As Hurricane Ike bears down on the Texas Gulf Coast, I'm thinking about the suburb known as the Clear Lake area, a mostly affluent zone that includes places like Nassau Bay, League City, Clear Lake City, Seabrook and the other towns around Clear Lake, which feeds into Galveston Bay. The area -- marked with a yellow dot on the illustration above -- is most well known as the home of the NASA Manned Spacecraft Center. The astronauts live in this suburb and when they're talking to "Houston," they're really talking to the Clear Lake NASA HQ. 

I went to high school in this place in the 1970s. Back then there were already vast suburbs that had been carved out of flat, windswept pastures and thick woods. The artery of the locale was NASA Parkway -- then called "NASA Road One" -- which swung past innumerable fast food outlets (some of which provided my first teenage employment) as well as the inaptly named Clear Lake. The suburbs bumped up against the old Galveston Bay towns Seabrook and Kemah, which faced each other on either side of the mouth of Clear Creek. Back then the towns consisted of a row of boatworks, bait shops and waterside bars, and behind them a few blocks of weathered wooden houses.

Even then, people were talking about the problem of subsidence. The ground was sinking, as a result of groundwater being pumped out, mostly for industrial uses but increasingly to water the lawns of the houses in the affluent suburbs. During the years of the 1970s, when I went to high school in the area and returned on vacations from college, I witnessed whole streets being lost to rising water. A storm or minor hurricane would come through and drown a street or a block, and after this happened three or four times the houses or apartments would be torn down, the street would be blocked off, and eventually people just forgot that there once had been property there bought and sold as real estate. This continues to happen to this day, and not just near Galveston Bay. This map shows the worst subsidence during 1995-2000 occured northwest of Houston.

This problem is highlighted during hurricanes, but it's always a problem there.