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Why are state leaders abandoning Houston to natural disasters?The scenes in and around Houston of angry, sweaty citizens threatening and attacking the very utilities workers sent to restore their electrical power have looked like something out of a Monty Python skit. In Sugar Land, twenty miles southwest of the Bayou City’s business district, a group of men reportedly wielding assault rifles menaced linemen as they worked to restore power. On Southwest Freeway, a man casually walked up to a utility truck and beat it with what appears to be a stick. Elsewhere in the Houston area, a hundred linemen were evacuated after a 38-year-old man allegedly waved a gun at workers. Ed Allen, a leader of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, remarked that “in forty-two years in this industry, working here in…

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Marfa Blackwell School exteriorWHO: Community activists in Marfa, who are celebrating a win after nearly two decades of advocacy to preserve the historic Blackwell School—and all Texans, who now have a new National Park Service site to enjoy.WHAT: The designation of the Blackwell School as a National Historic Site.WHY IT’S SO GREAT: Ringed by mountains, with pronghorn gliding through tall grass on the edge of town, Marfa is not an entirely surprising setting for the National Park Service’s newest installment. But it wasn’t the high desert ecosystem that drew the federal agency’s attention to the far West Texas community. The country’s new national park site landed in Marfa because a group of alumni of a long-closed school for Mexican American children didn’t want to see their campus demolished…

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Film still from HummingbirdsLaredoans Silvia del Carmen Castaños and Estefania “Beba” Contreras Solis were slacker, queerdo, artist types with a complicated relationship to the border (to put it mildly), and little film experience, when the cameras began to roll on their film Hummingbirds in 2019. “When we got the Sundance grant to help make the film, I didn’t even know what the f— Sundance was,” Castaños says as Solis laughs on our three-way phone call. “Like, I seriously thought, ¿que es eso? You know what I mean?” I do. As a Laredo native son who has since fled from the border to New York City, I’m sure I didn’t know what Sundance was until my college years, when I was living in North Texas. With all respect and admiration…

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Feges BBQ Spring BranchAfter Hurricane Beryl swept across the Houston area last Monday, 2.2 million residents were without power. Restoration has been slow. CenterPoint Energy, which serves most of Houston, was the butt of jokes last week when Whataburger’s online map of closed locations provided more detailed information about power outages than the electric utility provider could offer at the time. CenterPoint says it expects 10 percent of customers to still be without power a week later, and a newly released outage map estimates that some will not have power restored until July 19.The middle of summer is a terrible time to be without power in Houston. Area hospitals have seen a spike in heat-related emergency room visits, as well as visits for carbon monoxide poisoning from improper…

The post This BBQ Joint Is Just One Example of How Gulf Coast Restaurants Suffer in Extreme Weather appeared first on Texas Monthly.

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What Real Texas Storm Chasers Think of 'Twisters'Chelsea Burnett started chasing storms while she was still learning to talk. When she was just two years old, the slightest hint of thunder would send her running across her childhood home in Shawnee, Oklahoma, where she’d glue herself to the nearest window and wait for lightning to strike. By the time she had learned to read, she was saving newspaper clippings of extreme weather events. Then, in 1996, when she was ten years old, Twister tore through movie theaters, introducing audiences to a ragtag team of storm chasers and Burnett to her dream career. “It was just one of those moments in life where you realize exactly what you want to do,” she says. Today, Burnett is a real-life storm chaser who’s logged 65 tornadoes…

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Texas Coral SnakeEach month, we get to know one of the state’s many wonderful and quirky critters. Latin name: Micrurus tenerSize: Usually less than three feet longTexas habitat: The state’s southeastern half“Red touch yellow, kill a fellow. Red touch black, friend of Jack.” This mnemonic aims to distinguish the coral snake, one of fifteen venomous snakes in Texas, from harmless lookalikes. But use this mostly accurate phrase at your own risk, warns Spencer Greene, director of toxicology at HCA Houston Healthcare Kingwood. Greene once treated a Boy Scout whose troop leader thought the saying went “Red touch yellow, friend of a fellow.” Of all venomous Texas critters, Greene says, only the black widow spider boasts a more agonizing bite. Now I’m terrified.You shouldn’t be! “This is a shy snake,”…

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Allison Brocato last saw her sister alive on the afternoon of January 13, 1995. It was a Friday, and Catherine Edwards, Allison’s 31-year-old identical twin, had just gotten off work at Price Elementary School, in Beaumont. On her way home, Edwards stopped to pick up her beagle, whom Brocato had been dogsitting. She lingered a few minutes to chat and to play with Brocato’s infant daughter. “She seemed kind of sad that day,” Brocato would later recall. “I think she had had a fight with an ex-boyfriend the night before.”Brocato and Edwards considered themselves best friends. After graduating from Lamar University, they both got jobs as public school teachers and moved into a modest town house in west Beaumont, where they lived together until Brocato…

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We Need to Fix our Electrical Wires After BerylEarlier this year, a decayed utility pole toppled amid high winds in the Panhandle, dropping power lines into dry brush and sparking the largest wildfire in state history. The Smokehouse Creek fire burned more than one million acres and killed two Texans.Then, earlier this month, Hurricane Beryl brought relatively weak hurricane-force winds to the Houston area, wreaking havoc with trees and utility poles. More than two million households lost power. In the aftermath, at least three deaths have been attributed to heat exposure, amid soupy humidity and temperatures in the upper 90s. A week later, a quarter million Texans were still in the dark and without air-conditioning. As the unrelenting heat became a health hazard, emergency officials opened a temporary hospital in the parking lot…

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Post Malone performs at Bud Light's "A Night In Nashville" concertPost Malone kicked off “A Night in Nashville” with his song “Rockstar,” but it quickly became clear at Tuesday night’s event that he’s bound for country stardom. To open his set at Marathon Music Works, the Grapevine-raised artist infused his 2017 trap hit with the soaring fiddle of legendary session musician and fellow Texan Larry Franklin, who’s appeared on records by Vince Gill, Alan Jackson, Miranda Lambert, Ray Price, and Lee Ann Womack, to name just a few.Malone, 29, teamed up with Bud Light for his Music City country coronation, stopping to greet the crowd with a “Cheers, motherf—ers” throughout the show as he sipped his beverage of choice. The crowd, decked out in boots, Bud Light merch, and even some homemade “I [heart] Post…

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The Injured Bird Saved By a TacoWHO: Taquito the baby bird.WHAT: A lost Mississippi kite hatchling is wrapped in a flour tortilla and saved.WHY IT’S SO GREAT: We here at Texas Monthly are smitten with animals. Our regular chronicles of critters, from cute to creepy, fascinate us as much as they do our readers. So our hearts melted when we read that on July 13, according to the Wild West Wilderness Rehabilitation Center in Amarillo, a family in the Panhandle city rescued a Mississippi kite chick in uniquely Lone Star fashion. The story was first reported by KENS5 in San Antonio. The bird, initially thought to be a barn owl, was discovered alone on the ground during a backyard barbecue at the family’s home. It was cold to the touch, so the…

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