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I’ve gone over some of the aerial images you posted, in systematic way, and here are the early results.

Galveston:

There’s a one mile stretch of the main road roughly halfway between downtown and the far west end that doesn’t exist anymore. The pavement is gone, the subgrade is gone and for much of this stretch, the embankment itself appears to be gone. This might become passable to 4WD vehicles sometime soon, but passenger cars would have trouble with it for some time to come.

At the far west end, roughly one home in ten to twenty is missing large pieces, overall average. The visibly damaged homes are most generall, but by no means always, nearest the ocean side beach. The further away from the ocean beach you get, the fewer homes show obvious damage. There is considerable debris inland, so some cleanup is expected, but generally the houses there survived more often than beachside.

Beachside, there are some places where several homes at once seem to have been completely destroyed, but that is more of an exception than the general rule.

Halfway between the far west end and downtown, the percentage of homes with significant visible damage rises. I’d guess one home in ten are missing big pieces or showing bare foundation.

My software, using official surge measurements taken at landfall, shows that all or nearly all of Galveston Island outside of downtown was completely submerged during the storm. The aerial imagery confirms this assessment at all instances noted. Everything not downtown got wet inside, from one to twelve or fourteen feet ASL max.

Bolivar Peninsula:

In general, the damage is lightest at the west end, heaviest at the east end. Damage here is much worse in the imagery than on Galveston Island. You have to get down in the weeds, downloading large images then magnifying them to see it, but even in neighborhoods that have many houses intact in them, there are apparantly totally destroyed homes, hit and miss. A quarter to a third or more, not just one or two.

Towards the ocean side beach, clusters of five to ten homes at a time appear to have been totally destroyed, showing mud or sand covered foundations and slabs.

Down towards Rollover Pass and Gilchrist, homes with big pieces missing are a rarity, very few structures are left standing at all. I didn’t even see any debris piles. That area largely got swept clean.

From Rollover pass over to High Island, most of that area was still underwater when the aerials were taken. Shallow water in most cases, but still under. Damage is roughly commensurate with that described above for Rollover Pass.

There’s what appears to be a large oil slick immediately west of High Island. I can not tell where this oil came from, or how much might have leaked, nor even if it really is oil, but there seems to have been a lot of it leaking, whatever it was.

High Island seems to have fared very well, at least the elevated portions. I did not see any homes or businesses with significant structural damage visible. There is small quantities of scattered debris, and some small outbuildings seem to have been damaged or destroyed, and these seem the be the primary source of the scattered debris.

My best guess says Bolivar Peninsula was also totally submerged at the heigth of the storm, and it’s generally a foot or two lower than Galveston, plus officially measured surge here was closer to fourteen feet than twelve.