PART VI: CONCLUDING REMARKS 
34. Alicia was a minimal category 3 (Safir-Simpson scale) hurricane 
with maximum winds of only 115 mph, yet it was the second costliest hurricane 
ever to strike the United States. Considering that Alicia was not particu- 
larly severe and most of the damage occurred in Houston, well away from the 
coast, the disaster potential of a large, intense hurricane making landfall 
in a heavily populated coastal region is clearly evident. That Alicia was 
not a more costly storm can be at least partially attributed to the existence 
of the seawall at Galveston built in the aftermath of the disastrous 1900 
hurricane. Other coastal areas affected by the storm were spared extensive 
damage because they were sparsely populated and/or consisted of a high pro- 
portion of dwellings constructed to withstand the effects of storms and surges. 
35. The correlation of the survival of coastal structures with measured 
surge levels provides a valuable data base for establishment or refinement of 
standards and guidelines for construction in high-risk coastal zones. As a 
consequence, the acquisition of reliable, quantitative data, particularly 
hydrographs, is invaluable in delineating storm conditions under which coastal 
structures survive or fail. Moreover, because numerical surge models are 
themselves time-stepping procedures, improvements of the models are highly 
dependent upon time series data. 
36. As mentioned earlier in this report, Alicia was a particularly 
severe test of the ability of the field team to quickly mobilize and reach the 
predicted vicinity of landfall; the procedures developed as part of this 
research effort proved to be well suited to the requirements of rapid deploy- 
ment. The surge gage, deployed in Baytown, Texas (Site T-14) early in the 
deployment phase when Alicia was predicted to make landfall in the Corpus 
Christi/Port Lavaca area, demonstrated the soundness of the site-selection 
procedure; whereby a small number of widely separated sites were initially 
occupied, with the more likely reaches of shoreline being filled as the storm 
neared the coast. 
37. A particular shortcoming uncovered during the post-Alicia survey 
was the length of time before retrieval of some of the hydrographs. The 
necessity for estimating the time of peak surge by means of a numerical model 
for these hydrographs was caused by substantial clock errors that existed 
prior to the arrival of the storm and were compounded by the lengthy interval 
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