CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — Post Hurricane Hanna damage continues to be seen throughout the Coastal Bend. While most of it can be seen in yards, buildings and homes, there was only one casualty of the storm at the Corpus Christi Marina.
If you were out this morning near the Shoreline Marina, you may have seen Brandon Upton taking a dive in the water. He's the local owner of Sea Tow's -- a company that's like the triple-a for boats.
Efficiency is a must for Sea Tows, since they've been hired by an insurance company to not only assess the damage done to the only sailboat sunk at the downtown Marina, but also to refloat the vessel.
"The storm surge on the boat came up and the hull was breached on the starboard side, rubbing on the bulkhead here," Upton said. "To limit exposure, and damages to the environment as well as the vessel and preserve vessel value."
Upton said the sunken catamaran is worth in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. It was the only casualty of the surge caused by Hurricane Hanna. Members of the local Coast Guard showed up to lend a hand.
"We're just here to monitor this operation, sort of supervise it, and see if there's any oil discharge into the water and to just make sure that's cleaned up properly," Shawn Stanley with the U.S. Coast Guard said.
While Upton inspected the boat underwater, another employee was using pads to soak up the small amounts of oil leaking from the vessel. Upton said this isn't the only boat the company has had to work on since Hanna.
He added that the storm surge could have caused more damage to vessels if landfall would have been closer to us.
"This is our fourth vessel now post Hanna, thankfully the only vessel that went down in this Marina downtown was this one right here," Upton said. "It's unfortunate but at the same time, I think we dodged a huge bullet with the storm surge. It got really close to causing havoc on a lot of vessels but we didn't reach that point, thankfully."
For the latest updates on coronavirus in the Coastal Bend, click here.
For the latest updates on Hurricane Hanna, click here.