OH, THAT’S JUST MOM What was that awful stench emanating from the fourplex at 601 Fairview in Montrose, directly across the street from the original Barnaby’s Cafe? The rotting corpse of a tenant’s mother, it turns out: Wayne Donawho, who took over management of the property in August, tells Houston Press reporter Richard Connelly he had trouble investigating complaints because the tenant of the apartment where the smell seemed to be coming from told him his mom was sleeping and that he didn’t want to disturb her. And yes, that’s what the tenant told the cops this morning, too — before they got inside and found the decomposing body. “I don’t know if she died and he was keeping her to get a Social Security check or what — the police are there now looking at everything,” Donawho tells Connelly, and adds: “I always thought he was just a little weird, but I never thought it would turn into something like this.” [Hair Balls]
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Hazards
THE TALE OF THE ENTERPRISING RENOVATORS The owner of the South Acres house where that angel dust lab burst into flames last night told arson investigators he hadn’t been living at home because it was being worked on, and didn’t know anything about any drug manufacturing operation going on in his single-car garage. Neighbors living a couple blocks away from the tiny Donegal Way cul-de-sac off Akard St. south of Sims Bayou said their houses were shaken by the explosion, and observers reported seeing flames leap 20 to 30 feet into the air. “The investigators said they are planning to question the people renovating the home.” [MyFox Houston]
Parts of Jersey Village have been subsiding by about 2 inches a year, according to 2 UH professors and a former grad student who’ve been studying a decade’s worth of GPS data from 2 dozen area measurement points. Associate professor of geology Shuhab Khan, geology professor Kevin Burke, and former Ph.D. student Richard Engelkemeir note there’s been gradual subsidence in a “sprawling” 324-square-mile area of northwestern Harris County, but Jersey Village is the fastest to fall.
Just what is it that makes this little community so down-to-earth? Reports Khan:
The most likely reason for the sinking of Jersey Village is the withdrawal of water from deep beneath the surface. While groundwater withdrawal has ceased in most of the Houston area, it continues in the northwestern part of the county that has seen a rapid growth in population.
Continued subsidence, of course, will also help the entire northwest Houston area collect more water when it rains. But it isn’t all downhill for Houston.
SELF PRESERVATION 
Among the businesses and organizations smoked out of the 36-story former Gulf Building Downtown at the corner of Main and Capitol after last night’s fire on the 27th floor: The Greater Houston Preservation Alliance, which has offices on the ground floor of the 1929 tower, now named after JPMorgan Chase Bank. It’s likely the organization hasn’t lost anything, but none of the businesses with offices there will know for sure until the building is reopened. “Crews are currently on the scene fanning smoke out of the building,” the GHPA reported this morning — from a remote location. [abc13 update] Photo: Jim Parsons.
Here they are: the latest views from the scene on Fondren just north of Harwin, where cleaning chemicals and hair sprays likely accelerated an early-morning strip-center blaze. The exploding cans were locked inside M Trading Company, a wholesale business that supplies local dollar stores, at 5710 Fondren. Also consumed by flames: Jessie’s Hair Salon, and the better portion of blossoms in Floreria Lee. A&C Tires and Star Karaoke appear to have made it through mostly unharmed.
A closer look at Greater Sharpstown’s latest strip-center-arcade fire:
Reader Claire de Lune has a reconnaissance report on the mysterious home at 9765 Oak Point Dr. in Spring Branch Woods Swamplot highlighted yesterday — you know, the new “enter at your own risk, with a mask” $110K listing apparently so horrifying to the agent that only a series of seemingly random stock photos could properly represent it. “There IS a house behind all that foliage,” our volunteer correspondent assures us. But then: “I must say, of all the stock photos [the listing agent] used, the little children running away in fear is the MOST appropriate.”
Claire de Lune reports that the rest of the street is pretty, but there’s no for-sale sign in front of this home:
This is a corner lot, overgrown with a minimum 3-4 years of neglect. Dead tree limbs on the roof suggest Ike damage. I suspect someone who really knows where and how to dig can find out when the taxes were last paid. . . . This place is within walking distance of the ginormous HEB @ Bunker Hill and all that surrounds it.
A couple more photos from the scene:
COMMENT OF THE DAY: SAVES YOU MONEY!! “Harness/Lanyard runs about 400 dollars total. They must be replaced too. In addition there is significant overhead for training. Including time to train, and productivity losses. These Productivity losses amount to regulations that call for your tie off point be able to withstand a load of 5 kips (5000 lbs). So In the image where the dude is standing on a wood beam, laborers would have to construct a system for him to be tied off to. How do laborers know what can take 5000 lbs? well Scaffold builders do that a lot… how do scaffold builders do that? With an engineer who designs the scaffold? And all the time, and money trickles down to the homeowner. Finally, in the housing industry there is a large illegal immigrant workforce. They are working at lower wages [than] US citizens. If they get injured the cost vs productivity/exploitation of that illegal still falls in the companies[’] advantage.” [Enginerd, commenting on Comment of the Day: Extreme Homebuilding Makeover, Oil and Gas Edition]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: EXTREME HOMEBUILDING MAKEOVER, OIL AND GAS EDITION “i understand that safety regulations are lax and/or nonexistent in the housing industry but those people standing on beams/heights without safety harnesses would be kicked off the job in the oil and gas biz. people underneath that manlift is questionable too. it’d be nice and safer to see other industries held to the same standards as oil and gas.” [joel, commenting on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition Meets Extreme Mud: Houston Edition]
An in-depth investigation.
A TEXAS OIL SIGHTING As BP continues to monitor pressures in its newly sealed well in the Gulf, a marine biologist sights a bit of oil slick conducting an unauthorized maneuver far to the west: “‘We saw about a half-mile thick line of oil on the water about five miles offshore a little to the Southwest of Sabine Pass,’ [the Sea Turtle Restoration Project’s Chris] Pincetich said. Official spill maps from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration don’t put the slick near that area. Tar balls from the spill have shown up on beaches in Galveston, but it’s believed they were brought there on the hulls of ships that passed through the oil closer to the spill site.” [Newswatch: Energy; previously on Swamplot]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: HOUSTON’S METHANE-POWERED TSUNAMI APOCALYPSE WON’T CHANGE A THING, REALLY “People will still drive their cars into the high water.” [Matt, commenting on And Now a Tall Blast of Hot Air from the Gulf]
AND NOW A TALL BLAST OF HOT AIR FROM THE GULF See, this ginormous methane fart is gonna shoot up from deep beneath the Gulf of Mexico, and then we’ll all be outta here like the dinosaurs: “BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling operation may have triggered an irreversible, cascading geological Apocalypse that will culminate with the first mass extinction of life on Earth in many millions of years. . . . If the methane bubble—a bubble that could be as big as 20 miles wide—erupts with titanic force from the seabed into the Gulf, every ship, drilling rig and structure within the region of the bubble will immediately sink. All the workers, engineers, Coast Guard personnel and marine biologists participating in the salvage operation will die instantly. Next, the ocean bottom will collapse, instantaneously displacing up to a trillion cubic feet of water or more and creating a towering supersonic tsunami annihilating everything along the coast and well inland. Like a thermonuclear blast, a high pressure atmospheric wave could precede the tidal wave flattening everything in its path before the water arrives. When the roaring tsunami does arrive it will scrub away all that is left.” [Helium; deprogramming available on Reddit; both via Rex Hammock]
RICE VILLAGE BARBECUE AND POT LUCK BRINGS ON THE CHEMICALS AND HAZMAT CREW As abc13 reports it this evening, both sides in everyone’s favorite ongoing Rice Village feud contributed what they could to today’s neighborly resolution of that little rotting-meat problem. To neutralize the odor emanating from the tens of pounds of stinky flesh that had been dumped on an adjacent private alley a week ago, workers from Hans’ Bier Haus reportedly poured calcium hydroxide (or lime) onto it. And the friendly folks next door at the 2520 Robinhood at Kirby condos hired a hazardous-materials crew to remove the resulting stew: “It’s a corrosive and it could be toxic also,” Bernard Nelson of Legacy Environmental told a station reporter. “If it gets on the skin it could burn. It carries [a] pH of 14 to 16 so that’s definitely caustic.” [abc13; previously on Swamplot]
THE POWER BALLS HAVE ARRIVED! Okay, fess up: Which one of you has been secretly transporting oil from the Deepwater Horizon gusher to our local beaches? The Coast Guard reported over the weekend that up to 5 gallons of dime- to ping-pong-ball-size tar balls collected from the surf along East Beach in Galveston and the Bolivar Peninsula’s Crystal Beach came from BP’s little offshore accident. But surely the little bugger-balls can’t have been trying to swim all the way back to headquarters? “[Coast Guard captain Marcus] Woodring said the condition of the tar balls didn’t look like they had drifted all the way from the Macondo well. They were ‘inconsistent with the weathering pattern that would be expected,’ he said. ‘To travel 400 miles is going to take a long time,’ during which the oil would be expected to break down. Officials were investigating whether the tar balls were from oil that clung to the hull of a ship passing through the BP oil slick or were from ballast water taken on by a ship in the oil slick zone and later dumped in Texas waters, Woodring said.” [Houston Chronicle]
PARK PLACE APARTMENT FIBERFEST Workers from Inland Environments will be taking “extra precautions” with the demolition of 4 apartment buildings at the corner of Park Place and Telephone Rd., the mayor’s office promises. There’s plenty of asbestos to go around in the Park Place Apartments at 7410 Park Place Blvd., but the buildings, which have been sitting vacant for 20 years, aren’t considered structurally sound enough for the asbestos to be removed. A bankruptcy filing by the owner last week delayed the city-ordered demolition, but it’s now scheduled to begin at 9 this morning. Update, 2:10 pm: Now there’s video! And the dust is flying. [Mayor’s Office; previously on Swamplot]