Inside the Moon
PlyWooden Boat Festival A4
Fishing A7
Plein Art in Port A A9
The
Issue 601
Island Moon
The voice of The Island since 1996
October 22, 2015
Around The Island By Dale Rankin editor@islandmoon.com The currents are ripping, the tides are abiding, the sharks are sharking, and the narcs are narcing (see the Police Blotter). There’s a lot going on Around The Island even in this traditionally laid back time of year. The tides have been finding their way to the base of the dunes all along our shores and in some cases the rapidity with which they have rolled in have left motorists stranded in water and in need of help to get out. On several occasions last week, especially along the seawall where the beach is narrow and relatively low, the water levels rose from low to high in less than ten minutes working around the tires of vehicles that had been high and dry all day. As of this writing mid-week the Weather Wonks are calling for rain through the weekend. Keep your rain gear handy.
Shark in the Canal! A few weeks ago we had over 400,000 hits on our Facebook page theislandmoonnewspaper on our photo of a Hammerhead shark swimming in the Skinny Water along the beach. Then last week, right on cue as Sharkathon was underway, this fellow, a Bonnet Shark, was photographed swimming in the Suntan Canal. Photographs of sharks in the canal system are rare but that doesn’t mean they haven’t been there all along. But that doesn’t stop us from running a headline that says “Shark in the Canal!”
Rumble on the Landing Strip
Port A Old Town Parade A11
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Ten Years Out Packery Channel System Healthy Frequency for dredging less than expected
By Dale Rankin
By Dale Rankin For years two types of businesses have topped the wish list for Padre Island residents, a breakfast diner and a grocery store but up until now, like the weather, everyone was talking about it, but no one was doing anything about it. But developer and new Island resident Mohsin Rasheed has set out to do something about both.
On Tuesday the Corpus Christi City Council approved what will likely be the last $350,000 annual expenditure for the monitoring of Packery Channel by Texas A&M University Corpus Christi.
Rasheed said this week he is moving forward with plans to bring two separate commercial and retail developments to The Island which would include a Denny’s Restaurant, a Sprouts Farmers Market, a Dairy Queen, a Jack in the Box, a Wells Fargo Bank and a 75-room Microtel. Rasheed, who said this week he is selling the three shopping centers he currently owns in Houston where he has lived for 22 years and builds “two to three” shopping centers each year.
The council, following the lead of the Island Strategic Action Committee, told TAMCC officials that while the expectation is that scientists from the University will continue to monitor the water levels, jetties, and economic impact of the channel, the $350,000 figure, paid for from the Island Tax Increment Refinance Zone (TIRZ), is too high and needs to be reduced by next fall when the contract approved Tuesday will expire.
Prior to the 2014 contract scientists from TAMCC monitored only the beach adjacent to the channel’s mouth and the channel itself to its convergence with the Intracoastal
Developer Looking to Add Food Store and Retail to The Island Sprouts, Denny’s, and hotel part of plans
In 2005 when Packery Channel was opened plans and funding were put in place to do maintenance dredging every year. Ten years out the channel has been re-dredged only three times with the latest being in 2014 when sand left behind by Hurricane Ike in 2008 was removed.
The channel was originally dredged to fourteen feet and the system has proven itself robust with some annual shoaling near the mouth of the channel in the summer months but, in most years, the sand accumulated near the channel’s mouth is cleared by the north winter winds which move the water out taking the sand with it. However, after Hurricane Ike the sand was trapped between the sandbar at the Gulf entrance and the basin near the entrance to Lake Padre and had to be removed. The problem was made worse by the failure to dredge the outermost 600 feet of the channel during the two previous dredge projects. According to information presented to the ISAC in its annual reviews of the TAMCC contracts, that failure was the result of loosely worded dredging contracts which specified only how much sand was to be removed from the channel and did not specify which portion of the channel was to be dredged. In the interest of economy the dredging companies dredged only the area immediately adjacent to the beach and did not reach the more expensive 600 feet at the mouth of the channel.
Live Music A18
“There is hardly any retail on The Island,” Rasheed said this week. “Myself and my wife Lori want to retire there and help it develop.” Rasheed has the experience to do that with years of business development and operational experience in Sacramento, California where he owned strip centers which included Wells Fargo locations and 38 restaurants including Denny’s, Jack in the Box, and Long John Silvers. He said this week that he has purchased a 1.72-acre tract on Merida Drive, near the corner of Palmira, where he plans to put the three-story Microtel hotel, a branch of the Wyndham Group, and Dairy Queen.
The iron gates designed to seal the entryway from Packery Channel into Lake Padre have rusted away over the years and are now unusable. The system to seal the gate in case of an oncoming hurricane was an unwieldly one which called for the gates to be lifted with a crane and inserted into these vertical slots. Current plans call for the passageway to be widened to 50 feet. Waterway at the JFK Causeway. Beginning in 2014 and continuing in the contract approved this week, they also now monitor Lake Padre and the Main Canal of the Island system to the ICW in anticipation of the opening of the Park Road/SPID Water Exchange Bridge which would connect Lake Padre to the Island system allowing for water circulation from the Gulf of Mexico to the Laguna Madre. As part of that project the water gate between Packery Channel and Lake Padre would be widened. There are currently no dredging projects scheduled for Packery Channel and officials from TAMCC told the city council on Tuesday they will search for grants to replace any cuts in funding from the Island TIRZ
He also owns a 4.65-acre tract on SPID just north of Seashore Middle Academy where he has applied for a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Permit to build a 25,000 squarefoot strip center which would include the Wells Fargo Bank, the Sprouts store, the Denny’s restaurant, and a Jack in the Box on which he said he has already begun architectural drawings. “We expect to hear back on the permits in the first week of November,” he said. “We will have to fill in the land to get it to at least nine feet above sea level.” According to maps from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) released late last year the adjacent intersection of Whitecap and SPID is eight feet above sea level. The land owned by Rasheed does not reach all the way to Whitecap where
Development continued on A6
A little Island history
After a delay of a week due to an equipment problem crews are installing rumble strips along State Highway 361 between Packery Channel and Port Aransas. This behemoth - not the kind in Job 40 verse 15 “Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee; he eateth grass as an ox;” no this behemoth doesn’t eat grass but he stamps his iron foot and leaves an indention in the pavement which alerts drivers that they are swerving into oncoming traffic. The work is part of what will eventually be $14 million worth of work by the Texas Department of Transportation to improve this busy roadway which is the scene for regular accidents in the busy summer season. The next step is to add passing lanes which as of this writing is set to go out to bids by the end of the year. Work to widen the road going into Port Aransas is currently underway. We will have more on the growing pains which Port A is experiencing in our next issue. In the meantime say hello if you see us Around The Island.
Islander’s Marine Uncle Gets Arlington Burial 72 Years After His Death
By Dale Rankin On the morning of November 20, 1943 U.S. Marine Corporal James Dimitri Otto was part of the second assault wave that went ashore on Beach Red 3 of the Tarawa Atoll. It wasn’t to be an easy landing.
heat of the battle there was little time for a proper burial and Lt. Otto and other marines were hurriedly buried in what in military parlance was known as the 8th Marines’ Cemetery #2. It
The first wave went in at low tide and their landing craft wouldn’t clear the coral reefs, which were covered with barbed wire and mines, and they had to wade several hundred yards through waist deep water under fire from the 4500 Japanese troops that were dug into more than one hundred pill boxes and concrete bunkers. By the time the second wave went ashore the Japanese guns had their range and causalities were heavy. It is not known exactly how Lt. Otto was killed but sometime early on the first day of the three-day battle it is believed he was hit by artillery fire on the beach. In the
was eventually renamed Cemetery #27 and a memorial plaque was erected and inscribed with the names of the men who were reportedly buried there. But while there was a monument, when investigators went back to the site at the end of the war they found no remains; but the U.S. Marine Corps has a policy that no marine gets left behind and they are serious about that. So fast forward to June 26, 2015 when an organization called History Flight, Inc. notified the Defense POW/ MIA that they had unearthed a burial trench on the island and recovered the remains of thirty-five marines who had been buried in Cemetery #27. The dental records of one of the marines buried there matched those of U.S. Marine Corporal James Dimitri Otto.
Physical evidence from the siteOtto's canteen
Soon after a phone call was made to another Island, this one generally peaceful and located along the Gulf of
U.S. Marine Corporal James Dimitri Otto Mexico and the home of Bob Otto. The call was from the Pentagon, more specifically the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency Laboratory and Bob was informed that the organization had found the remains of his long-lost uncle and they would like to come to his home on Padre Island and explain in detail what they had found. It
History continued on A2