Chasing the Tide

- [Jay] Funding for this program was provided by... - [Chrissy] The J.W.

Couch Foundation.

- [Jay] Caesar Kleberg Wildlife Research Institute at Texas A&M University, Kingsville.

- [Chrissy] Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi.

- [Jay] The Gulf of Mexico Trust.

- [Chrissy] Threshold Foundation.

- [Jay] Shield-Ayers Foundation.

- [Chrissy] Alice Kleberg Reynolds Foundation.

Gossamer Gear.

Cina Alexander Forgason.

Pam and Will Harte.

- [Jay] Helen Alexander.

Blair and Wade G. Chappell.

Claire Dewar.

Cheryl and Paul Drown.

Deborah and David McBride.

Myfe Moore.

Shirley and Dennis Rich and the Texas Water Foundation.

- [Chrissy] For more information and a complete list of funders, please visit ChasingTheTidesSeries.com (gentle music) - [Jay] The Texas Coast.

- [Chrissy] From the Sabine River to the Rio Grande.

- [Jay] It's diverse.

- [Chrissy] It's industrial.

- [Jay] It's a buffer.

(waves crashing) - [Chrissy] A gateway.

- [Jay] And it's rapidly changing.

- [Chrissy] We're gonna show it to you.

As we walk every inch.

- [Jay] This is "Chasing the Tide."

- [Chrissy] Our journey began over 20 years ago.

I had just finished a field job on Hawaii's Big Island.

I was trapping mosquitoes and banding birds to better understand the impacts of a warming climate.

- [Jay] I was working with a partnership of ranchers and indigenous tribes in the Brazilian Amazon to salvage the most biologically rich place on the planet.

- [Chrissy] He invited me down to Brazil to meet the people he'd been working with for over three years.

It was amazing to see the beauty, but also heartbreaking to see the devastation of such an important ecosystem.

- [Jay] We got married in 2005.

A few years later Sophia was born.

Katherine and Amelia followed.

As our family grew, we instilled our love of the natural world with our kids.

Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.

- It tastes a little funny though.

- It tastes funny?

Yeah?

Like salamander?

- [Sophia] No.

- Uh, blind catfish?

- I don't know what that tastes like, so... - (laughs) Good point.

- [Chrissy] We've also dedicated the past 20 years to conserving Texas wildlife and open spaces.

- [Jay] Chrissy working in wildlife conservation and photography.

- And Jay in land conservation and film.

But one of us has had a little more freedom to escape.

Yes, I'm very excited for Jay - [Jay] Are you excited for Jay?

- I'm a little jealous, yeah, I wish I could go.

- I'm jealous.

- Maybe we could trade off like halfway through.

We can, uh, I can tag in.

While we've logged countless hours traveling the state for various projects and jobs, one place that we, along with most Texans, have overlooked is the Texas Gulf Coast.

- [Jay] For much of the past 500 years, the Texas coast has represented the next frontier and a harbinger of the future.

From indigenous tribes, to the birth of a republic, to the beginnings of an industry that would forever change the world, and new technology that seeks to leave this one behind.

- [Control] Exiting tower, and lift off of CRS-26 Falcon and happy Thanksgiving.

- [Chrissy] Jay and I decided we wanted to see it for ourselves, to try to understand the rapid changes taking place.

So we figured the best way to do that was to walk the seven barrier islands, where the unrelenting force of the Gulf of Mexico meets Texas beaches and communities.

This three-week, 370-mile journey will be difficult, not only for us, but for our entire family.

- We have right about 50 in here.

- [Jay] This is a story about the Texas barrier islands.

It's a story about understanding the past, and adapting to the future.

It's about those who call it home, those making a comeback, and those fighting for survival.

- [Chrissy] This is a story about seeing the beauty in the details and finding meaning in the journey.

It's about the price humanity is willing to pay to live on the front lines of change, and the lengths all of us are willing to go to protect the natural world.

(bright music) - You got sunscreen, right?

- [Chrissy] Yes, the sun will be our greatest enemy.

- [Jay] You have some?

All right, I got some.

- This list is mainly kind of for us like what we need to make sure we have.

- For us, personally.

Yeah.

- Yeah.

Oh, look what I got.

- Ooh, nice.

- Look what I found.

Jalapeo - Just one?

- Just one.

- So wait, is that for me or for everybody?

- [Chrissy] You like hot sauce, you can have it.

- [Katherine] I love hot sauce.

- [Jay] Okay, so this Tents, PFD, raft, et cetera.

- [Katherine] What?

- [Sophia] I thought you could do it - [Jay] There's these tags and everything, you just make sure that you like, you've got it screwed in correctly, and all the safety mechanisms that don't allow it to deploy that you've got all that stuff off of it.

- Does this go around?

- Yeah, it'll go around her.

Yeah.

There you go.

(Jay laughs) You're ready to go.

- You're gonna dance.

- [Jay] Paddle.

- I think just- - Ultra light.

- Does that not work for rain?

- No, just sun.

This is the tent that you and I are gonna carry and we're gonna sleep potentially together in, and then these are two individuals that we can take if we're not getting along.

- Oh, okay.

(chuckles) - I know, I brought those just for backup.

- Oh yeah, mom.

- Amelia, come here.

- Hold on.

(Jay laughs) - So y'all are coming halfway through the trip for some levity, some levity.

- [Chrissy] Yeah, for entertainment.

Will you just walk next to me like that the whole time.

- [Jay] We could probably drone drop her every 40 miles.

- Is there one she can hold on to?

- Yeah, like we'll probably have to get water in Galveston, my guess, like Galveston, Follett's Island, and then Sargent, Matagorda.

We have jugs that we're gonna take with us.

- I have two four gallon.

- [Chrissy] Where are we refilling or buying?

- We're gonna have to buy water in those towns and then carry enough for like three, four days probably in the truck and then you and I will have to carry at most for like two days.

- And it's because it's day one, I think we're gonna get probably a later start than what we think, because of kids and just day one.

- Yeah.

That's fair, so we may not go as far as we thought we would the first day.

- [Chrissy] But we'll make it up.

- Yeah, we'll make it up.

And then there are gonna be areas like Matagorda Island where they can't do cleanups or they don't do cleanups.

- I think I was kind of in denial the whole time.

Like, oh, we've got a year, and then we've got six months.

And then as we got closer and closer, I think I started to panic a little bit.

Because not, I mean, not only have all the logistical things we had to think about for the trip, but like, you know, we've got three kids that we have to make sure are gonna stay alive while we're gone and, you know, are taken care of.

So when we were gone, too, walking on the beach we were also managing a home life, too.

Yeah.

- It's a lot.

- Where do y'all start?

Where do y'all start the walk?

- [Chrissy] Where do we start?

Do you want to look at the map?

- Sure.

- And it's called Sabine Pass between Louisiana and Texas.

So we're all gonna go out Sunday morning, super early.

It's so remote here at the tip of Texas that we have to take an airboat to get to the start.

There are no roads that go there.

So we're gonna go to the very tip up here and then we're gonna start walking this way.

(airboat rumbling) (airboat rumbling continues) (wind rustling) - This is mine.

- Thank you.

(soft music) (soft music continues) - You'll make it home and Dad and I will still be walking.

(waves crashing) (Chrissy laughing) - Take care of your sisters, okay?

It'll come fast.

(soft music) It was hard to leave the girls.

They got pretty emotional at the end.

And then it was time to begin.

370 miles in 21 days.

(adventurous music) (adventurous music continues) - It was harder than I expected, it was hotter.

The terrain varies pretty substantially.

You've got like deep shell and sand and this like peat kind of material, like thick, almost like mulch.

There was no beach to speak of.

So the erosion on this part of the coast is really high.

It's like this, just these ridges of thousands of years of built up shell and there were huge shells and rocks and it certainly wasn't beachy, like you would think of South Padre or Galveston.

Not what we expected to go through.

(adventurous music) - [Chrissy] One thing that was really striking walking down the coast was the erosion that's taking place.

(seagulls squawking) - [Jay] The danger in having no beaches or dunes means that the coast is vulnerable to storm surge, with nothing to keep that flooding from going miles inland.

(adventurous music) It makes for pretty tough walking.

- [Chrissy] The crew was starting to wonder if we were actually going to be able to do this in what turned out to be the hottest year on record.

(adventurous music) - The tide was up pretty high, so we kind of got pushed up and squeezed between the saltwater and the marsh.

And we're on this old shell ridgeline right now, really walking through the marsh.

Not much to speak of as far as sandy beaches.

(majestic music) - [Chrissy] It didn't help that some spots, like Sea Rim State Park, and homes in the area were devastated by Hurricane Rita and Ike in the 2000s.

(waves crashing) - [Jay] Hurricanes are a fact of life for the upper coast.

- [Reporter] Breaking news, Hurricane Harvey, an enormous powerful Category 4 hurricane has made landfall in Texas.

- [Chrissy] Hurricane Harvey in 2017 was yet another devastating blow for the Texas Gulf Coast.

- [Reporter] Wind, rain, and the potential for catastrophic flooding as Hurricane Harvey pounds the Gulf Coast of Texas.

- [Reporter] Well, what you're seeing right now is kind of a traffic jam caused by all the boats that are headed into Port Arthur to rescue people.

Here, about five miles from us, is the largest oil refinery in the United States.

And that has prompted major shutdowns as floodwaters have risen.

- On that day that the storm actually landed, we were told that we could evacuate.

At that time when we were told we could evacuate, our backyard was like the middle of the Gulf Coast.

It seemed like they picked our house up, put it in the Gulf Coast, we were surrounded by water.

So from the very beginning of the storm, we were already stuck at home.

So it started off on 100.

- As we exited the freeway and moved into the communities, we saw the devastation and it was horrific.

- Hurricane Harvey was an experience that I've never experienced before in my, at the time, 54 years, living in Port Arthur, Texas, Southeast Texas.

Taylor, the eldest, walked through the house, just casually doing what we were normally doing.

Went to the garage and maybe 10 minutes later, he said, "Pop," he said, "There's water in the garage."

And immediately the water just channeled through the house.

Immediately when we walked out, the water was here on me.

Water, at that level, it's not forgiving.

You had debris, chemicals floating through the water.

It was an experience that we wouldn't want to experience again.

- [Jay] Since the 1850s, over 66 hurricanes have struck Texas.

And due to climate change, it's likely that they've increased in severity.

The effects of hurricanes on the coast can be devastating for another reason, their impact on the energy industry.

Texas leads the nation in oil and gas production.

If it were a standalone country, the Lone Star State would be the ninth largest oil and gas producing nation in the world.

Houston and Port Arthur make up the largest petrochemical and refining complex on the planet, processing base chemicals for consumer products, diesel, and 33% of America's aviation fuel.

There are over 900,000 energy workers employed throughout the state.

- [Chrissy] For over a century, oil and gas have been a huge economic engine for Texas.

The infrastructure that has been developed over that time isn't going anywhere.

And most of the time, it's been developed on Texas's Gulf Coast.

- [Jay] Port Arthur is home to the largest refinery in North America.

And more than 20 others are located on or near the Texas coast.

That clustering makes them vulnerable to hurricanes.

(upbeat music) - [Chrissy] The oil and gas industry is the source of the largest emissions of greenhouse gases and carbon.

Due to the tidal flow of melting ice caps, the effects of climate change will be felt most strongly on the upper Texas coast, where the industry is based.

Recent studies show sea levels rising faster near Galveston Island than only one other place on the planet.

At this pace, much of the island will be underwater in the next 100 years.

- Environmentally, we've got a fabulous coast.

Economically, we've got an incredibly vibrant economy.

We have really talented people in both sectors, but they're not used to talking to each other.

I'm talking about nature to industry, and that's a conversation they're not used to having.

So I think, first of all, we've got to be open-minded.

We are in a transition.

The Texas coast needs to be the center of the energy transition.

The energy future in 2050 will be very different than it was in 1950.

It's a different world, it's a different environment.

All of us are gonna have to get comfortable with these changes, and change is the hardest thing humans deal with.

- [Jay] But we can't ignore the changes taking place on the Texas coast, and we have to figure out a balance.

(gentle music) - [Chrissy] The marshy area west of Sabine Pass, known as the Chenier Plain, covers an area the size of Massachusetts.

(gentle music) - [Jay] Fresh water, elevated ridges, and dense vegetation have historically acted as the first line of defense for coastal communities against flooding from storms and hurricanes.

On this flat, wet landscape, Chenier ridges provide elevated places for people, wildlife, and livestock to escape flooding.

- [Chrissy] In recent years, storms and hurricanes have seriously tested the flood prevention powers of this complex of beaches, dunes, wetlands, prairie, croplands, and wooded forests.

(gentle music) Cheniers and the associated coastal marshes slow inundation from the Gulf of Mexico, reducing wave energy and protecting inland areas from flooding.

- [Jay] It may look like a swamp, but it's abundant with wildlife and an enormously important ecosystem.

(majestic music) - [Chrissy] Farmers produce most of Texas's rice here, which provides additional freshwater habitat to wetland-dependent species.

- [Jay] It's one of the prime areas for wintering and migrating waterfowl, shorebirds, wading birds, and songbirds in all of North America.

(majestic music) (majestic music continues) - [Chrissy] When the tide is in, many juvenile crabs, shrimp, and fish use the dense cordgrass for protection and feeding, and are then prey for those birds.

- [Jay] But the wetland is losing ground to rising sea levels and a lack of new sediment from rivers.

- The wetlands on the coast, they get their feet wet every day.

That's kind of, you know, the tide comes in and goes out, but they're not supposed to be surrounded by water all the time, and with sea level rise, we'll have that level rising, and if there's no sediment coming in to keep the marsh growing upwards with that, the marsh will drown.

A drowned marsh will have basically dead root systems.

That will give way, and we'll lose essentially the building blocks of the coastal fishery.

As humans, we've built a lot of dams.

On the Mississippi River, on the Missouri, on the Sabine, we've got Toledo Bend up in East Texas, we have, you know, Sam Houston, we have Lake Livingston on the Trinity.

All of those capture sediment, and so they are sediment traps that reduce the sediment flow from what historically has come.

And that's been a long-term trend, and we're seeing the impacts of that with the beach losses, and then now we're gonna add sea level rise to that, and between those two things, our marshes are threatened, our beaches are threatened, and much of the low-lying area of the coast, I'd say there's upwards of six million acres on the Texas coast that are endangered by those two factors.

- [Chrissy] Over the past century, we've altered this place.

With the construction of the Gulf Intracostal Waterway in 1930, the overland freshwater flows that used to drain from the upper part of the watershed to the lower part, were cut off, leading to the elimination of almost half of salt bayou's watershed, and a decline in overall biodiversity.

- [Jay] The community, along with federal and state partners, rallied after Hurricane Ike in 2008 devastated the region and began what would become one of the largest coastal restoration projects in the country.

- [Chrissy] New dunes and beaches could give the marsh a chance to flourish again.

The last 15 years of work to restore this ecosystem could help the people, communities, and wildlife of this region stand their ground.

- [Jay] It might also simply postpone a managed retreat from the coastline.

As we learned from this nearly month-long journey, most Texans living on the coast prefer to fight.

But as we made our way down the coast, we encountered a roadblock in the form of construction.

(tense music) - [Chrissy] The beach restoration project at McFaddin National Wildlife Refuge was adding 17 miles of beach and dunes.

But that construction meant no one could walk the beach, and our support and camera crew couldn't drive it.

We hadn't anticipated this kind of setback just a few miles into our journey.

- [Jay] To build the beach and dunes back, sand is dredged from the ocean floor a few miles out into the Gulf and piped ashore.

- [Chrissy] When it's done, it'll provide more coastal protection and recreation.

- [Jay] But for now, it meant we couldn't walk a big section of the coast.

- To only make 12 miles, day one, I think you were panicking a little bit.

- Yeah, I was worried and somewhat demoralized.

- Yeah.

- Because you spent so much time planning and then to get to the first day and achieve half of your goal of what you're supposed to be doing every day for 20 days, I felt like all of a sudden, the train was completely off the tracks and everything that we had worked for and planned for was in jeopardy.

Next time on "Chasing the Tide."

It's been raining and lightning the last four or five hours.

- We are responsible for the largest public works infrastructure project in the history of the United States.

- Yet the proposed coastal barrier wouldn't necessarily protect us from the four or five.

- [Jay] Funding for this program was provided by... - [Chrissy] The J.W.

Couch Foundation.

- [Jay] Caesar Kleberg Wildlife Research Institute at Texas A&M University, Kingsville.

- [Chrissy] Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi.

- [Jay] The Gulf of Mexico Trust.

- [Chrissy] Threshold Foundation.

- [Jay] Shield-Ayers Foundation.

- [Chrissy] Alice Kleberg Reynolds Foundation.

Gossamer Gear.

Cina Alexander Forgason.

Pam and Will Harte.

- [Jay] Helen Alexander.

Blair and Wade G. Chappell.

Claire Dewar.

Cheryl and Paul Drown.

Deborah and David McBride.

Myfe Moore.

Shirley and Dennis Rich and the Texas Water Foundation.

- [Chrissy] For more information and a complete list of funders, please visit ChasingTheTidesSeries.com