Hurricane Ike hit the Texas coast on Sept. 13, 2008, and the Category 2 storm's mark on League City has not faded.

Ike made landfall at 2:10 a.m. near Galveston with sustained winds of 110 mph, KPRC reported. The storm damaged 24,165 structures across Galveston County and caused an estimated $29.5 billion in damage nationwide. It killed 113 people in the United States.

In League City, the power went out. It stayed out. CenterPoint Energy called it the largest outage in the company's history and said restoration could take four weeks or more, according to a Wikipedia account of the storm's effects in Texas. Residents who had evacuated were allowed to return on Sept. 16, 2008, under a dusk-until-dawn curfew and told to bring enough food for two weeks. Two League City residents died of natural causes tied indirectly to the storm.

Across the region, between 1.2 million and 1.5 million people evacuated before landfall. Storm surge reached the highest level recorded on Galveston Island since 1915 and set a record at Sabine Pass at 14.24 feet. On Bolivar Peninsula, 3,266 homes were destroyed.

Will Wright, interim executive director of the Galveston Historical Foundation, told Houston Public Media on Sept. 13 that the storm's scars remain visible in water line markers on buildings, plaques bolted to surviving homes and tree sculptures on Galveston Island's east end carved from trees the hurricane killed.

"I knew my house was likely submerged, which it was," Wright said. "But I couldn't get back for a couple weeks."

The anniversary falls during the 2026 hurricane season, which through mid-September had not produced a hurricane threatening the Texas coast. After Hurricane Rita's chaotic 2005 evacuation, the Houston-Galveston Area Council (H-GAC) and 13 counties built coordinated evacuation zone and route maps. Francis Rodriguez, H-GAC's principal program coordinator for incident management, told Houston Public Media in September that Rita forced regional partners to build a truly coordinated effort.

The biggest infrastructure response to Ike remains unfinished. The Coastal Texas Project, commonly called the Ike Dike, is a planned system of barriers, gates and dunes that would shield the 367-mile Texas Gulf Coast. The Gulf Coast Protection District board voted in January to begin preliminary engineering and design work on the Galveston Bay Barrier System. The project is still 20 to 30 years from completion, and federal funding has lagged. Houston Public Media reported the cost at nearly $35 billion; the Galveston County Daily News cited an Army Corps of Engineers estimate of up to $57 billion. The federal government contributed $500,000 in 2024 and $5 million in early 2026.

Bob Stokes, president of the Galveston Bay Foundation, told Houston Public Media in February that the project needs roughly $2 billion a year in federal money for 20 years.

Closer to home, League City Mayor Nick Long urged residents in May to sign up for the city's free emergency alert system. In June, the Webster Office of Emergency Management hosted a Hurricane Preparedness and Safety Fair at the League City Civic Center in collaboration with League City, Dickinson, Kemah and Galveston County.

The 2026 Atlantic hurricane season runs through Nov. 30.