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    Tattered Jeans

    A weather addict finds her Houston hotspot: Hurricane in the museum

    Katie Oxford
    Jun 29, 2011 | 5:45 pm
    • Eliana Perez, Weather Museum coordinator, gives a forecast in the Green ScreenRoom.
      Photo by Katie Oxford
    • Tornado in a bottle
      Photo by Katie Oxford
    • Ike's Track
      Photo by Katie Oxford
    • Meteorologist Jill Hasling
      Photo by Katie Oxford
    • Checking out the gift shop
      Photo by Katie Oxford
    • The Weather Museum
      Photo by Katie Oxford
    • The Tornado Chamber
      Photo by Katie Oxford
    • Hurricane survival kit
      Photo by Katie Oxford
    • Maureen Maiuri, executive director and meteorologist, in her favorite room inthe Weather Museum: The Weather Sphere
      Photo by Katie Oxford
    • Eliana Perez in a snow simulation in the Green Screen Room
      Photo by Katie Oxford
    • Eliana Perez in a hurricane simulation in the Green Screen Room
      Photo by Katie Oxford

    I have a thing for weather. Hurricanes especially.

    To my siblings and me, Hurricane Carla (1961) was an adventure. Mama filled the bathtub with water. My brothers borrowed a boat from our cousin Bill and we paddled through the neighborhood seeing things with a new pair of eyes.

    A week later, we all loaded up in Daddy’s convertible and drove down to Bolivar Peninsula to take a peek. A peek was just about what it was too. The hurricane had turned Highway 87 into a long narrow hallway with giant walls of sand piled on both sides.

    While some folks were able to retrieve an item or two from their beach house — we got something else. Amazingly, somehow a baby nanny goat survived the storm! We bundled her up in a towel, named her Magnolia Blossom and brought her back to Beaumont, where she lived in our back yard. We took turns feeding her with a baby bottle twice her size.

    I remember vividly one summer afternoon, when a lightning storm commenced so fiercely that I crawled underneath a chair where Ida Gilmore (our beloved housekeeper) sat, utterly still and holding her hands. We didn’t see the strike, but we sure heard it!

    It hit the pine tree in our front yard sounding like a bowling ball scoring a strike. I saw the trunk and thought of the scab on my knee, only this one was huge! Today, the scar on that tree is still there, but slightly smoother.

    Even now, my favorite part in the movie The Wizard of Oz is that damn tornado. Mesmerizing. In fact, whether it’s a full moon or monsoon, I find weather in general fascinating.

    How fascinating? Each morning around dawn I’m usually tuned to the Weather Channel. If it’s during a tropical update (10 minutes before the hour) I’m fixed. My husband enjoys embellishing this fact. He’ll stand, holding onto an imaginary railing, making whistling sounds and rocking back and forth like he’s in a small boat on the high seas.

    For those of you who share a similar addiction to storms and weather period, you’ll love the Weather Museum! It’s the best-kept secret in Houston.

    The Weather Museum, also known as the Weather Research Center (WRC), is a two-story white brick house on the northwest corner of Caroline and Palm street (sorta perfect huh?) It holds nine permanent exhibits and three full time meteorologists, with an expansion in the works. Student meteorologists are also hired to teach summer camp and to help in the museum.

    The signage out front reads The John C. Freeman Weather Museum at Weather Research Center. Dr. John C. Freeman (since deceased) was a meteorologist and oceanographer. He had been active in his field long before he and his daughter Jill F. Hasling (president and a certified consulting meteorologist) opened the museum.

    His work and contributions in meteorology are extensive, but the part that perhaps best captures Dr. Freeman also describes The Weather Museum. “Dr. Freeman’s love of weather and science education touched the lives of many Houstonians, and others across the country.”

    Jill Hasling was out of town the day I visited the museum, but framed and hanging on a wall is an article from the Houston Chronicle, with a great photograph of her. She’s wearing a hard hat and holding one hand on her hip, standing amongst weather instruments in the yet to open, interactive weather museum. The title of the article reads IN HER ELEMENT. It sure looks like she’s home.

    “We’re small but we’ve packed a lot of information into it,” said Maureen Maiuri, executive director and meteorologist. Indeed.

    The exhibits are:

    WRC-TV Studio — also known as the Green Screen Room — a blast!
    Interactive Climate Zone
    Hurricanes, Cyclones & Typhoons
    Severe Weather
    Weather Sphere
    Weather History
    Weather Video Room
    City on the Bayou: Houston’s History Through Floods
    Observation Deck/Hurricane Ike

    Maiuri’s favorite part of the museum is the Weather Sphere, where you can view images on a 3D digital globe. “It shows how weather in Houston moves around the earth,” she explained.

    From the offices upstairs, she starts every morning early providing forecasting services for various oil companies. The oil companies, whether in the Gulf of Mexico, off shore Trinidad, or the Mediterranean Sea all share three primary interests — tropical weather, wind and waves.

    “We also educate and train young meteorologists the art of marine and tropical meteorology,” Maiuri explained. “We want to make the community weatherwise — we talk a lot about safety preparation.”

    At The Weather Museum, you’re sure to learn something new, even for us hurricane junkies. For instance I didn’t know that in our trusty hurricane survival kit, we’re missing two items — a whistle and a white distress flag. Both could come in handy any time in our house!

    Aside from the exhibits you can reach for one of the brochures, abundant and all informative. I found the one called Remembering Carla 50 Years Later especially nifty. You can learn about storm surge that even those poorest in math like myself can understand and calculate. There’s a section on Zip Zone Evacuation — a list of zip codes on one page correlating to the color-coded counties on a map opposite.

    Of course some of this information you can get off of the Internet but it’s not anything like being there — inside this interactive weather museum — touching a tornado created in water vapor, giving a weather forecast, viewing classic tornado and hurricane footage.

    “I love the museum and I want to see it grow,” Maiuri told me. Apparently, it is. In 2010, 8500 people came through the museum.

    It may be the best-kept secret in Houston but certainly, not for long. For weather lovers, it’s a jewel.

    unspecified
    news/city-life

    population report

    Houston saw 2nd biggest population gain in 2024, per Census

    Amber Heckler
    May 19, 2025 | 12:15 pm
    Houston
    Photo by Ali A on Unsplash
    Houston is home to more than 2.39 million people.

    Houston saw the second-highest population increase in the United States in 2024, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

    The new population report revealed Houston gained 43,217 residents from July 2023 to July 2024, bringing the city's population to 2,390,125.

    Houston hung on to its reputation as the fourth largest city in the country, and joined 11 other Southern cities that saw the largest numeric population gains in 2024, the report added.

    Elsewhere in Texas, Fort Worth is now home to more than 1 million residents, surpassing Austin as the 11th largest city in the U.S. Fort Worth had the fifth-highest numeric increase in population, adding 23,442 residents during that same time frame to bring the city's total population to 1,008,106 residents.

    Dallas retained its No. 9 spot on the list of the 15 most populous cities in the U.S. The city gained more than 23,000 residents during the one-year period, bringing the city's population to 1,326,087 people in 2024.

    Austin slipped two spots and now ranks as the 13th largest city after adding more than 13,000 residents to bring the Texas Capital's population to 993,588.

    San Antonio gained 23,945 residents — the fourth-highest increase nationwide – and was the only other city besides Houston to have a higher numerical growth rate than Fort Worth during the one-year period.

    Fastest growing U.S. cities
    Princeton, a North Texas suburb of Dallas, topped the charts as the No. 1 fastest-growing U.S. city in 2024. The Census Bureau says the city's population has more than doubled in the last five years to more than 37,000 residents.

    Fulshear, about 34 miles from downtown Houston, has continued its rapid expansion as the second-fastest growing city. The suburb grew nearly 27 percent since the previous year, and its population rose to 54,629 residents as of July 2024.

    Five additional Texas cities made the list of fastest-growing U.S. cities:

    • Celina, near Dallas (No. 4) with 18.2 percent growth (51,661 total population)
    • Anna, near Dallas (No. 5) with 14.6 percent growth (31,986 total population)
    • Fate, near Dallas (No. 8) with 11.4 percent growth (27,467 total population)
    • Melissa, near Dallas (No. 11) with 10 percent growth (26,194 total population)
    • Hutto, near Austin (No. 13) with 9.4 percent growth (42,661 total population)

    The Austin suburb of Georgetown's growth has continued to slow down since 2023, and it no longer appears in the list of fastest-growing cities. However, it did surpass 100,000 residents in 2024.

    San Angelo, a small city in West Texas, also surpassed the 100,000-population threshold.

    Most populous U.S. cities in 2024
    New York City maintained its stronghold as the biggest in America in 2024, boasting a population of nearly 8.5 million residents. Los Angeles and Chicago also retained second and third place, with respective populations of nearly 3.88 million and more than 2.7 million residents.

    "Cities in the Northeast that had experienced population declines in 2023 are now experiencing significant population growth, on average," said Crystal Delbé, a statistician in the Census Bureau’s Population Division. "In fact, cities of all sizes, in all regions, showed faster growth and larger gains than in 2023, except for small cities in the South, whose average population growth rate remained the same."

    The 15 populous U.S. cities as of July 1, 2024 were:

    • No. 1 – New York, New York (8.48 million)
    • No. 2 – Los Angeles, California (3.88 million)
    • No. 3 – Chicago, Illinois (2.72 million)
    • No. 4 – Houston, Texas (2.39 million)
    • No. 5 – Phoenix, Arizona (1.67 million)
    • No. 6 – Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1.57 million)
    • No. 7 – San Antonio, Texas (1.53 million)
    • No. 8 – San Diego, California (1.4 million)
    • No. 9 – Dallas, Texas (1.33 million)
    • No. 10 – Jacksonville, Florida (1 million)
    • No. 11 – Fort Worth, Texas (1 million)
    • No. 12 – San Jose, California (997,368)
    • No. 13 – Austin, Texas (993,588)
    • No. 14 – Charlotte, North Carolina (943,476)
    • No. 15 – Columbus, Ohio (933,263)
    us census bureaupopulation growthhouston
    news/city-life
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