BOLIVAR PENINSULA, Texas - If you drive down the main road on the Bolivar Peninsula and pull into a place called Pat's Tires, you'll find a friendly woman who'll tell you all about Highway 87.
"I've been living here for 38 years on the peninsula," Maryann Rogers said. "And we used to have a Highway 87 that went all the way to Sabine."
But the road that once connected weekend vacationers in Beaumont and Port Arthur to locales like Crystal Beach, now comes to an abrupt end on Bolivar Peninsula.
Much of Highway 87 was swallowed by the expanding Gulf shoreline during Tropical Storm Allison in 2001 and Hurricane Ike in 2008.
What's left of the low-lying road running along the spine of the peninsula still frequently floods, an especially hazardous prospect during tropical storms and hurricanes.
When 87 goes under, the only other route off the peninsula is the Bolivar Ferry. And when the ferry simultaneously shuts down due to stormy weather, people on the west end of the Bolivar Peninsula are trapped.
That's why Galveston County officials have for years pressed the state highway department to raise part of Highway 87.
The road would still flood during severe storms, but just a couple of feet of elevation would give residents in the area more time to evacuate as hurricanes approach.
"You need to have enough time for people to make a decision about whether to evacuate," said Ryan Dennard, a Galveston County commissioner. "Right now, we literally have to give people notice to evacuate from Bolivar when there's a storm down in Cuba.
"That's impractical," he said. "And if you have a quick developing storm in the Gulf before you had a chance to get out, it could become a public safety issue."
Tropical Storm Bill shut down the highway for a couple of days, blocking the road with not only water but also debris that wasn't cleared until Wednesday.
The ferry kept running, so the peninsula wasn't cut off. But county officials pounced on the storm as a prime opportunity to press the Texas Department of Transportation to fund the long-discussed proposal to raise Highway 87.
By coincidence, Galveston County officials happened to have a meeting with TXDOT officials scheduled for the day after Tropical Storm Bill rolled ashore.
So they showed state highway officials photographs of the debris covering the road that's the only land connection between the peninsula and the mainland.
Mark Henry, the Galveston County judge, pointedly emphasized that Highway 87 was the only state highway closed by the tropical storm.
"They understand that it needs to be raised," Henry said. "It's strictly a funding issue. You know, for a decade TXDOT has been underfunded. They can't even maintain their roads, much less build new roads. We fully understand that. But this is a life safety issue at some point, depending on the severity of the storm."
The project to raise parts of Highway 87 would cost an estimated $21 million, although that figure will almost certainly change as labor and material costs fluctuate.
State and county officials have basically been haggling over who should pay most of the tab. County officials have said TXDOT would like them to foot 80% of the bill.
"But our position is, 'It's your road,'" Henry said. "It's a state road. The county should not be asked to be paying the majority of raising your road. And so, they have committed to going back and asking if they can figure out a different way to fund that project and get Highway 87 raised up."
Highway projects take years to come to fruition, but a state lawmaker representing the peninsula said what he heard during the meeting led him to hope the highway will be elevated within the next three years.
"I think we need to realize that public safety is always at the forefront of everything we do," said State Rep. Wayne Faircloth, R-Dickinson, whose district includes the peninsula.
"Unfortunately, this is a case where we do not need to be reactive. We need to be proactive and we need to go forward and make sure that we can provide for the safety and protection of our citizens -- and even the citizens who visit Galveston County."
About 3,000 people live on the peninsula, Dennard said, but the population swells with visitors during summer vacation months and on weekends.
"We're optimistic," Henry said. "Sometimes optimism is all you've got."
