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    We ♥ Hou

    Terrible Beauty: Houston's real sense of place lies at its industrial heart

    Bruce Webb
    Feb 23, 2010 | 12:00 am
    News_Bruce Webb_Fred Hartman Bridge_day
    The Fred Hartman bridge cables are painted a pale canary yellow that makes them seem lighter, more ethereal.
    Photo by James Dillard

     Bruce Webb is a professor of architecture at the University of Houston. He moved to Houston from Pittsburgh in 1973 and never left.
     

     

     .........................

     

    One of the places I have begun to include on my Houston visitors’ tour is the stretch of State Highway 225 that veers off of the West Loop just north of Interstate 45 toward the hard, industrial muscle of Houston’s economic base. This is definitely off the beaten path for most Houstonians who navigate around town without dipping into the vast Houston terra incognito.

     

    Highway 225 is the seam between several industrial towns – Pasadena and Deer Park are the most prominent – and a linear, petrochemical, industrial compound on the north that is sandwiched between the highway and the bustling Houston Ship Channel. When you get tired of Sunbelt-city simulations of strips and malls, this is where to go to find a hyper-real sense of place.

     

    A significant portion of Houston’s middle class makes its living here (1,700 in Shell Deer Park plant alone), either in the refineries (340,000 barrels a day) or in the chemical plant, where they oversee the execution of recipes for such modern alchemies as phenol acetone, butadiene and epoxy resins. It’s the ultimate case of NIMBY. The plant is volatile; one of its by-products is poisoned air, and town and industry have shared a fitful, nervous boundary for more than 50 years in the kind of symbiotic imbalance that burdens every industrial town in America.
     
    So like many fascinations, the industrial site, too, is a case of terrible beauty. Stretched out in a complex fusion of geometries, it resembles a Buck Rogers city of the future and rivals anything built in the city for its ability to engage the imagination. Its primary assembly is the articulated truss frames and modules of platonic space-forms – spheres, cylinders, rectangular solids of various scales – joined by miles of pipes and precarious walkways and stairs. It’s like a cage for a half-magical, fire-breathing dragon, menacing and toxic. It makes an atmosphere of white smoke and steam that hovers and floats overhead, punctuated by the ignition of flaming safety flares.
     
    The trip reaches a kind of crescendo when the Fred Hartman Bridge's quintet of towers come into view. This daring span, constructed in 1995, replaced an earlier connecting conduit, the Baytown Tunnel, that dealt with the ship channel by sliding beneath it. The bridge is an engineering marvel, but much more than that, it is an object of considerable beauty. One of the most satisfying classes of beautiful things are those that find their beauty unselfconsciously, by pursuing other goals than just looking good. That’s the case with the bridge: It’s minimalist sculpture of a very high order, where nothing is wasted, nothing out of place. It seems to float across the width of water, drawing your eye up into its cathedral-like space.
     
    The bridge cables have been painted a pale canary yellow that makes them seem lighter, more ethereal. To get the most out of the experience, plan your trip in the late afternoon when the long rays of sun out of the west render the refinery skeletons in a kind of chiaroscuro and puff out the spherical gas storage tanks with strong shadows. They play across the array of cables as though they were a musical instrument, and it glows, reflecting the color of the sunset against the gathering darkness to the east. Coming back after dark, the artificial lighting gives the bridge the spectre of an inner glow.
     
    As dark settles the refineries reappear, outlined by thousands of dots of clear white light, and everything becomes more concentrated, intense and lonely on the way home.

     

    At dark, the artificial lighting gives the Fred Hartman Bridge the spectre of an inner glow.

     
    unspecified
    news/city-life

    Flood News

    More rain brings further flood risk as Texas death toll tops 100

    Associated Press
    Jul 7, 2025 | 9:36 am
    Death Toll Rises After Flash Floods In Texas Hill Country
    Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images
    Death toll rises after flash floods In Texas Hill Country

    With more rain on the way, the risk of life-threatening flooding was still high in Central Texas on July 7 even as crews searched urgently for the missing following a holiday weekend deluge that killed at least 100 people, including children at summer camps. Officials said the death toll was sure to rise.

    Residents of Kerr County began clearing mud and salvaging what they could from their demolished properties as they recounted harrowing escapes from rapidly rising floodwaters late July 4.

    Reagan Brown said his parents, in their 80s, managed to escape uphill as water inundated their home in the town of Hunt. When the couple learned that their 92-year-old neighbor was trapped in her attic, they went back and rescued her.

    “Then they were able to reach their toolshed up higher ground, and neighbors throughout the early morning began to show up at their toolshed, and they all rode it out together,” Brown said.

    A few miles away, rescuers maneuvering through challenging terrain filled with snakes continued their search for the missing, including 10 girls and a counselor from Camp Mystic, an all-girls summer camp that sustained massive damage.

    Gov. Greg Abbott said 41 people were unaccounted for across the state and more could be missing.

    In the Hill Country area, home to several summer camps, searchers have found the bodies of 68 people, including 28 children, Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha said. Ten other deaths were reported in Travis, Burnet, Kendall, Tom Green and Williamson counties, according to local officials.

    The governor warned that additional rounds of heavy rains lasting into Tuesday could produce more dangerous flooding, especially in places already saturated.

    Families were allowed to look around the camp beginning Sunday morning. One girl walked out of a building carrying a large bell. A man whose daughter was rescued from a cabin on the highest point in the camp walked a riverbank, looking in clumps of trees and under big rocks.

    One family left with a blue footlocker. A teenage girl had tears running down her face as they slowly drove away and she gazed through the open window at the wreckage.

    Searching the disaster zone
    Nearby crews operating heavy equipment pulled tree trunks and tangled branches from the river. With each passing hour, the outlook of finding more survivors became even more bleak.

    Volunteers and some families of the missing came to the disaster zone and searched despite being asked not to do so.
    Authorities faced growing questions about whether enough warnings were issued in an area long vulnerable to flooding and whether enough preparations were made.

    President Donald Trump signed a major disaster declaration Sunday for Kerr County and said he would likely visit Friday: “I would have done it today, but we’d just be in their way.”

    “It’s a horrible thing that took place, absolutely horrible,” he told reporters.

    Prayers from the Vatican
    Gov. Greg Abbott vowed that authorities will work around the clock and said new areas were being searched as the water receded. He declared July 6 a day of prayer for the state.

    In Rome, Pope Leo XIV offered special prayers for those touched by the disaster. The first American pope spoke in English at the end of his Sunday noon blessing, saying, “I would like to express sincere condolences to all the families who have lost loved ones, in particular their daughters who were in summer camp, in the disaster caused by the flooding of the Guadalupe River in Texas in the United States. We pray for them.”

    Desperate refuge and trees and attics
    Survivors shared terrifying stories of being swept away and clinging to trees as rampaging floodwaters carried trees and cars past them. Others fled to attics, praying the water wouldn’t reach them.

    At Camp Mystic, a cabin full of girls held onto a rope strung by rescuers as they walked across a bridge with water whipping around their legs. Among those confirmed dead were an 8-year-old girl from Mountain Brook, Alabama, who was at Camp Mystic, and the director of another camp up the road.

    Two school-age sisters from Dallas were missing after their cabin was swept away. Their parents were staying in a different cabin and were safe, but the girls’ grandparents were unaccounted for.

    Warnings came before the disaster
    On Thursday the National Weather Service advised of potential flooding and then sent out a series of flash flood warnings in the early hours of Friday before issuing flash flood emergencies — a rare alert notifying of imminent danger.

    Authorities and elected officials have said they did not expect such an intense downpour, the equivalent of months’ worth of rain for the area.

    Kerrville City Manager Dalton Rice said authorities are committed to a full review of the emergency response.

    Trump, asked whether he was still planning to phase out the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said that was something “we can talk about later, but right now we are busy working.” He has said he wants to overhaul if not completely eliminate FEMA and sharply criticized its performance.

    Trump also was asked whether he planned to rehire any of the federal meteorologists who were fired this year as part of widespread government spending cuts.

    “I would think not. This was a thing that happened in seconds. Nobody expected it. Nobody saw it. Very talented people there, and they didn’t see it,” the president said.

    deathsfloodingtexasweatherhill countrycamp mysticdisastersjuly 4 flood
    news/city-life
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