The Roller Coaster Next Door

Worried that deed restrictions won’t protect your home from someone putting up ugly townhouses on your street?

Big whup. On the Kemah Boardwalk, the next-door neighbors of Coy and Carol Killion decided to build a 96-foot-tall roller coaster.

The Boardwalk Bullet is now a few dozen feet from the house. For 12 hours a day, the family listens to the coaster’s squeaks and rattles and the screams of 800 passengers an hour rolling by at 50 mph.

“It’s such a shame, really. We all used to just love the peaceful quiet,” said Carol Killion, who built the house in 1962. “It’s what we enjoyed about it, away from the big city.”

The Killions, of course, still refuse to sell their home to Landry’s.

“As long as I live, it will not be sold to him,” she declared, referring to Landry’s President Tilman Fertitta.

This weekend, the coaster’s noise drove them all from the porch: Killion, her husband, Coy, and her son, daughter-in-law and two grandsons. “You can’t even carry on a conversation,” she said. “I don’t think we’ll even be able to barbecue.”

No public hearing was ever held to inform residents about the coaster.

The city has no zoning, and the coaster met all setback requirements, a Kemah city administrator told the Houston Chronicle in July. Carol Killion said a lawsuit would be just too exhausting.