a week after a resurgent Hurricane Beryl slammed into Texas, with power still spotty in Galveston, Nick Guide vacuumed water from the seaside inn his family has run since 1911. Blue tarps covered much of the peeling roof. Guide picked up cleaning shifts for hotel and restaurant staff who couldn’t afford to lose shifts to the prolonged power outage.
The Fourth of July weekend was meant to mark the start of a lucrative tourist season for the popular resort’s hospitality industry, but a week later, with only a few dozen visitors on its usually packed beaches, Guide felt an urgent need to get the message out that Galveston, Texas, was reopened.
“We’ve dealt with storms in late August and September,” Guide said, “but when a storm comes in early July, it’s a different story.”
Located about 50 miles southeast of Houston, Galveston has weathered numerous natural disasters, most notably the devastating hurricane of 1900 that killed thousands at a time when Galveston Island was emerging as the state’s jewel. More recently, Hurricane Ike raged in 2008, flooding the historic downtown with a 20-foot storm surge and causing more than $29 billion in damages.
But Houston neighbors accustomed to storms were caught off guard by Beryl’s sudden arrival. The Category 1 hurricane struck early on the calendar, halting the island’s tourism-based economy at a time when local restaurants were hoping to boost revenue from an influx of beachgoers. Despite widespread power outages, businesses and residents are hanging in there.
Just west of hard-hit Jamaica Beach, Way West Grill & Pizzeria was still without power Saturday afternoon, leaving owner Jake Vincent in limbo. He’d been told power would be restored by July 19, but he was hopeful it might come back sooner.
The loss destroyed all of their inventory, including a truckload of mozzarella cheese, an eight-foot box of french fries and an estimated 3,000 pounds of pepperoni.
Vincent had hoped that this year would finally bring a “bright light” to the family-run restaurant he founded in 2018, but he’s no longer hopeful. He said the majority of annual sales are concentrated in the three summer months, and “tourism is probably over for this season.”
“That complicates things,” he says. “You have to save all your summer money to get through the winter.”
Downed power lines and orange construction cones were visible along the road that links tourist-filled beach seafood shacks to colorful short-term rentals on the west end, and workers from CenterPoint, a Houston-area power company, sweated on lifts as they worked to restore power to line after line.
With the power still out Saturday morning, Greg Alexander shoveled debris to the edge of a road in his Jamaica Beach neighborhood, where water was pouring in through the windows of his home, even though he was already sleeping on the balcony level of his home, as Beryl’s crosswinds blew rain onto his bed.
For Alexander, it’s just part of life here: His family moved to Galveston permanently in 2017 after Hurricane Harvey dumped 38 inches of water on their Lake City home. Without electricity, he says, “I appreciate the air conditioning in my car more than ever.”
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He has no plans to leave, and the ordeal will only make the community stronger, he said.
“The people of the West End are different from the rest of the population,” he said.
Steve Bloom and Debra Pease were still without power Saturday, but they were finding heat elsewhere. Bloom said he’d already booked a hotel in Houston this week so his daughter could use their beach house in Galveston. They planned to spend the first night in Galveston and then sleep in nonrefundable rooms the rest of the week.
Steve Bloom, 72, said he’d never seen a hurricane come in as quickly or intensify as Beryl, but joked that just one factor could force him to move from the island where he was born and raised.
“If they demolished all these houses, we’d be in the front row and property values would probably double or triple,” he said, before clarifying, “No, I hope that doesn’t happen.”
For Ann Beam and her husband, who come down from San Antonio every July to celebrate her birthday, the aftermath was far worse than the hurricane itself.
After the storm passed on Monday, they opened the windows and enjoyed the nice breeze, but Tuesday night, she said, there was a “horde of mosquitoes,” as hundreds of the bugs infested their home and they slept in their car with the air conditioner on full blast.
She said they also purchased a wading pool to cool off in before the power was restored Thursday night.
“We just tried to look at it as an adventure,” she says. “Every day was a new hellish day.”
