Urban government and environmental policies: regulating the storage and distribution of fuel oil in Houston, Texas, 1901-1915.

IN JANUARY 1901 A NEW OIL FIELD OPENED AT SPINDLETOP NEAR Beaumont, Texas. This production area and its successors made vast amounts of cheap crude petroleum available to the Gulf South, where boiler plants traditionally consumed expensive coal, lignite, and wood. (1) Although fuel oil did not seriously challenge coal as a general power source nationally until after World War I, its introduction in superabundant quantities transformed the regional energy market. Humans had long used wood and coal, but fuel oil was the first new energy source employed in centuries. Because it was liquid (and therefore difficult to store) and feared to be explosive, its use presented special problems. Houston's pioneering role in the production and utilization of this new energy source deserves careful historical examination. (2) Houston's experience illustrates how a southern municipality devised policies to regulate a potentially dangerous new fuel supply and its consumption. To accomplish this, city officials engaged in the politics of risk analysis and management; in the midst of heated debate they identified and employed the legal basis and economic justification for protecting the built environment.

Owing to population density, commerce, and production, towns and cities by definition are centers of energy consumption. As a case study, Houston's role in constructing a rational interface between energy production and consumption clarifies an important feature of post- 1900 southern urban history. Galveston, New Orleans, Mobile, Pensacola, Tampa, and Savannah, all coastal communities otherwise quite different in size, population, and regional status, also faced problems posed by fuel-oil storage. (3) Understanding what happened in Houston opens the above-cited municipalities to comparative investigation and analysis of who supported or opposed large-scale oil storage and of the various regulatory tactics and strategies developed to deal with energy market issues at a time when cities across the nation were dramatically expanding their reliance upon expert knowledge and bureaucratic supervision. Appreciation of Houston's fuel-oil experience bolsters our knowledge of an important episode in energy adoption in the southern United States.

By 1901 Houston had survived a decades-long competition with Galveston for preeminence in maritime trade and, as a railroad center, had become by design an entrepot for East Texas and its vast timber, rice, and cotton production. Buffalo Bayou was a lifeline to the coast, and with federal aid this watercourse would later be widened and deepened to allow seagoing ships to come close enough to Houston to establish it as a major port. Cheap fuel oil fitted easily into this constellation of city promotion, commercial dominance, and well-designed transportation facilities.

Seizing the opportunity for commercial hegemony brought Houston face-to-face with a basic issue. To make petroleum, a fuel that prior to 1900 the public had largely exploited for illumination, available to meet anticipated energy demands, the city set down conditions of safe storage, distribution, and consumption. This process involved selective adaptation of energy-delivery technologies to Houston's particular circumstances and the city's community-defined safety standards. Both contributed to the creation of a new energy market that brought together buyers and sellers of oil. Informed by necessary rules, or "systems of regulation," that specified how to marry energy supply with new energy demands, consumers were free to substitute oil for traditional energy sources. (4)

Deciding how to proceed raised several important questions for Houston leaders, dilemmas that required thoughtful answers. Should Houston subordinate the safety of its infrastructure--roads, buildings, wharves, manufacturing districts, railroad networks, and channel access to the Gulf of Mexico--to accommodate oil investors, producers, and distributors? If city leaders shaped public policy to suit oil promoters, what would be the effect on Houston's citizens and its natural and built environments? What standards should prevail in making such decisions--safety, convenience, commercial goals, or aesthetics? Finally, did city officials and interested citizens have adequate knowledge of the oil business and sufficient information about petroleum safety hazards to balance "the interests of risk creators and risk bearers"? (5)

To determine the questions put forward and analyze the answers that resulted, this essay examines Houston, primarily in 1901 and 1902, and its roles as both observer of and participant in the Texas Gulf Coast oil fields. These areas produced enormous amounts of crude oil, which stoked the city's raging desire to use this apparently inexhaustible and hence inexpensive energy source to achieve commercial and manufacturing dominance in the Southwest. (Galveston, its longtime rival, was too devastated by a hurricane in 1900 to compete for leadership in the new age of oil.) Houston's struggle to tie energy supplies to consumption illustrates how a turn-of-the-century municipality embraced fuel oil under terms attained through serious debate and negotiation. Houston leaders, reflecting public perceptions and ambitions, established a regulatory atmosphere that represented a compromise fashioned by various interested parties whose property, commercial aspirations, and fears were at stake in the creation of a new energy market. (6)

This study also examines the regulatory authority the city brought to bear on these matters, looking specifically at how the Houston administration used its police powers--which were intended to protect community health, safety, and well-being--to regulate and control fuel-oil storage. One major goal was to avoid a disaster such as a massive oil fire or explosion. In the framework of the regulatory and environmental history of the South, Houston's mediation between energy supply and consumption, devised through the politics of risk analysis and management, was an exercise in environmental adaptation. The issue was how to take economic advantage of a promising new energy source without putting human life and urban property at severe risk. (7)

Thus, the central theme of this article is that Houston--in particular its commercial and civic elite and its political leaders--aided in the creation of an energy market by mediating the relationship between an energy supply new to the Southwest and the interests of industrial consumers and the public at large. Mediation meant delineating through police powers the terms or conditions under which the city would allow consumption of fuel oil.

Gulf Coast crude oil had exceptional potential as a marketable product, though not as an illuminant, which had been the dominant use of petroleum distillates in the late nineteenth century. (8) Business leaders, entrepreneurs, and ambitious regional boosters viewed oil as an endless source of energy to build up the industrial base of the Gulf South, to stimulate commerce and trade through Gulf ports, and to power streetcar systems, electric light plants, ice plants, and waterworks. (9) The discovery consumed the interests of Texas investors, speculators, drillers, prospectors, and oil-field workers, in addition to many out-of-state participants, (10) By 1908 these eager capitalists, oil-field impresarios, and mechanics found, captured, and brought to market a vast amount of crude petroleum in successive strikes at Beaumont, Sour Lake, Saratoga, Batson, Humble, and Goose Creek. (11) Investors moved rapidly to form companies, to accumulate capital, and to pipe or otherwise transport fuel oil to Galveston and New Orleans, while also canvassing local manufacturers, sugar-mill operators, sawmill owners, and rice farmers to determine their fuel needs. (12)

The manic commerce in oil properties and frenetic drilling in January 1901 in the aftermath of the Spindletop strike caught the attention of Houston observers. (13) Consequently, a number of Houstonians took part in the development and exploitation of the Gulf Coast oil fields, contributing to the city's nascent financial and administrative leadership in the oil business. Of the thirty-three oil companies with headquarters in Houston listed in the 1902-1903 city directory, many had Houston investors, directors, and organizers who raised money for drilling (not only in Beaumont but also in unincorporated areas of Harris County near Houston, its county seat), formed companies, obtained charters, and directed company affairs in the oil fields. Their practical experience and knowledge enabled them to offer credible opinions on the matter of safe storage of fuel oil within the city. (14)

Oil delivery and storage quickly became pressing issues because specific enterprises and industries, such as breweries, the Houston Electric Street Railway Company, the Cleveland Compress and Warehouse Company, the C. R. Cummings Lumber Company, and the Hutchins House Hotel, installed oil burners or began considering adopting fuel oil as their primary energy source. Even the city took part when the city council voted on June 3, 1901, to outfit the city's new sewer pumping station "for the burning of oil for fuel." When limited test operations began in December 1901, the station burned oil drawn from a large underground tank with a capacity of about twelve thousand to sixteen thousand gallons. Citizens' Electric Light Plant changed over from coal to fuel oil in July, and by August 1, 1901, it consumed roughly ninety barrels of oil every twenty-four hours. To feed the plant's large engines the company put three twelve-thousand-gallon oil tanks in the ground. Houston's oil age had begun. (15)

When several Houston firms refitted their plants and machinery to burn fuel oil, acting out of expectations of competitive advantage and market growth, the companies introduced to the city many of the attendant problems of oil production, transportation, and consumption. A basic difficulty was a lack of accurate geological knowledge. When so-called gushers came in, many producers were utterly unprepared because they did not want to spend money on equipment or storage until they were certain of striking oil. Early developers of the Spindletop field, though fairly confident of finding oil, simply did not know how much oil was underground. The Lucas well at Spindletop, for example, produced so much oil (an estimated sixteen thousand to fifty thousand barrels per day initially) that the black fluid quickly filled a hastily embanked reservoir and spilled out onto the prairie. On March 3, 1901, the lake caught fire but eventually burned itself out. It was one of many narrow escapes from a catastrophic and destructive fire in the Beaumont oil field. (16)

Another peril was that boring for, releasing, and pumping oil from the ground were sloppy activities that often produced dangerous waste such as spilled lubricating fluids. Even tightly capped wells seeped oil around the casehead. If a producing well spewed oil all over the ground and filled up small catch basins, pipe fitters tried to control or temporarily cap it. If they failed, they shunted the flood of oil into leak-prone wooden or scarce steel tanks. Oil-field accumulation systems sometimes leaked. Defective unions, tees, or elbows, broken or cracked pipe segments, or faulty valves (whether in-line on a pipe, as part of a set of railroad loading racks, or mounted on a railroad tank car) frequently caused trouble. In February 1902 the main pipe of Higgins Oil and Fuel Company broke and released a "large quantity of oil" into the sewers and, from there, into the Neches River at Beaumont. It caught fire and produced a "magnificent spectacle" of fifty-foot flames and "dense ... heavy smoke." (17)

Of course, how such accidents would play out in and among the buildings, homes, and citizens of Houston was unknown. Houston, like practically every large city in the nation, had suffered major fires within the previous quarter century. And it did not help that oil had burned on the surface of the Neches River, reinforcing a common belief that water would not extinguish oil fires, in particular an oil fire in the street gutter in front of one's home or business.

To minimize such problems, producers obtained tanks as fast as they could either purchase them from manufacturers or contract for on-site construction. Even so, unanticipated large production required inground storage until field hands pumped the oil into the tanks or diverted it into a distribution grid. One way to handle surplus oil was to sluice it off into a plank- or brick-lined earthen reservoir. However repugnant it sounds to our modern ideas of environmental responsibility, many well owners and oil companies in 1901 viewed ground storage of excess oil as a rational, inexpensive means of controlling crude production until they could acquire steel tanks or hook in to a pipeline. (18) Since building with wood was cheaper than using iron or steel, it was economically advantageous to build very big reservoirs. (19) Well-financed firms, flush with crude oil that needed immediate storage, found earthen lakes to be effective settling vats for oil whose price they anticipated would go up dramatically. Reservoirs also made it possible to have very cheap oil on hand to fulfill contracts when well production could not keep up with demand. (20)

Storage was pertinent to Houston' s consumption of fuel oil, in terms of both the pace of conversion from other fuel sources and aggregate use. Manufacturers and plant owners hesitated to switch from coal to fuel oil until there was a reliable and assured supply to meet potential market demands. Further, Houston civic leaders, as they considered safety and nuisance issues posed by requests for permits to install small on-site tanks or huge distribution containers for large-scale production, relied upon various sources of information about handling oil. Experiences gleaned from different kinds of oil storage in the production fields carried weight with city council members, their advisers, and friends and confirmed to the insurance interests that oil was a fire hazard to be handled carefully. (21) In view of the foregoing, it was hard to persuade cautious insurance underwriters and owners of large stocks of flammable commodities such as cotton, cottonseed oil, or timber to allow great earthen lakes of oil within the Houston city limits.

Where storage was scarce or impractical, many small companies that operated wells in the Spindletop field sent their output to a central collector such as the Texas Company's pipeline to Sabine or the J. M. Guffey Petroleum Company line to Port Arthur, Texas. Of course, the preferred solution was to store production crude in reliable metal tanks. Nonetheless, steel tanks still had shortcomings. Periodically the oil vats caught fire, often from lightning or slipshod field practices. Even though this led to a major effort to institute strict fire-prevention protocols at Spindletop, there was an enormously destructive fire there in September 1902. Thus the idea of putting oilfilled tanks, which had already proved vulnerable to fire despite safety measures, inside the city must have sounded to some Houston observers like a failure of common sense and a completely unacceptable risk. (22)

Oil companies built storage facilities as fast as available capital, skilled labor, and tank fabricators could respond to the need, but putting up tanks in Houston was a complicated affair and undertaken in uncertain financial and commercial circumstances. Houston's inability in the 1880s and 1890s to secure tax revenues sufficient to provide basic city services, endless wrangling over streetcar, water, and gas franchises, and political tensions between reform-minded "Metropolitans" and city-focused ward politicians tempered optimism about Houston's growth potential. (23) Yet, in the broad context of progressive ideals such as efficient management, business-like accounting methods, and a concern for community welfare and social justice, many turn-of-the-century visionaries in the Business League and on the city council regarded cheap fuel oil as an indispensable key to future commercial and manufacturing growth. Readily available fuel would sustain all campaigns for social amelioration, progressive government, and community stability. "Any step" taken "to cheapen the cost of fuel," one commentator observed, would benefit Texas consumers. (24) A newspaper article on Houston industry asserted in September 1901 that the discovery of oil so near the city had contributed to "industrial development," which was a "branch of progress." Further, the article claimed, oil production had led to at least six plants using it for fuel and many others making arrangements to do so. (25)

In late January and early February 1901, soon after the strike at Spindletop, the city council granted pipeline franchises to several groups of investors led by local businessmen to furnish oil or gas "or the products thereof" to "any factory, residence and business places." (26) With these franchises formally in place, the investors needed a pipeline from the oil fields to Houston so that distributors could pump crude directly from wellhead or settling tank to storage farms and refineries in the city. (27) The Houston Business League, led by George P. Brown, set in motion a campaign to attract investors. Texas law limited construction-condemnation proceedings to pipelines eight inches in diameter or less. In response to lobbying by Houston leaders, the legislature reportedly authorized a pipeline to the city but failed to specify the size of the line. This action left city promoters no closer to getting a pipeline started than before because knowledgeable investors apparently considered the allowable pipe size to be too small to recover the enormous capital investment needed to finish a pipeline from Beaumont. (28)

However, some citizens, such as nervous insurance underwriters and property owners, considered petroleum a risky substance to bring into a relatively densely populated area filled with homes, businesses, warehouses, and vulnerable caches of flammable agricultural commodities. At several crucial points in the oil-storage battle, ordinary Houston residents made their opposition known through petitions to block tank emplacements. They were not deviant cranks or paranoid faultfinders. Their apprehensions about the safety of fuel oil were companions to public disquiet about the likelihood of fire damage, unease made unmistakably clear by pleas these city dwellers made to the city council for water service, supply extensions, outlets, and fire hydrants. (29) Uncertainty about fire protection reached a high point on June 24, 1901, when flames destroyed the Market House, the principal building in Houston, in which City Hall was located. Alderman James A. Thompson accused the Houston Water Company of neglect and incompetence for failing to maintain sufficient water pressure to suppress the conflagration. This charge could only lead other citizens to believe that, although they lived or worked near a water main, there might not be enough water pressure to extinguish a major fire. (30)

Extensive coverage of Spindletop events made Houstonians aware of oil-field dangers, accidents, and fire hazards. Taking this and their general unease over fire into consideration, it is unlikely that many of the city's residents or merchants would approve of similar safety and environmental risks such as dumping waste oil or oil-field brine, drilling mud, or well sand into pits, shallow lakes, creeks, and marshes or simply on the bare ground inside the city of Houston (although such actions were quite common elsewhere in the absence of a major health crisis or threat to commercial viability). (31)

Houston, like other cities, traditionally dealt with threats to community well-being, dangers such as fire or explosions, through an extensive array of state-granted police powers. These powers related to public health, safety, and order. They restrained individuals in the exercise of their private rights when those rights injured others or posed a threat to the "general comfort, health and prosperity" of society. (32) States defined and enumerated such powers in municipal charters promulgated as legislative acts of incorporation or in enabling statutes that gave city officials authority they formerly did not possess. This pattern was evident in the various Houston municipal charters granted by the Texas legislature from 1862 to 1899. In 1862 the state gave the mayor and city council of Houston "full power and authority" to provide safe and convenient streets, city guards, and adequate street lighting and "to determine in what part of the city wooden buildings" could be erected. The city also had the authority to prevent storage of gunpowder in "the city or suburbs in such quantity as to endanger the public safety," to inspect "all comestibles sold publicly," and to "define and suppress nuisances...." (33)

The incorporation act passed in October 1866 repeated these powers and added control over railroad tracks within the city. Houston's 1874 charter expanded the gunpowder clause to include hydrocarbon distillates and other inflammable liquids, allowing officials to "prevent gunpowder or other explosive material, kerosene oil or other inflammable oils being stored within the city limits in such quantities as to endanger the safety of adjacent property...." (34) These powers survived in subsequent charter consolidation or amendment acts passed in 1879, 1881, 1897, and 1899. The phrase covering gunpowder, kerosene, and inflammable liquids (oils) remained the same in each iteration. (35)

Although the city's authority to control flammable substances such as gunpowder and kerosene was undiluted, by the summer of 1901 Houston's successive charters and amendments had not specifically addressed the issue of using fuel oil. However, city authorities had three possible legal avenues to regulate that resource: the authority to control flammable substances, an 1897 charter stipulation that building modifications in the city limits required a permit from the city engineer, and nuisance-abatement capability (which might allow the city to label fuel oil a threat to public health and well-being). (36) The requirement for a site-modification permit explains why institutions, workshops, commercial firms, and manufacturers that operated boiler-fired power plants turned to the city for permits to install oil tanks or to convert equipment to burn oil. In the absence of an ordinance to control the supply and storage of fuel oil, business inquiries about installation permits exerted pressure on the Houston city council to put regulations in place.

An example of commercial plans for intra-Houston distribution surfaced July 15, 1901. Lone Star and Crescent Oil Company, a major enterprise backed by New Orleans capital, approached the city council for permission to erect a steel oil tank covered with galvanized iron on property extending from the corner of Wood and Vine Streets about one-half of a city block to White Oak Bayou. The company envisioned oil transportation between its Spindletop wells and New Orleans, either through a pipeline or by barge, and wanted to service Houston also. Alderman James A. Thompson moved that the council refer this request to the fire committee and the fire chief "with power to act." Thompson also asked that the council ensure that the city would be held blameless in the event of any damage claims arising from placement of the tank. (37)

At the next council meeting a group of citizens filed a counterpetition to protest the Lone Star project. The petitioners, "citizens and tax payers owning property and residing near the proposed site" in the Fifth Ward, alleged that oil was dangerous and emitted an unpleasant odor. The appellants asked the council to clear Vine Street of all obstructions and to reassert municipal claim to the passageway to "protect our homes, lives and property." The endorsements and dated notations on the original petition indicate that on July 29, 1901, the document went to key groups and figures in the regulatory process--the council fire committee, the city engineer, the city attorney, and Fifth Ward aldermen. Two weeks later they reported to the council that they had sided with the citizens' protest. The council adopted the report, effectively blocking construction of the tank. (38)

Lone Star's agent in Houston was R. W. Gamble and Company, a major supplier of oil-field equipment and steel storage tanks and later an oil-land and stock brokerage. Company communications with Mayor J. D. Woolford and the city council shed a great deal of light on the business arrangements and legal snares associated with gaining municipal permission to store fuel oil. A letter from the company to the mayor, dated July 30, 1901, recounted how Lone Star, through Gamble, sought to place an oil tank in Houston. Gamble claimed that on July 5, 1901, it had leased land along Wood Street near White Oak Bayou, between blocks fifty-eight and fifty-nine on the city map, and in turn subleased the site to Lone Star and Crescent Oil Company. (39)

Yet the letter to Mayor Woolford noted that on July 29, City Engineer I. Austin Miller had notified Gamble that the city "would not permit the occupancy of said land" since Houston had possession of or would make claim to possess it. The original lessor insisted that he never conveyed the land to the city; that there was no grant to prove any such conveyance; and that the city never "opened, improved, layed off and occupied said land as a City Street," which meant that any title the city may have had at one time was void and forfeit. In addition Gamble contended that not being allowed for two weeks to occupy the land caused the company "material monetary loss." The company asked that the city legal department examine the situation and "designate ... that portion, if any, which the City possess title to." (40)

Gamble's letter explains why the formal statement delivered August 12, 1901, by City Engineer Miller and the fire committee sided with local opponents of the proposed Lone Star tank. The report stated that the relevant county deed records showed that Vine Street was "open between blocks 58 & 59." Therefore, Gamble had subleased to Lone Star a passageway claimed by the city for public use and within the city limits. The law firm of Stewart, Stewart and Lockett, acting as the city attorney, noted that Section 34 of the city charter granted the city council the power to "prevent or regulate the storing of inflammable oils within the City limits" (though the lawyers omitted the remainder of the charter phrase: "within the city limits in such quantity as to endanger the safety of adjacent property"). A tank placed in or on Vine Street would abut other property, thus putting the question of siting it under municipal jurisdiction. If the proposed tank posed a threat to nearby property, there would be grounds to disqualify the site. (41) By adopting the recommendation, the city council affirmed the view that under existing police powers, even without a specific statute dealing with fuel oil, the municipality had valid legal authority to control oil use inside Houston.

In a petition delivered to Mayor Woolford and the city council a week later on August 19, Gamble renewed its request to "erect an oil tank on Wood street...." The company complained that it had conferred in advance with the mayor, the city attorney, and the fire committee about "possible objections on the part of the city to our erecting a tank" on the Vine Street property roughly seventy-five feet from Wood Street on a slope leading to White Oak Bayou. The mayor had assured Gamble that there was "no possible objection." Gamble also alleged that prior to the city council meeting of August 12, when the adverse report came before the aldermen, the company had questioned the city attorney about the Vine Street property and that neither he nor members of the fire committee had claimed this land on behalf of the city. Therefore, Gamble contended, the site on Vine and Wood Streets was a perfect location for an oil tank. It fulfilled "all the precautionary requirements and conditions" prescribed by the "insurance companies in regard to the erection of said tank." A crescent-shaped brick and earth retaining wall to be constructed between the heavy steel tank and the bayou would make it "absolutely impossible for any of this oil to get into the Bayou" in case of fire. This oil catchment, Gamble assured the city, could handle, together with "excavations which are to be made," four to six times the tank's capacity. In addition, Gamble pointed out, a pumping station would connect the tank to railroad loading racks during delivery so that oil would never come into contact with the atmosphere or be exposed to "light, fire or flame anywhere near it." The tank would also have attached steam pipes for fire suppression in case lightning ignited the oil. (42)

As additional evidence in favor of the Vine Street site, Gamble also introduced approval from "the special committee of Insurance Agents," with whom company officials had visited on August 12, 1901, the same day that the Houston city council had blocked the tank. While Houston sources do not identify the members, the insurance committee, judging from similar events in Mobile and New Orleans, was probably made up of prominent insurance brokers, agents, or company representatives specifically picked to lobby the city to frame an oil-storage ordinance in harmony with the industry's safety concerns. Gamble alleged that this special committee had said the proposed location for the tank was an "ideal spot." Closing the arguments, Gamble pointed out that the Lone Star oil tank, placed in a "hollow space" and surrounded by "natural and artificial fire precaution," would essentially be a "buried tank," a configuration that matched insurance demands for underground tanks. But Gamble's tone was not completely obsequious. "We feel that we have a right to complain at the treatment we have received," a Gamble official announced. The city council had not responsibly considered the company's request; Gamble was "legally, justly, & equitably" entitled to a permit. (43)

Risk management was important to the city's fire-insurance agents, since they were contractually obligated to indemnify many property owners against fire loss. In the creation of an interface between energy supply and demand, the city should, the agents insisted, take into consideration their serious concerns about fuel-oil use. Their envoy J. B. Cochran asked the city council to prescribe special permits for those who wanted to set up fuel-oil apparatus. In the context of city police powers, this move would enlarge the application of an existing policy that required permits in order to improve (repair or reconstruct) buildings within the city limits--a procedure also used in Mobile and New Orleans. The council referred the insurers' request to the city attorney and the fire and ordinance committees, aware that it would take a new ordinance to establish specific regulations on using fuel oil in Houston. (44)

The underwriters' petition was a classic statement of compliance-based regulation. It offered "detailed prescriptive safety requirements" for controlling fuel-oil usage with which engineers, equipment erectors, suppliers, and consumers had to comply. The criteria could be observed, measured, and evaluated in terms of physical dimensions, types and arrangements of equipment, and tank placement. For example, supply tanks, designed to feed a boiler or hold several hundred gallons of oil for daily industrial use, should be put underground and made of galvanized iron, steel, or boiler iron that was at least an eighth of an inch in thickness. For the storage of fuel oil in an existing tank that was above or partially above the ground or in a new tank that could not be put underground, the insurance regulations demanded that the tank be at least one hundred feet "from any building, platform or shed" and be oriented so that oil flowing out of it would not run toward any nearby structures. Underground tanks would have to be at least ten feet from the foundation of any buildings, and tank tops would have to be at least four feet below the surface. The highest point of the tank would need to be at least two feet below any device in which oil burned. There were also provisions for how to convey fuel oil to the burner apparatus and a requirement for iron standpipes. (45)

The insurers also stipulated safety standards for storing larger amounts of fuel oil. Massive aboveground oil-storage tanks erected in Houston, holding two thousand to ten thousand or more barrels (with forty-two gallons per barrel), would have to be at least 250 feet from Buffalo Bayou and 150 feet from "any combustible property." The underwriters argued that such restrictions would not impose hardships on anyone but would, "at the same time," preserve the "safety and security" of city property. They designed the bayou provision to prevent property owners along the channel from suffering a loss if lightning set oil tanks on fire and burning oil flowed down the bayou. (46)

The contents of the petition were similar to insurance rules on using "crude petroleum for fuel in steam plants," outlined in a letter dated February 2, 1901, from Childress and Taylor, a Houston insurance firm, to the Houston Daily Post. Faced with unusual, unanticipated, or adverse risks, agents sometimes wrote special conditions or exceptions into a standard policy. It became a habit to put these at the end of the policy, so they became known as riders or attachments. Eventually, insurers standardized the conditions and exceptions that applied to various situations. Insurance companies codified, printed, and distributed these rules, thereby allowing agents who were not technically trained to detect unique risks simply to attach the appropriate exception to a standard policy. In addition, some companies used these provisions to devise special forms that contained the appropriate general wording applicable to a particular hazard or risk but added blank spaces to record the details of time, place, and so forth. Since Houston ordinances in 1901 did not specifically address fuel-oil use, insurance policy riders and special forms were the only restraints available in the face of the looming tide of oil use in the Gulf Coast region. Childress and Taylor's letter noted that they wrote "[i]n answer to many inquiries in regard to the use of crude petroleum...." (47) In the absence of a storage ordinance, potential oil users, before putting in an oil-storage tank, sought approval from their insurance agents in addition to a building improvement or reconstruction permit from the city engineer.

Through the petition in August 1901, Houston insurance underwriters pressured city leaders to write a municipal ordinance using the language of the insurers' special policy provisions or forms applicable to burning fuel oil. Such a law would shift the burden of approval to the city, make consistent the process of obtaining permits to use oil as fuel, and lay the groundwork for a debate in Houston over fuel-oil dangers and constraints. An open discussion of risk would soon result.

In early September 1901 more firms asked for the city's permission to erect oil-storage tanks. The Texas and New Orleans Railroad Company (TNORR) petitioned the Houston city council for permission to build a fuel-oil storage tank on a vacant block in the Fifth Ward. The Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway Company (GCSFRC) also asked permission to put up a steel oil tank in the middle of a Houston city block. The council referred both petitions to the city engineer and the committees on fire and streets and bridges. (48)

Facing pressure from both citizens and businesses, the city aldermen began to take action at the council meeting on Monday, September 16, 1901. Houston residents again expressed great concern about the hazards of fuel oil. Having assessed the risk of oil storage, they submitted a petition to the city council that opposed the proposed GCSFRC oil tank. In addition, the fire and ordinance committees recommended that the council refer the August 19 petition from insurance underwriters to the city attorney with instructions to draft an ordinance controlling oil-tank placement in the city. The full council took up this recommendation straightaway as new business. The city attorney had anticipated the committee report and introduced an "Ordinance governing the construction and building of tanks for fuel oil and at what distances they may be located from surrounding property." Alderman Malcolm D. Bennett asked that the ordinance committee consider the proposal immediately during a fifteen-minute recess and then report to the council. Alderman Louis E. Miller tried to sidetrack this expeditious review, asking that the ordinance "take its regular course." He may have asked for the delay because, as the title of the newly introduced ordinance suggests, it apparently dealt only with bulk storage of oil and may not have addressed supply tank and boiler plant apparatuses, which would have required a lot of technical details. On a procedural vote the council rejected Miller's motion but subsequently agreed to his second motion that the ordinance committee delay its report until the next week and that the clerk distribute copies of the proffered ordinance to each alderman. (49)

This roundabout maneuvering produced a detailed ordinance that was a template for the city's mediation between energy supply and demand. Ordinance particulars provide important, concrete evidence of how technical skill and information shaped Houston's material culture. In most instances in which the fuel-oil ordinance underwent change arising out of debate by the city council, the city either sought the well-informed opinions of the city engineer, the chief of the fire department, or the city boiler inspector or indirectly followed the advice of technicians, surveyors, and inspectors from the insurance ranks. This illustrated a developing municipal reliance on professional expertise in the face of increasingly complex problems of governance. Engineers, knowledgeable specialists, and men of practical experience represented "systems of technical accomplishment," used increasingly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to organize sizable areas of the built environment. (50)

At a meeting on September 30, 1901, Alderman Hiram L. Robinson brought before the council an "Ordinance amending the Oil Tank Ordinance," the title of which indicates that it was a substitute for the city attorney's original proposal two weeks earlier. The council consigned Robinson's tendered measure to committee scrutiny. (51) Even though there is no known text of Robinson's ordinance, two closely related, extant variants of the city council's final enactment provide some of the fine points of its content and evolution. The first rendition, entitled "An Ordinance to Regulate the Use and Storage of Crude Petroleum and Fuel Oil by Consumers in the City of Houston," contained in thirteen sections a staggering amount of detail on construction, materials, placement of appendages and attached instruments or devices, the diameters of supply, suction, and overflow pipes, and the size of the reservoir in which a tank must rest. (52)

Sections one through eight dealt with relatively small supply tanks, perhaps ten to eight hundred barrels, which typically would be placed just outside a building whose boilers burned fuel oil. Section one ordered that tanks for storing oil in Houston be made of boiler or tank iron that was three-sixteenths of an inch in thickness. Tanks had to be "placed underground in all cases." A tank fifty feet or less from a building had to have a ventilation pipe that ran underground to and then up an exterior wall to a point six feet above the roof. Most students of petroleum hazards, whether insurance agents, engineers, or amateur observers, believed fuel-oil vapors precipitated ignition. (53) Further, engineers relied upon ventilation pipes to dissipate sulfurous oil fumes. (54) Tanks inside a vault had to have a steam pipe at least one inch in diameter running from the boilers to the top of the vault to extinguish burning oil. (55)

To make allowances for consumers who wanted to use tanks already in place, the ordinance specified that a tank "wholly or inpart [sic] above ground" had to be at least seventy-five feet (changed from one hundred) from nearby buildings and oriented in such a way that the contents of a ruptured tank flowed away from any buildings or "combustible property." The tank also had to be inside a "brick vault or earth embankment" forming a reservoir whose volume was twice the tank capacity. Obviously, concerns about vapor explosions, vessel fractures, and fire damage to property animated these provisions. (56)

The ordinance stipulated that underground tanks with a capacity larger than twenty-five hundred gallons (fifty-nine and one-half barrels) had to be at least ten feet from the foundation of any building in which boilers burned crude oil and at least two feet below grade. Furthermore, the tank had to be situated so that no oil could flow by gravity through pumps, standpipes, or piping to the combustion device. Section six directed that "artificial pressure or suction" had to move oil "whether by pump, vacuum or other means" from such tanks to the ignition point. (57) Between the supply tank and the burners there had to be an iron standpipe no greater than ten gallons in capacity, located outside the building and bolted to the building foundation. Standpipes, whether open or closed, supported fluid pressure in a conveyance system. Closed standpipes were either risers or columns. The riser was a long string of vertical piping mounted in a building to make water available to suppress fires, particularly above the fourth floor. A very tall, large-diameter iron column, necessarily erected at the highest site available in a service area, stored water to guarantee sufficient pressure throughout a municipal water system to fight fires. (58) In the case of moving fuel oil to boiler burners, engineers employed a much smaller pipe, open at one end to insure through atmospheric pressure a steady network flow and to prevent unexpected or unwanted flow reversals that could occur due to siphoning. Depending upon space limitations or design considerations, one might substitute a small tank or "iron accumulator" fitted with a relief valve and overflow pipe for a standpipe to achieve the same purposes. (59)

Supply pipes ran from the storage tank to the standpipe and from the standpipe to the burners. The standpipe had to be equipped with an overflow outlet, the flow rate and internal diameter of which exceeded that of the oil-pump suction pipe. If the pump malfunctioned and pulled more oil out of the supply tank than was moving from the standpipe to the burners, the excessive oil could return to the tank through the overflow conduit rather than spilling uncontrolled out of the standpipe or possibly forcing too much oil to the burners. (60)

Also extant is a second version of this ordinance that is very similar in wording to the above-noted rendition. On October 7, 1901, the ordinance committee recommended to the city council "The passage of the within ordinance as a substitute for the original with the same caption," but the council debated and amended this draft through December 1901. (61)

In the second version, the subheading prefacing sections nine through thirteen is similar to the first extant edition. These sections in the first version of the document covered "large storage tanks." Section nine limited the capacity of a single bulk tank inside the city of Houston to ten thousand barrels (amended from two thousand), or 420,000 gallons. Although there was no limit on the number that could be erected, no two tanks could be closer than 2,000 feet. Further, each tank had to be at least 250 feet from any "combustible property" and inside a dugout or entrenchment walled in by a brick-and-earth embankment that could hold twice the tank's capacity. These constrictions ruled out tank farms with hundreds of tanks, except perhaps on empty property on the fringes of the city. No large tank, under any circumstances, could be placed at a distance of 250 feet or less from Buffalo or White Oak Bayous. Consonant with other applications of municipal police powers such as building regulations, any person or corporation that wanted to burn crude petroleum or fuel oil in Houston had to obtain a permit from the city engineer before installing a storage tank. Section eleven made the chief of the fire department responsible for certifying that the installed oil plant complied "with all of the above regulations before being used." (62)

Council observers assumed that if the usual course of events played out, aldermen would vote at their October 15, 1901, meeting for final passage of the amended fuel-oil ordinance. However, for reasons that are not clear, the council at that time delayed the vote. (63) Delay bred frustration. In the city council's meeting of October 21, 1901, Alderman H. A. Halverton offered several new amendments to the oil-tank ordinance. He pleaded for the council to take up the ordinance with his amendments and to pass it. This was a pressing matter, Halverton urged, "as the storage of oil for fuel purposes was becoming a matter of great importance to the manufacturers' interest of the city." Storage was also of interest to him since he was the president of the Houston Drilling and Supply Company, organized in May 1901 in Houston to drill oil wells and to supply "oil well machinery" to other companies. The council instead decided to refer the fuel-oil measure to the ordinance committee again, with instructions to report at the next meeting about Halverton's changes. Once more, every alderman received a copy of the contested ordinance, presumably so they could study it and contribute to any coming discussions. (64)

Apparently those who had reservations about the ordinance or Halverton's amendments were not ready to give final approval. At the last meeting in October, the council carried a motion by alderman and metal manufacturer Malcolm D. Bennett ordering that the secretary of the council ask for model fuel-oil storage ordinances from several cities, including Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and San Francisco. (65) Either this was a delaying tactic, or those who supported the amended ordinance wanted to confirm that other cities had similar regulations. Precedents from other municipalities would blunt any claims that the city's leaders were strangling fuel-oil usage and sidetracking Houston's march to prosperity. Nothing happened for about two weeks because the city council got bogged down in other matters. At the council's meeting on December 3, 1901, the ordinance committee submitted an amended "Oil Tank Ordinance," but Alderman Louis E. Miller, an electrical engineer and coal dealer, moved that it was defective. The other council members agreed and referred the draft to the city's boiler inspector, W. E. Gale. (66)

At this point the Houston Chronicle joined the battle. In an editorial on December 7, the paper pointed out that the expanding use of fuel oil was a "new form of fire hazard" that had to be assessed by "use and experiment." Insurance underwriters did not have broad experience with fuel oil or statistics on the number of hazardous incidents to be traced to it, making it difficult for the insurers to "adjust their rates" to match the hazard level of fuel oil. The writer recommended that Houston officials quickly pass ordinances that minimized fire risks from fuel oil, thereby making it hard for insurance companies to raise rates unless they could show fuel oil constituted a special hazard. (67)

Ten days before Christmas the city boiler inspector reported back to the council on the proposed oil-tank ordinance. He recommended equipping oil-supply pumps with a pressure regulator to prevent excessive flow-rates leading to accidents in the ignition chamber. Pump-fed, unpressurized standpipes should have float regulators to restrain excessive flow on the tank-to-standpipe side of the conveyance systems. But one proposed addition would prove controversial and would ultimately obstruct Houston's search for acceptable regulation. "In no case," read the addendum, "will Oil tanks be allowed under side walks or in streets." Not anticipating a great deal of trouble passing the ordinance--given the time spent and the changes incorporated into it--the council once again referred the amended fuel ordinance to its ordinance committee but without comment. (68)

The committee reported positively on the oil ordinance on January 6, 1902. In addition to the emendations that the city boiler inspector suggested on December 14, 1901, the committee made various other changes to the text submitted in early December 1901. In section three, for example, committee members reinstated a requirement that aboveground supply tanks had to be 100 feet "from any building or other exposure." Section eight required that the accumulator tank, installed in place of a vertical standpipe, had to be put outside the building where burners it served were located. But of the changes made by the committee, the most interesting were figures scrawled in the text. While the reported ordinance retained the stipulation that large bulk-storage tanks had to be at least 250 feet from "any combustible property," ink emendations showed that ordinance authors enlarged permitted tank capacity from five thousand to ten thousand barrels. Recall that the text of the first extant version of the oil-tank ordinance had the figure of two thousand overwritten by hand to specify ten thousand barrels. The Houston Daily Post reported that the oil-tank ordinance (in its second version) had a five-thousand-barrel limit but that council members changed this threshold to ten thousand barrels under a suspension of the rules and by a unanimous roll-call vote just before final passage. This debate reflected council disagreements about how much oil was too much oil to be stored in Houston wards and neighborhoods. (69)

Finally, on January 6, 1902, after five months of discussion and maneuvers, the Houston city council passed a fuel-oil ordinance. Companies, already straining at the bit to get started converting to oil, acted quickly. Three days after the passage of the ordinance, Santa Fe Railroad announced that it was constructing a 10,000-barrel tank on St. Emanuel Street, using materials that had been at hand for months but had gone unused because of regulative uncertainties. The company had asked to build in early September 1901, but in the absence of a specific ordinance on storing fuel oil, nothing concrete came out of the railroad's request. (70) Southern Pacific Railroad, a major line that served Houston, deliberated at length about converting its locomotives to fuel oil. Just after passage of Houston's oil-tank ordinance, railroad observers determined that Southern Pacific would soon build oil tanks in Houston and other points west to El Paso. By August 1902 oil burner installation in the company's locomotives was underway. Company officials estimated that at completion the system would consume 10,000 barrels of oil per day. A small subsidiary, International and Great Northern Railroad Company, announced in March 1902 that all of its passenger trains "in and out of Houston" burned fuel oil. (71) Oil supplier Southwestern Oil Company had a crew of men at its Houston Heights refinery set down the "foundations for new storage tanks" as part of a plant addition. The company anticipated that by April 1, 1902, its refinery would be turning out 1,000 barrels of refined oil per day. Penman Steel Tank Company of Chicago closed a deal with Southern Pacific Railroad for twenty-five to thirty very large tanks, ranging in size from 37,500 to 50,000 barrels, at a cost of $250,000; at least one of the tanks would serve Houston. (72)

On January 20, 1902, the firm of Binz and Settegast petitioned the city council for permission to "construct [an] oil reservoir in [the] basement of the Binz building on the Texas Ave. side" in downtown Houston. The council, following guidelines in the recently passed oiltank ordinance, referred the petition to its fire and ordinance committees, the city engineer, and the chief of the fire department. (73) In late March 1901, about ten months before this request, city officials had faced a similar solicitation about fuel oil. Candy manufacturer Charles Heim, who had a factory at 405-407 Sixth Street, had asked the city council for permission to "erect a storage reservoir for fuel oil" under the sidewalk in front of his business. The finance, streets and bridges, ordinance, and fire committees, as well as the city attorney and city engineer, had taken the matter under review. The council's choice to send the petition to many subgroups and municipal officers suggests that Heim's request had caught the council off guard. (74) At the next council meeting, April 1, 1901, the fire committee had reported favorably on the petition, provided that no one could hold the city liable for any damages "that may occur from whatever cause." The council had then referred this question to the finance committee and the city attorney, who immediately concurred in the report. (75) It is unclear whether or not the council ratified the reports and legal opinion, but assuming it did, these deliberations plainly show that the city was quite leery of the liability implications of storing oil under sidewalks.

The petition from Binz and Settegast in January 1902 came to the city council under different circumstances. Only two weeks earlier, the city council had specifically disallowed storing oil under sidewalks. Why did Binz and Settegast ask permission to do something that was apparently illegal? The council received and concurred in a report given February 3, 1902, that addressed this puzzle. The ordinance committee recommended granting the entreaty from Binz and Settegast but stipulated that the proposed "oil reservoir" be "placed according to ordinance governing same." The fire committee and the fire-department chief added their consent, on the condition that tank placement conform to the "permit showing position" and dimensions. The building owners got the permission they needed because their submitted plans showed clearly that their oil-tank placement would satisfy the city's regulations. Further, in obtaining a building permit, they had convinced city officials that installation would follow the oil-tank ordinances. (76)

These seemingly contradictory dictates made it apparent that the new oil-tank ordinance required some fine-tuning. As it stood, the ordinance absolutely banned placing oil tanks under sidewalks, and tanks above or partially above the ground had to be at least one hundred feet from surrounding buildings. (77) Jacob Binz, an influential merchant, wanted to use the new cheap fuel in densely built central Houston, where multistory buildings had exterior walls flush to one another or had only narrow alleys between them. Following the demands of the ordinance generally was not possible in relatively crowded areas.

Only an ambiguity in the city's new regulation allowed the council to rule in favor of Binz and Settegast. Section five of the oil-tank ordinance allowed underground tanks to be as close as ten feet from a building foundation. Owners could claim that a reservoir set down in the center of a basement was more than ten feet from any foundation or, alternatively, that a tank placed under a very broad sidewalk was still ten or more feet from the foundation. Since extensions of a building basement under sidewalks were by law part of the basement, a strict interpretation of Houston's oil-tank ordinance would have led to the denial of a tank permit for the Binz building and would have banned oil tanks in any basement that extended under a sidewalk. This would prevent many Houston business-district property owners from using oil.

If some clarification of the ordinance was in order, the question was whether the best course was to abolish, moderate, leave alone, or toughen tank-placement requisites. One group, influenced and led by civic promoters, businessmen, and oil distributors, thought that rigorous scrutiny of the application from Binz and Settegast showed that the current regulations were unjustifiably strict. Such regulations discouraged fuel-oil adoption because no one wanted to spend time and money seeking construction permits, only to find that the ordinance requirements might be unachievable. On the other side were the insurance underwriters, anxious property owners, and vocal ward residents who feared expensive conflagrations. For these observers, the request by Binz and Settegast threatened to unleash a wave of applications asking to store oil in basements and under sidewalks in Houston's central business district, thereby jeopardizing the city's well-being. (78)

To make the city's oil-storage regulations palatable to all sides, Alderman Halverton introduced at the council meeting on February 10, 1902, an amendment to section five of the oil-tank ordinance. The change proposed to allow tanks under sidewalks, still at least ten feet away from the building foundation, if the tanks were encased in a twelve-inch brick or concrete sarcophagus. On February 17, 1902, the city council approved the ordinance, allowing commercial consumers to install brick-encased oil tanks under sidewalks contiguous to their buildings and thus to enjoy Houston's new, cheap fuel. (79)

Not everyone was happy with the changes. George P. Brown, influential secretary of the Houston Business League, complained to the Houston Chronicle that the state and the city of Houston had imposed too many restrictions on the use of fuel oil. Beaumont oil, Brown contended, was not the same as other flammable liquids whose "careless use" had caused so many accidents around the country. He argued that reasonable care and "proper precautions" made fuel oil safe to store anywhere in Houston. The ordinances already passed on oil storage delivered a "grievous injury to the oil interests" and shut out of Houston large quantities of money earmarked for pipelines and oil tanks. It was, Brown charged, as though some "ulterior influence" was "at work to hinder and hamper the use of fuel oil" in Houston--very likely a reference to the insurance interests that had played a major role in devising the restrictions on the storage and use of oil. Brown proposed that the city council have an open heating on this subject and make some concessions on controls on "fuel oil, storage and conveyance pipes." (80)

Brown disliked the city's application of the "precautionary principle" in its management of fire hazards. (81) In such cases a concern for the "magnitude or severity of the consequences of actions not taken" shapes municipal policy on fire. Having a responsibility for the health, safety, and welfare of citizens, Houston authorities believed they had to act with "prudence and anticipation." Not having objective, statistical information on the risks of public use of fuel oil, the city relied on a vast body of anecdotal, experiential, and narrative material about oil as a fire hazard. It was sufficiently convincing for some leaders, insurance underwriters, and residents to act upon, rather than spending time arguing over the credibility of evidence of hazards or weighing various regulatory outcomes against the possibility of a major fuel-oil accident. The latter would have amounted to an inchoate "risk, cost and benefit analysis...." In August 1901 local insurance underwriters had referred to an anticipated oil-storage ordinance as a safeguard, not as calculative "models of events" that predicted quantitatively the "probability of an adverse outcome" from using oil. They wanted an enactment to be a "legally mandated precaution" that positively, absolutely reduced fire dangers, notwithstanding the lack of statistically probative knowledge about the exact perils of fuel-oil usage. (82) Note, however, that Brown's rhetoric of reasonable care, proper precautions, concession, and compromise suggested that he wanted city officials to incorporate causation and probability into their deliberations. They could accept some risk by balancing "potential gains or losses" and therefore could moderate restrictions on using fuel oil. (83)

Brown's recommendations brought council action once again. Less than a week after Brown's first newspaper interview, Alderman W. W. Thomas proposed that the major parties in the matter--the Business League, the Cotton Exchange, the Houston Manufacturers' Association, the "insurance agents," the chief of the fire department, the city council ordinance committee, and the mayor--perfect an ordinance that would meet the "demands of the users of fuel oil without causing an advance in the rates of insurance ... or creating a menace generally to the people of Houston." Although the council carried Thomas's motion, no negotiations had taken place by March 8, owing to lobbying, the Houston Chronicle claimed, from the Dallas-based Texas Fire Prevention Association (TFPA). This organization had visited Houston in September 1901 and questioned the fire department's readiness and proficiency. The newspaper published a letter from the TFPA to local underwriters that alleged that agents of the "oil and railroad interests" were leading the effort to water down the oil-tank ordinance. The association asked the Houston agents to oppose "strenuously" any changes to a regulation that the group regarded as "very fair to all interests...." (84)

But Brown was not finished. On Tuesday, March 4, 1902, he told the Houston Chronicle that fuel-oil ordinances were "of supreme importance" to the city and should be written to "cause the general use of the Beaumont product locally." Unquestionably, Brown argued, fuel oil was safe and a key to Houston's future. But Houston, Brown complained, would be the last place to take advantage of this wonderfully cheap product because of the "brick wall that has been thrown around this city by indifferent legislation...." Brown concluded that it would be a step in the right direction if the council followed Alderman Thomas's suggestion, made the previous Monday, to have a committee of citizens and councilmen amend the present oil-tank ordinance. (85)

Obviously, both Brown and Thomas thought the city council had not acted impartially and had allowed the insurance interests to shape its decisions about storing oil. The solution was negotiation, which in effect was a plea for "[c]oordinating decision making in policy planning...." The use of reason in decision making can either be "substantive," focusing on "what to choose," or it can be "procedural," that is, "how to choose." Brown and Thomas aimed at procedural reason. The "how" they preferred was face-to-face group negotiations. Further, asking stakeholders to haggle over fuel-oil regulations was an assertion that public "[p]olicy formulation" involved reconciling various municipal factions, whose needs might be quite different from, even in conflict or inconsistent with, one another. The outcome of this process would not be the choice most desired by a particular portion of the municipal population, but instead one "acceptable ... for almost all parties concerned." (86)

The city council did not immediately call a conference. (87) Instead, at its meeting on March 10, 1902, the council took up a recommendation from the committee on records and accounts to revoke two pipeline franchises granted about one year earlier to H. W. Cortes and associates and to James P. Irwin, B. F. Bonner, and others, claiming that the franchisees had not begun work within the required twelve months. (88) To fill any gaps in Houston's fuel-delivery network that might be created by the revocations, Alderman Louis Miller proposed granting a twenty-five-year franchise to D. Frank Carden (Dallas), E. L. Bacon (Beaumont), and James McCane (Houston) to construct a pipeline for pumping oil and gas to Houston consumers. (89)

However, as important as these franchises were to a city anxious to use fuel oil, George P. Brown and Alderman W. W. Thomas were too influential to be ignored. Before the city council met on Monday, March 17, Thomas's proposed colloquy came to pass. Insurance envoys Jerome B. Cochran and Alfred K. Taylor met with Houston Business League representative Henry F. MacGregor; F. N. Gray, delegate from the Manufacturers' Association; Aldermen M. D. Bennett and H. L. Robinson; and Mayor J. D. Woolford. The goal was to modify the current oil-tank storage ordinance, which Brown, the Houston Chronicle, and other oil-distribution sympathizers regarded as excessively restrictive. Despite a low-key campaign by the Houston Chronicle and its rival, the Houston Daily Post, to prove that Beaumont oil was not highly flammable, the delegates had not reached an agreement by April 1, 1902. (90)

Houston residents kept the controversy alive, however. "Property owners & Merchants" from downtown petitioned the city council on April 3, 1902, asking them to block the "erection of [an] oil tank under [the] sidewalk of the Binz Building." They argued that the proposed tank was "not in accordance with the Oil-Tank Ordinance." Petitioners contiguous to and near the Binz building obviously were unwilling to risk what they considered to be a fire hazard. It is also possible that insurance brokers had threatened to cancel the policies of these property owners if the Binz tank was constructed. Petitioner motives notwithstanding, the council took the request seriously and sent the petition to the ordinance committee and the city attorney with instructions to "prepare [an] Ordinance repealing [the] Amendment to Oil-Tank Ordinance," that is, removing the change made to section five allowing oil storage under sidewalks. (91) At a meeting of the council on April 8, 1902, aldermen took up the re-amended oil-tank ordinance, adopting the report of the ordinance committee and passing the ordinance under suspended rules. Once more, oil could not be stored under sidewalks. (92) Insurance spokesman Jerome B. Cochran said the ordinance disallowing under-the-sidewalk storage was "entirely satisfactory" to the insurance faction. According to the Houston Chronicle, the council approved the ordinance "upon the strength" of Cochran's statement. (93)

The regulation of fuel oil had undergone complicated changes in the course of only a few months. After a long period of political negotiations and discussions, the city council had passed a new oil-tank ordinance in early 1902 banning storage under sidewalks. The council modified the law in February to allow such storage but then reversed itself in April 1902. Clearly, the request by Binz and Settegast to place a fuel-oil supply tank in the basement of the Binz Building had triggered a review of banning under-the-sidewalk oil storage. The city first tempered its fuel-oil restrictions by making this type of storage possible, acknowledging that it was risky while concluding that it was necessary in order to encourage Houston to embrace cheap available fuel. But this concession was unacceptable to property owners and businessmen near the Binz building and provoked the petition to disallow installing the oil tank.

The existence of both abiding opposition and parallel complaints that the city was obstructing economic progress requires further explication of the dynamics of this dispute. Legal proceedings that arose because of the debate about under-the-sidewalk oil storage provide some clarification. According to a court decision in 1907, Jacob Binz signed a contract March 11, 1902, with National Supply Company (NSC) in which NSC agreed to "furnish the labor and material" to construct "an oil plant under the sidewalk adjoining Binz's property." NSC delivered the materials to Binz, who refused to allow NSC to assemble the fuel-oil plant, leaving an unpaid bill of approximately $850. NSC sued Binz for payment. Binz's lawyers responded to NSC's claims with a demurrer, a "general denial," and a countersuit against NSC, the city of Houston, and several insurance companies. The attorneys related that in January 1902 the city of Houston adopted an oil-tank storage ordinance that banned placing tanks under sidewalks. This was the legal standard when Binz asked the city council for permission to install one. About one month later, February 17, 1902, the city council amended the ordinance to allow storage under sidewalks. This was the regulation in force when Binz signed the contract with NSC. (94)

In addition to these factual statements, Binz's lawyers made some very provocative charges. They claimed that even before the amended ordinance passed the city council on February 17, 1902, Binz had submitted to the Houston insurance underwriters the plans of his proposed oil tank, which they subsequently approved. The insurance men determined that "there was no increased risk" (in storing oil under the sidewalk) and "for considerations" (fees for permits) agreed to keep their fire-insurance policies in force and to renew them when needed on the Binz building. Furthermore, Binz's attorneys insisted that the insurance companies--not the oil or railroad interests, as implied by some--had persuaded the Houston city council to amend the oil-tank ordinance so as to allow storage under sidewalks. Once the amended ordinance was in place, Binz consummated the contract with NSC and obtained both a construction permit from the city of Houston and permits from the insurance companies, who attached them to their fire policies on the building. (95)

But according to Binz's legal advisors, the insurance people reneged on these arrangements. The insurance interests told Binz and NSC that if they installed the oil tank and equipment, the companies would cancel all fire-insurance policies on the Binz building and see that Binz would not be able to obtain insurance from anyone. More accusations followed. Binz's lawyers insisted that the Houston insurance interests persuaded the city council to restore the ban on under-the-sidewalk oil storage. Allegedly, the underwriters got their way because they threatened to cancel the policies on not only the Binz building but also all nearby buildings, putting the Houston central business district in peril. (96)

How does this litigation shed light on the 1902 Houston fuel-oil situation? First, the Binz case exposed a web of questionable dealings behind the public debate over how to handle fuel oil. The defendant's claims, if true, reflected unfavorably on the insurance underwriters' tactics and the city council's willingness to buckle under pressure. Second, the lawsuit revealed serious misunderstandings about where various parties stood on the oil-storage issue. Participants plainly held mistaken assumptions about what they stood to gain from promises, permits, or favors exchanged among municipal officials, property owners, and insurance men.

Aside from the influence of insurance interests, the city, before changing safety regulations, had to take into account its legal liability for sidewalk accidents. Liability was a legal issue central to the nature of municipalities; their police powers not only were used to impose order and protect community well-being but also entailed various obligations. If passersby sustained injury or loss because of a fire or explosion originating in an under-the-sidewalk oil reservoir, they might charge the city with failure to impose reasonable restrictions on oil storage. Municipal power over the streets was complete, unless the legislature by charter or special statute directed otherwise. This meant city governments had control over the sidewalks, since in common law they were considered part of the street. Power over streets imposed a duty to keep the roadway, curbs, and sidewalks in repair. Even if a city required lot owners to pay all or part of the costs of constructing sidewalks, the city remained responsible if they fell into disrepair. (97) According to its 1897 charter, Houston enjoyed almost absolute power over and responsibility for its streets and sidewalks. The charter invested in the city the responsibility "to regulate the use, and abate and remove encroachments and obstructions thereon." (98) Storage of fuel oil under city sidewalks was an important legal matter, since injuries arising from it implied city negligence in the repair and maintenance of streets.

Several petitions came to the city council after it had settled upon a fuel-tank ordinance in April 1902. Jacob Binz petitioned the city once again in May 1902 for permission to put up an oil-storage tank in his downtown building, but following an unfavorable report in early June 1902 by the council fire committee and the city attorney, council members rejected the petition. (99) Late that month, the GCSFRC repeated a request to place an oil tank on the block bounded by Preston Avenue, Prairie Avenue, St. Emanuel Street, and Hutchins Street. The city council again denied permission for the tank at a meeting on July 8, 1902, because the council committee responsible for fire-related matters had determined that the proposal was "not in accordance with the requirements of the oil-tank ordinance." (100)

Thus, the city had fashioned a procedure to control fuel-oil storage that in light of contemporary knowledge and experiences, satisfied many critics of unregulated oil use. This was important. Mobile and New Orleans also required oil consumers to obtain permits from their city engineers to erect a supply tank and specified how installers were to arrange the equipment, but unlike Houston, these port cities adopted rules that confined massive, bulk oil storage to specific districts bordered by certain streets. Houston relied primarily on tank capacity (ten thousand barrels), minimum distance between tanks (2,000 feet), and minimum distance (250 feet) from Buffalo Bayou to determine if bulk storage tanks belonged inside or outside the city limits.

In subsequent ordinances there were, of course, changes in various details such as allowable tank volume, but generally these later regulations reflected the same concerns addressed in 1901-1902. Complications arose but only in step with advancing petroleum technologies and new markets for hydrocarbon distillates. For example, in May 1911 the city passed an ordinance that controlled the handling of gasoline and other inflammable liquids. The measure addressed placing tanks outside buildings, burying them below ground, or covering them with earth or concrete if put in the basement of a building, and it specified standards for tank metal gauge, riveting, caulking, pipe connections, openings, venting, suction pumps, and check valves. Gasoline or other inflammable liquids could not be stored in portable tanks larger than fifty gallons in capacity. Inflammable liquids inside buildings but not in supply tanks had to be stored in five-gallon safety containers with a limit of one container per building. (101)

There was, however, one notable exception to the similarity between the 1901-1902 oil-storage ordinance and subsequent enactments. Comparing the 1904 published edition of code revisions to those of 1914 and 1922 shows that the city of Houston once again reversed its position on under-the-sidewalk storage. (102) On May 13, 1913, Mayor Ben Campbell submitted to the city council an ordinance to alter Article 904 in Chapter 38 of the 1904 code compilation. The amended ordinance granted permission to have oil-supply tanks "outside of buildings or under sidewalks." The council considered and passed this amendment on the day of its introduction. (103)

The change did not represent unjustifiable vacillation, nor was it the result of poor civic leadership. Risk assessment rests upon a formula of the likelihood of an event (a hazard) multiplied by the scale of harmful consequences. As turn-of-the-century businessmen, insurance underwriters, and residents built up a body of experience with petroleum, employing increasingly reliable and sophisticated technology, Houston leaders modified or adjusted municipal regulations, reflecting lessons learned in how to avoid accidents and damage to property. As time passed, some substances proved to be less dangerous than previously believed. However, hydrocarbon distillates such as gasoline, benzine, and naphtha, substances that had made poorly refined kerosene (illuminating oil) extremely dangerous in the nineteenth century, unquestionably remained serious fire hazards after 1900 owing to effortless vaporization at room temperature. In particular, large quantities of gasoline received regulatory attention, engaging the city of Houston, as fuel oil had in 1901-1902, in mediating the relationship between a source of energy and demand for it.

This essay has examined Houston, Texas, from 1901 to 1915 in the context of the oil boom on the Texas Gulf Coast. It has focused upon the role the city played in creating a rational interface between a new energy source and anticipated energy demand. Houston city officials, businessmen, insurance agents, and concerned citizens took part in the politics of risk management. They negotiated the terms under which suppliers and consumers transported, stored, and used fuel oil in the city limits. On one hand, insurance underwriters, anxious property owners, and supportive ward politicians sought, through prescriptive regulations, strict guidelines for safe oil storage and usage. On the other hand, city boosters, oil-field entrepreneurs, investors, manufacturers, and other commercial interests insisted that the city set down reasonable rules for access to oil, largely out of a concern that Houston not fall behind rival communities in industry, finance, and commercial growth.

Starting in earnest in August 1901, the Houston city council devised, revised, and passed an oil-storage ordinance that eventually satisfied various parties and constituencies. City regulation of fuel oil rested upon Houston's charter-based police powers to protect citizen safety and the built environment. This task defined precisely the common-law notion that individual rights were always to be exercised under the limitation that they not endanger the health or welfare of the community. Despite a legal dispute about banning oil storage under sidewalks, the council settled on an ordinance in April 1902 that both satisfied insurance underwriters and was one under which businesses could work effectively to utilize the new resource. Houston's management of fire hazards and public nuisances through its police powers endured well into the twentieth century, preserving the built environment and keeping human capital from harm's way. (104)

(1) Regarding the difficulty of obtaining good coal in the 1880s at a reasonable price in Houston, see Harold L. Platt, "Energy and Urban Growth: A Comparison of Houston and Chicago," Southwestern Historical Quarterly, 91 (July 1987), 3. On lignite see "Houston, Texas," Houston Daily Post (hereinafter cited as HDP), June 8, 1901, p. 7, cols. 3-4. "How Houston Burns Wood," HDP, November 10, 1901, p. 12, col 2, addressed the city's consumption of wood. See also Joseph A. Pratt, "Letting the Grandchildren do it: Environmental Planning During the Ascent of Oil as a Major Energy Source," Public Historian: A Journal of Public History, 2 (Summer 1980), 29. Many friends and colleagues contributed greatly to this essay. Joseph Pratt and Martin Melosi of the University of Houston gave it credibility by inviting me to read an early draft at a meeting in March 2003 in Houston on environmental history. The history department of Rice University made it possible for me to present a second version at the Houston Area Southern Historians (HASH) Seminar in March 2004. Further, Mrs. Anna Russell, Houston City Secretary, and her assistants at the Office of the City Secretary found many valuable documents for me. Dr. Marty Olliff, Troy State University, Dothan, read two drafts and made very wise comments. Dr. Joe Jimmeh, my department chairman, frequently encouraged me. Auburn University librarians, including Marcus Kieltyka, Tim Dodge, and Marcia Boosinger, helped me greatly, as did Jeanne Celli, Miami University Library; Eric Wedeg and his staff at Tulane University's main library; and Katherine Nachod, Tulane University Law Library. May God sustain their lives and work with grace.

(2) On the dominance of coal and the challenge of fuel oil see David Stradling, Smokestacks and Progressives: Environmentalists, Engineers, and Air Quality in America, 1881-1951 (Baltimore, 1999), 6-11. It should be noted that fuel oil, as Stradling points out, became a primary energy source only in Texas and California, where local supplies made its cost competitive.

(3) Koen Steemers, "Energy and the City: Density, Buildings and Transport," Energy and Buildings, 35 (January 2003), 3, 9-10; Sam C. M. Hui, "Low Energy Building Design in High Density Urban Cities," Renewable Energy, 24 (November 2001), 628, 630-31; William E. Rees, "Urban Ecosystems: The Human Dimension," Urban Ecosystems, 1 (No. 1, 1997), 72; N. E. McIntyre, K. Knowles-Yanez, and D. Hope, "Urban Ecology as an Interdisciplinary Field: Differences in the Use of 'Urban' between the Social and Natural Sciences," Urban Ecosystems, 4 (No. 1, 2000), 14; and Ibrahim Dincer, "The Role of Exergy in Energy Policy Making," Energy Policy, 30 (2002), 137. See also James B. McSwain, "Fire Hazards and Protection of Property: Municipal Regulation of the Storage and Supply of Fuel Oil in Mobile, Alabama, 1894-1910," Journal of Urban History, 28 (July 2002), 599-628.

(4) The quotation is from Claudio Stares De Magalhaes, "Social Agents, the Provision of Buildings and Property Booms: The Case of Sao Paulo," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 23 (September 1999), 446. The technologies included rotary drilling rigs, field gathering networks, metal tanks, compressors, pipelines, burners, atomizers, regulators, and valves (along with replacement models and versions arising from adaptation, refinement, and improvement). Other necessary ingredients included the railroad motive power, signaling, and furnishings, as well as maritime vessels, boilers, rigging, steel barges, and pumps. Together these components were the means to discover oil, produce it, store it, and convey it to markets.

(5) Sidney A. Shapiro and Robert L. Glicksman, Risk Regulation at Risk: Restoring a Pragmatic Approach (Stanford, 2003), 51 (quotation). Martin J. Beckmann characterizes urban infrastructure as "basic to all economic life." In this category he includes "streets and public transportation; water supply and sewage removal; police and fire protection; judicial, educational, and health facilities; and parks and other recreational facilities." Beckmann, "An Economic Model of Urban Growth," in Jesse H. Ausubel and Robert Herman, eds., Cities and Their Vital Systems: Infrastructure Past, Present, and Future (Washington, D.C., 1988), 98. Natural environment means the "life-support systems of the earth: the atmosphere, oceans and water systems, soil and biological life." Karl Georg Hoyer and Petter Naess, "The Ecological Traces of Growth: Economic Growth, Liberalization, Increased Consumption--and Sustainable Urban Development?" Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning, 3 (July-September 2001), 177. The built environment is the "ensemble of our humanly created surroundings." Michael Benedikt, "Complexity, Value, and the Psychological Postulates of Economics," Critical Review, 10 (Fall 1996), 551.

(6) Eric H. Monkkonen, America Becomes Urban: The Development of U.S. Cities and Towns, 1780-1980 (Berkeley, 1988), 161-164.

(7) Disasters take place at the intersection of "society, technology, and environment." They represent "the failure of a society to adapt successfully to certain features of its natural and socially constructed environment...." See Anthony Oliver-Smith, "Anthropological Research on Hazards and Disasters," Annual Review of Anthropology, 25 (1996), 303-5 (quotations on p. 303); and Mark Manion and William M. Evan, "Technological Catastrophes: Their Causes and Prevention," Technology in Society, 24 (August 2002), 208, 216.

(8) F. H. Oliphant, "Petroleum," in United States Geological Survey, Mineral Resources of the United States: Calendar Year 1901 (Washington, D.C., 1902), 576. In "On the Use of Beaumont Oil as Fuel," Journal of the Association of Engineering Societies, 30 (March 1903), 96-97, Henry H. Humphrey noted that Beaumont crude had too much odiferous and sooty sulphur to burn in lamps but was well suited as fuel to replace more expensive coal.

(9) In late April 1901 "[t]wo immense iron tanks," each with a capacity of twenty thousand gallons, arrived at the pumping plant of the Cow Bayou Canal and Irrigation Company, having ridden to the site first on railroad flatcars and then on a barge from nearby Orange, Texas. The company stored fuel oil in them to burn for firing its boilers and planned to bring more oil as needed by barge directly from Beaumont. "Orange News Notes," HDP, May 1, 1901, p. 5, col. 4. See also "Figuring on Petroleum as Fuel," HDP, March 2, 1901, p. 3, col. 4; "To Use Oil for Fuel," HDP, March 31, 1901, p. 7, col. 2; and "Oil Mills of Houston," HDP, April 7, 1901, p. 11, col. 1.

(10) Houston, Beaumont, and Galveston newspapers constantly noted the influx of out-of-state visitors, investors, and technicians coming to see the Spindletop well, and the papers also received numerous written inquiries about it. For examples see "Well is Under Control," HDP, January 18, 1901, p. 5, cols. 3-4; and "New Rush on Beaumont," HDP, March 29, 1901, p. 5, col. 4.

(11) The Beaumont field accounted for roughly 16,000,000 of Texas's production of 18,083,658 barrels in 1902. The state turned out 17,955,572 barrels in 1903. The Beaumont contribution in 1903 was only half of its 1902 output, owing to a falloff in field pressure. Sour Lake and Saratoga made up the difference. D. H. Newland, ed., The Mineral Industry. Vol. XII: During 1903 (New York, 1904), 284-85.

(12) "Bailing the Oil Wells," HDP, July 27, 1901, p. 3, col. 4; see also Welsh (La.) Rice Belt Journal, June 27, 1902, p. 4, col. 3, for a paragraph on oil dealer Robinson and Day, which had sold eight hundred barrels of oil to local rice farmers the previous Tuesday to run their "pumping plants" (to power irrigation pumps). An editorial ibid., August 22, 1902, p. 4, col. 1, notes that "sugar planters and rice mill owners are now fully alive to the importance of oil as a fuel....'" They were moving quickly to install "machinery to burn oil" and were seeking supply contracts.

(13) F. N. Gray, secretary of the Houston Manufacturers' Association, observed that, owing to the high price of bituminous coal in the past, investors had hesitated to put capital into local industrial projects. But now, he claimed, Houston would "largely share" in the results of the "rich strike of petroleum at Beaumont" because "oil solves the fuel problem for manufacturing uses." See "Will Help Houston," HDP, January 15, 1901, p. 3, col. 3.

(14) Morrison and Fourmy's General Directory of the City of Houston, 1902-1903 (Galveston, n.d.), 500-501; "An Oil Company," HDP, January 20, 1901, p. 9, col. 2; "To Promote Oil Industry," HDP, January 24, 1901, p. 6, col. 4; "For Oil Development," HDP, January 25, 1901, p. 6, col. 1; "Echoes of the Oil Field," HDP, April 28, 1901, p. 2, col. 4; "The Local Oil Situation," July 4, 1901, HDP, p. 3, col. 2; "Harris County Oil Notes," HDP, July 5, 1901, p. 3, col. 2; "The Taylor Well Abandoned," HDP, September 8, 1901, p. 10, cols. 3-4; "Oil Field News: Contract for New Well," Houston Chronicle (hereinafter cited as HC), March 22, 1902, p. 4, col. 5; "Another Attempt to be Made," HC, September 10, 1901, p. 5, col. 3; "Oil Wegll [sic] Development," HDP, April 6, 1901, p. 3, col. 2; "More Big Oil Companies," HDP, April 26, 1901, p. 3, col. 6; "Eight More Oil Companies," HDP, April 28, 1901, p. 4, col. 5; "Another Oil Company," HDP, April 30, 1901, p. 3, col. 3; "Chicago-Texas Oil Co.," HDP, July 26, 1901, p. 3, col. 2; "A New Houston Oil Company," HDP, July 26, 1901, p. 3, col. 3; "They Own Two Wells," HC, February 8, 1902, p. 6, col. 4; "Oil Companies Chartered," HDP, April 7, 1901, p. 6, col. 1; "The Fever is Cooling Off," HDP, May 1, 1901, p. 3, col. 1. Morrison and Fourmy's General Directory of the City of Houston, 1902-1903, pp. 500-501, cited Houstonians John F. Kirby and B. F. Bonner as officers in the Southwestern Refining Company and listed F. A. Heitman as president of United States Oil Company. According to "Oil Companies Chartered," HDP, April 28, 1901, p. 4, cols. 3-4, there were, to date, fifteen oil companies with home offices in Houston. Much of the data on incorporation of companies can be found on the website of the Texas Secretary of State. See http://www.sos.state.tx.us/. There is also a great deal of information on oil companies in stock advertisements in the principal newspapers, especially March-June 1901.

(15) "Burning Fuel Oil," New Orleans Sunday States, March 24, 1901, p. 19, cols. 1-2; "Another Oil-Consuming Plant," HDP, April 9, 1901, p. 7, col. 3; "Stribling Pipe Line Completed," HDP, February 21, 1901, p. 3, col. 4; "The Use of Oil for Fuel," HDP, April 26, 1901, p. 6, col. 5; "Will Use Fuel Oil," HDP, September 7, 1901, p. 7, col. 4; "Oil Field News," HC, March 11, 1902, p. 7, col. 1; "Hotel Using Oil for Fuel," HDP, May 30, 1901, p. 3, cols. 2-3; H. P. McLaughlin and Co. advertisement, HDP, June 1, 1901, p. 1, col. 3; City Council Minutes, Book 2L, June 3, 1901, p. 134 (Office of the City Secretary, Houston, Tex.; hereinafter cited as City Council Minutes); "Meeting of City Council," HDP, June 4, 1901, p. 6, col. 3 (quotation); "Pumping Station in Operation," HC, December 24, 1901, p. 7, col. 3; "Another Oil Consumer,'" HDP, August 1, 1901, p. 6, col. 4.

(16) "Oil Struck Near Beaumont," HDP, January 11, 1901, p. 3, col. 6; "The Big Oil Well," HDP, January 12, 1901, p. 1, col. 3; "Solid Stream of Petroleum," HDP, January 13, 1901, p. 1, col. 3; "Oil Is Again Spouting," HDP, January 19, 1901, p. 4, col. 6; "Budget from Beaumont," HDP, January 24, 1901, p. 3, col. 1; "Oil Goes Up in Flames," Beaumont Daily Enterprise, March 4, 1901, p. 1, col. 3. "The Beaumont Oil Well," HDP, January 14, 1901, p. 5, col. 5, cited estimates of fifteen thousand to thirty thousand barrels per day. See also "The New Treasure Field of Texas: Its Discovery, Its Development, Its Present Status and Its Great Future," Part 1: "Texas Strikes Oil," HC, January 31, 1902, p. 4, cols. 3-4. This story alleged that having brought the Lucas gusher under control, workers much later reopened it and filled a thirty-five-thousand-barrel tank in about twelve hours, meaning a flow rate of seventy thousand barrels per day. See also "The Twentieth Century Fuel," HDP, January 20, 1901, p. 4, col. 6; "The Oil Field is All Right," HDP, February 8, 1901, p. 3, col. 4; and F. H. Oliphant, "Petroleum," in United States Geological Survey, Mineral Resources of the United States: Calendar Year 1900 (Washington, D.C., 1901), 579.

(17) "Budget from Beaumont," HDP, February 6, 1901, p. 3, col. 4; "Oil Field News," HC, February 24, 1902, p. 5, col. 4; "The Sulphur Wells," HDP, May 4, 1901, p. 3, col. 3; "Louisiana Development," HDP, May 22, 1901, p. 3, col. 3. On the shortage of oil tanks see "Oil Flow Has Stopped," HDP, January 20, 1901, p. 5, col. 2; "St. Louisians Interested," HDP, January 21, 1901, p. 3, col. 1; and "Oil Field News," HC, March 3, 1902, p. 5, col. 4. For information about accidents, broken equipment, and fires, see the regular feature titled "News from Oil Fields," in HC, January 16, 1902, p. 7, col. 2; HC, January 21, 1902, p. 7, col. 2; HC, January 22, 1902, p. 7, col. 2; and HC, December 27, 1901, p. 7, col. 2. See also Gulf Pipe Line Company v. J. M. Brymer, 59 Tex. Civ. App. 40 (1910) at 42-44; Gulf, West Texas & Pacific Railway Company v. Dan Wittnebert, 101 Tex. 368 (1908) at 372; Galveston, Harrisburg & San Antonio Railway Company v. Felix Sanchez, 57 Tex. Civ. App. 87 (1909) at 90; and "Oil Field News," HC, February 8, 1902, p. 4, col. 4.

(18) D. R. Beatty, a prominent oilman, claimed in "Oil Legislation," HDP, February 22, 1901, p. 6, col. 4, that "there can be no reasonable objection to storing" oil in earthen ponds. Oil, he argued, was too precious to waste, and if a well owner did not capture it, competitors would take it through their drilling activities.

(19) Using available statistics and estimations, one can surmise that a 450,000-barrel earthen reservoir required 1,600,000 board feet of lumber, or about 160 railroad carloads of it. "Beaumont Oil News," HDP, September 29, 1902, p. 5, col. 3. One report put the cost of a plank-lined reservoir with a capacity of 100,000 barrels at $13,000; if made 4.5 times larger, it would cost $58,500. Iron tanks cost about 25 cents per barrel of capacity, so to store in them the equivalent amount of oil (450,000 barrels) cost $112,500, almost twice as much as a lined earthen lake. See "Report On Texas Oil Field," HDP, February 5, 1902, p. 5, cols. 4-5. Manhattan Oil Company, according to "The Matter of Tankage," HDP, August 13, 1901, p. 3, col. 1, considered building a "mammoth earthen reservoir to hold 1,000,000 barrels of oil" at a cost of about $40,000, or 4 cents per barrel.

(20) "News from the Oil Fields," HC, January 29, 1902, p. 5, col. l; "Importance of Number Three, at Beaumont, Big," New Orleans Daily Picayune, January 28, 1902, p. 9, col. 1; "Immense Tankage," ibid., May 22, 1902, p. 2, col. 6. See also "Oil Field News: Earthen Reservoirs," HC, March 20, 1902, p. 6, col. 5, for plans by Dr. Frank Morrisal and J. D. Cameron to purchase a Gladys City site on which they planned a five-million-barrel earthen reservoir--"the cheapest and best storage obtainable."

(21) D. R. Beatty, Texas oilman and a director of Beatty Oil Company, remarked during a visit to Houston in May 1901 that he felt "assured that if we can convince the great fuel consuming centers of the world that they can depend upon a practically unlimited supply of fuel oil," many industries and manufacturers "will adopt this oil" and buy every barrel produced. "Extent of the Oil Field," HDP, May 23, 1901, p. 5, col. 5; see also "Letters from the People: Transportation of Fuel Oil," HDP, July 8, 1901, p. 4, col. 5. "The New Treasure Field of Texas: Its Discovery, Its Development, Its Present Status and Its Great Future," Part 8: "Permanency of the Field," HC, February 8, 1902, p. 8, col. 5, described Beaumont and Houston people as "men who are familiar with the actual conditions in the [oil] field...."

(22) On the Guffey pipeline see "A Pipe Line to Be Built from Beaumont to Port Arthur," HDP, January 21, 1901, p. 5, col. 7; and "Well Has Been Buried," HDP, January 22, 1901, p. 4, col. 1. See "Oil Burned at Corsicana," HDP, January 21, 1901, p. 3, col. 1; and "Loss at Corsicana," HDP, January 22, 1901, p. 2, col. 2, wherein a five-thousand-barrel tank "partially filled with partly refined oil" caught fire in a refinery explosion. Regarding fires and fire prevention in the Spindletop field, see "The Committee is At Work," HDP, September 1, 1901, p. 6, cols. 3-4; "Oil Men's Meeting," Galveston Daily News, September 1, 1901, p. 4, cols. 4-5; "Want of Pressure," ibid., September 6, 1901, p. 2, cols. 2-3; "The Beaumont Oil Field on Fire," New Orleans Daily Picayune, September 12, 1902, p. 1, cols. 1-3; "The Beaumont Oil Field Fire At a Standstill," ibid., September 13, 1902, p. 1, cols. 5-6, and p. 2, cols. 3-6; "The Oil Fire at Beaumont," ibid., September 13, 1902, p. 4, col. 1; "News and Notables at New Orleans Hotels: Manager of the Keith-Ward Oil Company Describes Conditions on the Tract," ibid., September 13, 1902, p. 6, col. 1; "Local Interests Affected by the Beaumont Blaze," ibid., September 13, 1902, p. 7, cols. 1-2; "The Beaumont Oil Fire Will Soon Be Extinguished," ibid., September 14, 1902, p. 1, cols. 3-6, and p. 2, cols. 3-6; "The Fire in the Oil Field," ibid., September 14, 1902, p. 4, col. 3; and "The Beaumont Oil Fire Stopped All in a Minute," ibid., September 15, 1902, p. 1, cols. 5-6.

(23) Harold L. Platt, City Building in the New South: The Growth of Public Services in Houston, Texas, 1830-1910 (Philadelphia, 1983), 90-103, 155-80. According to F. H. Oliphant, "Petroleum," in United States Geological Survey, Mineral Resources of the United States: Calendar Year 1902 (Washington, D.C., 1904), 568, Texas had 7,300,000 barrels of oil tanked in 1902.

(24) "Effect of Low Oil Rates," HDP, August 15, 1901, p. 4, col. 2. See also Joseph A. Pratt, "The Ascent of Oil: The Transition from Coal to Oil in Early Twentieth-Century America," in Lewis J. Perelman, August W. Giebelhaus, and Michael D. Yokell, eds., Energy Transitions: Long-Term Perspectives (Boulder, Colo., 1981), 11, 13.

(25) "Industrial Houston," HDP, September 1, 1901, p. 10, col. 3. A Houston Chronicle editorial cast the whole process in a framework of Darwinian selection and natural law. Fuel, the paper argued, was the most important factor in the decision to build or not to build manufacturing facilities and the "primary factor in factory operation ... once raw material and transportation to profitable market are forthcoming." When all the ingredients--raw materials, labor, cheap fuel--were present, transportation to market and profits were assured under the "great law of commercial evolution...." See "Expansion in the Oil Field," HC, January 20, 1902, p. 4, cols. 1-2.

(26) See City Council Minutes, Book 2K, January 28, 1901, pp. 485-87; "An Ordinance, granting right to Construct Mains & Pipes, for furnishing Oil, Gas etc.," City Ordinance Book, 1901, January 28, 1901, pp. 578-80 (quotations on p. 579) (Office of the City Secretary); City Council Minutes, Book 2K, February 4, 1901, pp. 493-94; "An Ordinance granting fight to construct and lay Mains and Pipes for furnishing Oil Gas etc," City Ordinance Book, 1901, February 4, 1901, pp. 581-83; "Mayor Woolford's Gavel," HDP, March 12, 1901, p. 9, col. 2; "Meeting of City Council," HDP, March 19, 1901, p. 6, col. 2; "Some Startling Reforms," HDP, February 20, 1901, p. 6, col. 2; City Ordinance Book, 1901, March 18, 1901, pp. 594-95; and City Council Minutes, Book 2L, March 11, 1901, p. 38, and March 18, 1901, p. 48. See also "Pipe Line Franchises," HDP, February 21, 1901, p. 6, cols. 1-2, for a trenchant analysis of these deals by Dr. [C]. S. Helsig.

(27) See "[Pipeline] Proposition," HDP, January 27, 1901, p. 13, col. 1; and "To Pipe Oil From Fields," HC, October 18, 1901, p. 6, col. 1.

(28) "Houston's Pipe Line," HC, January 4, 1902, p. 6, col. 3. There is no clear evidence that the bill actually became law, though the legislature may have drawn up or even passed this bill. The applicable state law, "An Act to provide for the organization of corporations for the purpose of the storage and transportation, and purchase and sale of oil, gas, salt, brine and other mineral solutions," stated in section 4 "that such pipe line so laid shall not exceed eight inches in diameter." See "Incorporations--Oil, Gas, Salt, Etc., Companies," Chap. CXVII, General Laws of the State of Texas Passed at the Twenty-Sixth Legislature (Austin, 1899), 202-3; the law is also printed in "Corporation Laws of Texas," HDP, April 29, 1901, p. 4, col. 4.

(29) Citizen petitions for fire protection and recommendations from city officials are in City Council Minutes, Book 2L, March 18, 1901, p. 43, April 8, 1901, p. 65, May 2, 1901, p. 117, and July 1, 1901, pp. 160, 168; and "Petition of Citizens for Extension of Water Mains to Silver & Spring & Sabine & Weber," envelope dated August 5, 1901, Miscellaneous Papers, 1900-1903 (Office of the City Secretary; hereinafter cited as Miscellaneous Papers).

(30) In a proposed contract between the city of Houston and the Houston Water Company, printed in "A New Water Contract," HDP, May 7, 1901, p. 6, cols. 4-5, maintenance of water pressure, water-hydrant placement, and emergency use of Buffalo Bayou water "in event of conflagration" were prominent topics. See also the editorial, "For Additional Fire Protection," HDP, June 26, 1901, p. 4, col. 1; City Council Minutes, Book 2L, June 25, 1901, pp. 155-56; and Martin V. Melosi, "Sanitary Services and Decision Making in Houston, 1876-1945," Journal of Urban History, 20 (May 1994), 370-71.

(31) Joseph A. Pratt, "Growth or a Clean Environment? Responses to Petroleum-related Pollution in the Gulf Coast Refining Region," Business History Review, 52 (Spring 1978), 6-7.

(32) Lawrence O. Gostin, Public Health Law: Power, Duty, Restraint (Berkeley, 2000), 47-50; Christopher G. Tiedeman, A Treatise on the Limitations of Police Power in the United States (1886; reprint, New York, 1971), 2 (quotation). Illustrative examples are the suppression and control of unpleasant activities that produced unwholesome odors or were bothersome, irksome, or irritating. These included soap or bone-boiling, animal slaughtering, rendering lard, disposing of human wastes, operating a house of prostitution, staging immoral plays, exhibitions, or shows, conducting games of chance, and operating bars.

(33) "An Act to consolidate in one act, and amend the several acts incorporating the city of Houston, in Harris county," Chap. LX, Sec. 27, Special Laws of the Ninth Legislature of the State of Texas (Austin, 1863), as reprinted in H. P. N. Gammel, comp., The Laws of Texas, 1822-1897 (10 vols.; Austin, 1898), V, 552-53. The pagination used in this article reflects the pagination of the Gammel volumes, not the originals.

(34) "An Act to consolidate in one Act and amend the several Acts incorporating the City of Houston, in Harris county," Chap. XCIX, Sec. 27, Special Laws of the State of Texas Passed by the Eleventh Legislature (Austin, 1866), as reprinted in Gammel, comp., Laws of Texas, V, 1391-92; "An Act to consolidate in one Act and amend the several Acts incorporating the City of Houston, in Harris County," Chap. III, Sec. 24, Special Laws of the State of Texas Passed at the Session of the Fourteenth Legislature ... (Houston, 1874), as reprinted in Gammel, comp., Laws of Texas, VIII, 277 (quotation). Defining and suppressing nuisances became "to define what shall be deemed nuisances in said city, and to abate them by summary proceedings...." Ibid., 277. See also Jon C. Teaford, "New Life for an Old Subject: Investigating the Structure of Urban Rule," American Quarterly, 37 (No. 3, 1985), 346-56. He found that in the post-1870 period "fire insurance interests formed an extralegal body of decision makers" who lobbied municipal officials for good public services such as "improved fire protection" (p. 347).

(35) The amending acts and the relevant sections are in Chap. 2, Special Laws of the State of Texas Passed at the Regular Session of the Seventeenth Legislature . . . (Galveston, 1881), as reprinted in Gammel, comp., Laws of Texas, IX, 243; Chap. 21, Special Laws of the State of Texas Passed at the Regular Session of the Sixteenth Legislature ... (Galveston, 1879), as reprinted in Gammel, comp., Laws of Texas, IX, 20; and Chap. 16 (S.B. No. 339), Special Laws of the State of Texas Passed at the Regular Session of the Twenty-Second Legislature ... (Austin, 1891), as reprinted in Gammel, comp., Laws of Texas, X, 305-21 (esp. p. 319). See also "An Act to provide a charter for the City of Houston, Harris County, Texas," Chap. 7, (S.B. No. 306), Special Laws of the State of Texas Passed at the Regular Session of the Twenty-Fifth Legislature ... (Austin, 1897), as reprinted in Gammel, comp., Laws of Texas, X, 1407; and Charter of the City of Houston, Harris County, Texas, As Amended in 1899 (Houston, n.d.), 34 (in a bound volume of pamphlets at the Office of the City Attorney, Houston, Tex.; kindly supplied to me by Paul Bibler in March 2003).

(36) "An Act to provide a charter for the City of Houston, Harris County, Texas" (S.B. No. 306), in Gammel, comp., Laws of Texas, X, 1402.

(37) City Council Minutes, Book 2L, July 15, 1901, pp. 176-77; "Meeting of City Council," HDP, July 16, 1901, p. 6, col. 1.

(38) "Petition of Citizens, protesting against Erection of Oil Tanks, at Wood & Vine Sts.," in envelope dated August 12, 1901, Miscellaneous Papers (quotations); City Council Minutes, Book 2L, July 29, 1901, p. 191, and August 12, 1901, pp. 217-18; "The City Council," HDP, July 30, 1901, p. 6, col. 1; "The City Council," HDP, August 13, 1901, p. 6, col. 1.

(39) Richard W. Gamble was a principal in the company. Its activities included stock brokerage, petroleum sales, and work as a contractor for fuel-oil equipment, supplies, and installations. Morrison and Fourmy's General Directory of the City of Houston, 1902-1903, p. 172. See also the advertisements "Fuel Petroleum" and "Fuel Oil Equipment" in HDP, June 17, 1901, p. 5, col. 6; and HDP, August 18, 1901, p. 4, col. 3. The two-page typed letter from R. W. Gamble and Co. to Hon. Jno. D. Woolford, Mayor of the City of Houston, July 30, 1901, is in an envelope dated August 12, 1901, in Miscellaneous Papers.

(40) Gamble and Co. to Woolford, July 30, 1901.

(41) City Council Minutes, Book 2L, August 12, 1901, pp. 217-18; notations from the fire committee, city engineer, city attorney, and fifth-ward aldermen (with date of report adoption "Aug 12 1901") on "Petition of Citizens, protesting against Erection of oil Tanks, at Wood & Vine Sts.," envelope dated August 12, 1901, Miscellaneous Papers (first and second quotations). The petition contains a handwritten notation under the initials "jaw" (perhaps Alderman W. J. A. Wherlin) indicating that the records showing Vine Street to be within the city limits were Harris County Deed Records, vol. R, pp. 543-44; and a map, W. E. Wood, ed., City of Houston, Harris Co., Texas: published from actual surveys ([Philadelphia], 1869). See also section 34 of the 1897 Houston charter in Gammel, comp., Laws of Texas, X, 1407 (third quotation).

(42) "The City Council in Session," HDP, August 20, 1901, p. 6, col. 2 (first quotation); "Petition from RW Gamble to Erect Oil Tank," envelope dated August 19, 1901, Miscellaneous Papers (other quotations).

(43) "Petition from RW Gamble to Erect Oil Tank," (quotations). To assess the validity of R. W. Gamble's viewpoint the council again called upon the Fifth Ward aldermen, as well as the committees on fire and on streets and bridges, and invested them "with power to act." City Council Minutes, Book 2L, August 19, 1901, p. 223.

(44) "The City Council in Session," HDP, August 20, 1901, p. 6, cols. 1-2; City Council Minutes, Book 2L, August 19, 1901, p. 224. On permits for building improvements, see "An Act to provide a charter for the City of Houston, Harris County, Texas" (S.B. No. 306), in Gammel, comp., Laws of Texas, X, 1402. For Cochran's business interests, see Morrison and Fourmy's General Directory of the City of Houston, 1902-1903, p. 108.

(45) Germ Saji, "Safety Goals in 'Risk-Informed, Performance-Based' Regulation," Reliability Engineering and System Safety, 80 (May 2003), 163 (first quotation), 165; "Burning of Oil as Fuel," HDP, August 21, 1901, p. 6, col. 1 (second quotation).

(46) "Burning of Oil as Fuel," HDP, August 21, 1901, p. 6, col. 1.

(47) "Oil and Fire Insurance," HDP, February 3, 1901, p. 28, cols. 5-6. For an example of an insurance form, see Form No. 2 (1902), Buyers' Transit Cotton Form, in South-Eastern Tariff Association, Book of Policy Forms. January 1, 1903 ([Atlanta, 1903]), 10. The form reads: "On cotton in bales, their own or held by them in trust, or on commission or purchased for their own account by agent of the assured wherever the said cotton may be located, or in transit within the State of .... (* .... excepted), subject to the following conditions...." The blanks allowed the agent to write in the specifics of the insurance contract, while the set text kept inexperienced underwriters from leaving out crucial material such as exceptions and coverage conditions.

(48) City Council Minutes, Book 2L, September 9, 1901, p. 241; "A Deadlock in the Council," HDP, September 10, 1901, p. 7, cols. 1-2. The proposed TNORR tank site was between Maffit, Burnett, and Semmes Streets and New Orleans Avenue, while Texas and Prairie Avenues and Hutchins and St. Emanuel Streets marked off the proposed placement of the GCSFRC tank.

(49) City Council Minutes, Book 2L, September 16, 1901, pp. 259, 262, 265-66 (quotations); "Council Again Deadlocked," HDP, September 17, 1901, p. 6, cols. 2-3.

(50) Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, 1990), 27.

(51) City Council Minutes, Book 2L, September 30, 1901, p. 294 (quotation); "Meeting of City Council," HDP, October l, 1901, p. 6, col. 4.

(52) The title of the detailed thirteen-section rendition is different from the ordinance that the city attorney put forward on September 16. Further, the text of this thirteen-section version is unsigned and has no endorsements recording an adoption date or dates of relevant committee reports. Since a fuel ordinance did not surface in council deliberations until October 7, this thirteen-section text may be a version whose handwritten changes and additions reflect the ordinance's evolution up to September 30, when Alderman Robinson offered his alternative. Typed on three unnumbered leaves with handwritten interlineations, the thirteen-section version of the fuel-oil ordinance, titled "An Ordinance to Regulate the Use and Storage of Crude Petroleum and Fuel Oil by Consumers in the City of Houston," ends with the notation "Adopted October 1901" and is extant in a folder labeled "Crude Oil Ordinance" in the Office of the City Secretary, Houston, Texas; hereinafter cited as Crude Oil Ordinance Folder. Mrs. Anna Russell, city secretary and custodian of records for the City of Houston, provided copies of this material.

(53) Ibid. (quotation); Ernest H. Peabody, "Oil Fuel," Transactions of the International Engineering Congress, 1915.... Vol. X (San Francisco, 1916), 504. The figures speculating about the size of small supply tanks are somewhat arbitrary. No specific figures appeared in any ordinances for supply tanks.

(54) W. J. Hardee to Charles E. Rice, president, Morris Building and Land Improvement Co., May 5, 1902, City Engineer, Outgoing Correspondence, Vol. 7, p. 289, City Archives, KJ 510, New Orleans, Louisiana (New Orleans Public Library). Hardee told Rice that Hardee's department did not object to "extending the vent pipe from the oil tank" (permit to build granted April 17, 1902) "over to the wall of the Morris Bldg...." Hardee observed that running the vent pipe up to the top of the building would "insure immunity against offensive odors to the occupants of intervening buildings."

(55) "An Ordinance to Regulate the Use and Storage of Crude Petroleum and Fuel Oil by Consumers in the City of Houston." Note that section one of this version required tanks to have a "vapor proof screw top manhole cover." Clayton O. Billow, a Chicago engineer and secretary of the National Supply Company, included this same feature in his description of the "component parts of a fuel oil plant." See "The Use of Oil For Fuel," HDP, March 31, 1901, p. 28, col. 4.

(56) "An Ordinance to Regulate the Use and Storage of Crude Petroleum and Fuel Oil by Consumers in the City of Houston."

(57) Ibid. See also the useful description of supplying fuel oil to an industrial furnace in Matthew H. Mawhinney, Practical Industrial Furnace Design (New York, 1928), 30. Oil pumped from a storage or supply tank passed through a relief valve so that overflow or excessive oil going to the burners could be returned directly to the supply chamber. Gases resident in the oil would bleed off through the relief valve, insuring "a steady oil supply to the burners" (or any intermediate device such as a standpipe).

(58) "An Ordinance to Regulate the Use and Storage of Crude Petroleum and Fuel Oil by Consumers in the City of Houston." Risers had feed inputs (ideally with third- or quarter-turn hose couplings) at street level and threaded or valve outlets on all floors. Eventually, many city building codes required risers in structures more than three floors in height because suction pumps can lift static water no more than twenty-seven to thirty-two feet (depending on altitude above sea level) above the water's point of origin. Further, when attached to long chains of hose sections, high-pressure street-level pumps can be ineffective owing to the weight of the water in the hose lengths and internal friction, which can drastically reduce nozzle pressure. See Andrew A. Fredericks, "Standpipe System Operations: Engine Company Basics," Fire Engineering, 149 (February 1996), 33-35, 38; Merta Acton v. Frederick A. Reed and Endoise Barnett, 104 A.D. 507 (1905) at 508-10; Crane Company v. Epworth Hotel Construction & Real Estate Company, 121 Mo. App. 209 (1906) at 212-15; Andrew L. Simon, Fire Hydraulics (New York, 1983), 128; and Charter and Revised Code of Ordinances of the City of Houston, Harris County, Texas, to October 31, 1904 (Houston, 1904), Chap. XXXVIII, Article 905, pp. 354-55. For large standpipes in municipal waterworks, see Oskaloosa Water Company v. Board of Equalization of City of Oskaloosa, 84 Iowa 407 (1892) at 409; Walter H. Watson v. Inhabitants of Needham, 161 Mass. 404 (1894) at 408-9; and The Jeffersonville Water Supply Company v. Riter et al., 138 Ind. 170 (1894) at 170-71, 175.

(59) "An Ordinance to Regulate the Use and Storage of Crude Petroleum and Fuel Oil by Consumers in the City of Houston."

(60) Ibid. On the importance (and difficulty) of maintaining internal oil and air pressure in atomizing burner systems, see W. Trinks, Industrial Furnaces (2nd ed., 2 vols.; New York, 1925), II, 62-90, 211-12.

(61) "AN ORDINANCE TO REGULATE THE USE AND STORAGE OF CRUDE PETROLEUM AND FUEL OIL BY CONSUMERS { and the Erection & location of Oil storage tanks } IN THE CITY OF HOUSTON," four typed pages, numbered in the top left corner beginning on the second page, in Crude Oil Ordinance Folder; City Council Minutes, Book 2L, October 7, 1901, p. 306 (quotation); "Important Council Meeting," HDP, October 8, 1901, p. 5, col. 4.

(62) "An Ordinance to Regulate the Use and Storage of Crude Petroleum and Fuel Oil by Consumers in the City of Houston." Both versions of the ordinance had the ten-thousand-barrel limit for a bulk tank, amended from two thousand, in section nine. However, officials who worked with the second rendition originally had written two thousand barrels, changed that to five thousand, and then to ten thousand. According to "Big Volume of Business," HC, October 21, 1901, p. 6, col. 1, the version of the ordinance then before the city council still read "2000" barrels. Andrew Hurley, "Creating Ecological Wastelands: Oil Pollution in New York City, 1870-1900," Journal of Urban History, 20 (May 1994), 341, notes that petroleum refiners, as an example of enormous centralized and mechanized production in the late nineteenth century, had to set up shop in "peripheral locations" owing to incompatibility with dense, central-city areas. And further, such activities attracted "ancillary firms" that supplied raw materials or equipment, creating pockets of smoke, terrible odors, and toxic wastes. How these early limitations on construction of fuel-oil tanks affected the development of perimeter industrial sites in Houston remains unexplored.

(63) "Regular Meeting of the City Council," HDP, October 16, 1901, p. 7, col. 3; "Mayor Woolford and the Council," HC, October 16, 1901, p. 3, col. 1 ; "Houston Will Use Fuel Oil," HC, October 17, 1901, p. 3, col. 1. Several council members may have had reservations about some elements of the ordinance, or perhaps they wanted more discussion of some details.

(64) "Meeting of City Council," HDP, October 22, 1901, p. 7, col. 3 (first quotation); "A Drilling Company," HDP, May 9, 1901, p. 5, col. 3 (second quotation); "May be Another Geyser," HDP, May 11, 1901, p. 3, col. 2; City Council Minutes, Book 2L, October 21, 1901, p. 333; "Big Volume of Business," HC, October 21, 1901, p. 6, col. 1; "Council To Meet Today," HC, October 28, 1901, p. 6, col. 1.

(65) City Council Minutes, Book 2L, October 28, 1901, p. 346; "Meeting of City Council," HDP, October 29, 1901, p. 6, col. 5. Harrisburg and Reading, Pennsylvania; Wheeling, West Virginia; and Wilmington, Delaware, were also on the list of inquiries.

(66) City Council Minutes, Book 2L, December 3, 1901, p. 397; "Meeting of City Council," HDP, December 4, 1901, p. 6, col. 3. Miller manufactured electrical supplies such as dynamos, motors, and fans, performed electroplating, and cast brass. See Morrison and Fourmy's General Directory of the City of Houston, 1902-1903, p. 310. Note also that the second typed version of the fuel-tank ordinance includes the notation "Boiler Inspector to report at next meeting," with the date "DEC 3 1901" stamped on it as well.

(67) "Fuel Oil Hazard," HC, December 7, 1901, p. 8, cols. 1-2.

(68) Typed letter on letterhead of the Office of City Boiler Inspector, dated at Houston, Texas, December 14, 1901, and endorsed "W. E. Gale/City Boiler Insp," in Crude Oil Ordinance Folder (quotations); City Council Minutes, Book 2L, December 23, 1901, p. 416; "Meeting of the City Council," HDP, December 24, 1901, p. 7, col. 4; "Mayor's Veto Sustained," HC, December 24, 1901, p. 6, col. 2. The second typed version of the fuel tank ordinance has the notation "Ordinance Committee," with a stamped date of "DEC 23 1901."

(69) City Council Minutes, Book 2L, January 6, 1902, p. 428; "An Ordinance to Regulate the Use and Storage of Crude Petroleum and Fuel Oil by Consumers {and the Erection & location of Oil storage tanks } in the City of Houston" (second typed version of the ordinance). As recorded by hand in City Ordinance Book, 1901, pp. 631-33, and City Ordinance Book, 1902, p. 634, the final ordinance has the same title as the second typed version, with the interpolation "{and the Erection & location of Oil storage tanks }" integrated into the final title. See also "Meeting of the City Council," HDP, January 7, 1902, p. 6, cols. 1-2.

(70) "Mayor Turned Council Down," HC, January 7, 1902, p. 6, col. 1; "Fuel Oil Tank," HC, January 9, 1902, p. 8, col. 3. "Notes and Personals," HC, January 30, 1902, p. 3, col. 4, reported that bad weather had led to slow progress on the tank.

(71) "Will Burn Fuel Oil," HDP, August 1, 1901, p. 7, col. 2; "Popularity of Fuel Oil," HDP, August 6, 1901, p. 7, col. 1; "The S. P. Drilling a Well," HDP, September 16, 1901, p. 5, col. 1; "Southern Pacific Oil Burner," HDP, September 22, 1901, p. 6, col. 3; "Oil Equipment Being Installed," HC, December 6, 1901, p. 6, col. 5; "Division Hospital," HC, January 10, 1902, p. 3, col. 1; "By May 1," HC, February 13, 1902, p. 8, col. 3; "Oil Field News," HC, March 7, 1902, p. 6, col. 5; "Tank Car Problems," Oil Investors' Journal, 1 (August 15, 1902), 1. Regarding the International and Great Northern, see "Oil on the Eye and Gee En," HDP, August 5, 1901, p. 3, col. 2; "Advantages of Oil Fuel," HDP, August 6, 1901, p. 8, col. 3; "Made a Run with Oil," HDP, September 6, 1901, p. 8, col. 3; "Adopting Oil for Fuel," HDP, October 4, 1901, p. 7, col. 2; "To Use Fuel Oil," HC, January 17, 1902, p. 8, col. 4; and "Oil in Use," HC, March 3, 1902, p. 8, col. 4.

(72) "Southwestern Oil Company," HC, January 15, 1902, p. 6, col. 2 (quotation); "Biggest in the World," HC, February 15, 1902, p. 2, col. 2; "News from Oil Fields," HC, January 18, 1902, p. 10, col. 4; "News from Oil Fields," HC, January 23, 1902, p. 7, col. 2; "Will Soon Commence," HC, March 27, 1902, p. 8, col. 3. According to "Oil Field News: Penman Company's Enterprises," HC, March 27, 1902, p. 6, col. 5, Penman Steel and Iron Works consummated a contract with Southern Pacific Railroad to build 1,020,000 barrels of oil-tank storage capacity.

(73) City Council Minutes, Book 2L, January 20, 1902, p. 440; "Teachers Will Get Salaries," HDP, January 21, 1902, p. 6, col. 1. Partners Arthur J. Binz and Jules J. Settegast Jr. made up Binz and Settegast. Jacob Binz, probably Arthur J. Binz's father, owned the Binz Building in downtown Houston. Fourmy's General Directory of the City of Houston, 1902-1903, pp. 64, 393.

(74) City Council Minutes, Book 2L, March 25, 1901, p. 53 (quotation); "Teachers to Be Paid," HDP, March 26, 1901, p. 6, col. 1.

(75) "Meeting of City Council," HDP, April 2, 1901, p. 6, col. 2.

(76) City Council Minutes, Book 2L, February 3, 1902, p. 455; "Meeting of the City Council," HDP, February 4, 1902, p. 6, col. 2.

(77) With regard to fire hazards and to reducing concomitant risks, stated distances in public (regulations) and semipublic (fire-insurance policies) instruments of governance are significant and were subjects of interpretive dispute. See Michigan Shingle Company v. State Investment and Insurance Company of San Francisco, 53 N.W. 945 (1892) at 945-51; and Mechanics' & Traders' Insurance Co. v. Thompson, 21 S.W. 468 (1893) at 468-69.

(78) Their fears were not irrational or premodern. See Farhad Nadim, Peter Zack, George E. Hoag, Shili Liu, and Robert J. Carley, "Non-Uniform Regulations of Underground Storage Tanks in the United States: Calls for a National-Scale Revision," Spill Science and Technology Bulletin, 6 (October-December 2000), 341-48, on leakage in modern underground storage tanks (USTs). The authors point out that strict UST regulations protect "ground water aquifers." The rules also seek to avoid the "risks of fire or explosion due to seepage of fuel oil into basements of residential and commercial buildings ..." (p. 342).

(79) "An Ordinance/AN AMENDMENT TO SECTION 5, OF AN ORDINANCE TO REGULATE THE USE AND STORAGE OF CRUDE PETROLEUM AND FUEL OIL BY CONSUMERS AND THE ERECTION AND LOCATION OF OIL STORAGE TANKS IN THE CITy OF HOUSTON./BE IT ORDAINED BY THE CITY COUNCIL OF THE CITY OF HOUSTON," one typed leaf with printed city-secretary certification pasted at bottom, Crude Oil Ordinance Folder. The certification contains redactions in pencil. The endorsements on the document show that the ordinance committee received it on February 10, 1902, and recommended passage on February 17, 1902. The interpretation allowing the tanks rests on the phrase "If any such tank is wholly underground," which an under-the-sidewalk tank would be. Note also that the revised section still required the "highest point in [the] oil supply" to be two feet below the furnace burn point, but the amendment allowed an exception to this stipulation if the supply system incorporated a device that admitted air at the highest point of the supply pipe (running from tank to burners) to prevent "any syphoning effect" when the burners shut down. See "An Amendment to Section 5, of an Ordinance to regulate the use and storage of Crude Petroleum and Fuel Oil by Consumers and the erection and location of oil Storage Tanks in the city of Houston," City Ordinance Book, 1902, p. 639. For the final version of this change, Halverton actually submitted a separate ordinance entitled "Ordinance amending the Oil Tank Ordinance, adopted Jany. 6, 1902." City Council Minutes, Book 2L, February 10, 1902, p. 473. See also City Council Minutes, Book 2L, February 17, 1902, pp. 480-82; "Meeting of the City Council," HDP, February 11, 1902, p. 4, cols. 2-3; and "Meeting of the City Council," HDP, February 18, 1902, p. 6, col. 3.

(80) "Fuel Oil in Cities," HC, February 20, 1902, p. 6, col. 1. "[C]areless use" referred to the nineteenth-century epidemic of accidental deaths and horrible burn injuries that usually involved women trying to refill lamps with poorly refined kerosene or kerosene mixed illicitly with benzene, naphtha, or gasoline. See James A. Ruffner, "Two Problems in Fuel Technology," History of Technology, 3 (1978), 131.

(81) Paolo F. Ricci et al., "Precaution, Uncertainty and Causation in Environmental Decisions," Environment International, 29 (2003), 1-19. As Ricci et al. make clear, there are two variants of the principle: relative and absolute. What is discussed here is the absolute form, which "urges precaution when the magnitude of the potential adverse event is large or the adverse outcome is severe, even if its probability is small." And one might add, even when its probability is not known through empirical, scientific, rational analysis. Ibid., 3.

(82) Anthony J. Berry, "Leadership in a New Millennium: The Challenge of the 'Risk Society,'" Leadership and Organization Development Journal, 21 (No. 1, 2000), 5 (fourth quotation); Ricci et al., "Precaution, Uncertainty and Causation in Environmental Decisions," 1-4 (first and second quotations on p. 2; third and fifth quotations on p. 3; sixth quotation on p. 1). A Houston Chronicle editorial tersely reiterated Brown's concerns. It asserted that the city council should handle the fuel-oil question "without any unnecessary restrictions." The editorialist pointed out that Houston already allowed storage of many inflammable liquids such as "naptha, gasoline, kerosene and whisky" on wharves and in warehouses alongside cotton and next to walls filled with electrical wiring. Proper handling made cotton and electrical wires safe, so why pick out fuel oil and "make it an object of special and stringent legislation"? Insurance companies should receive fair treatment, the newspaper noted, but Houston officials should not forget that "industrial development is of far greater importance" than placating the insurance interests. Fuel oil and the "manufacturing development" of Houston went hand in hand, and the city should not treat "as an enemy" a resource that made industrial expansion possible. "Fuel Oil Restrictions," HC, February 22, 1902, p. 4, cols. 2-3.

(83) Steve Frosdick, "The Techniques of Risk Analysis Are Insufficient in Themselves," Disaster Prevention and Management, 6 (No. 3, 1997), 165 (quotation); Hayim Granot, "The Human Factor in Industrial Disaster," Disaster Prevention and Management, 7 (No. 2, 1998), 93.

(84) "Where Opposition Comes From," HC, March 8, 1902, p. 12, col. 4 (first, third, fourth, and fifth quotations); City Council Minutes, Book 2L, February 24, 1902, p. 492 (second quotation). On the earlier visit see "Local Insurance Risks," HDP, September 12, 1901, p. 6, col. 3.

(85) "Tear Down Chinese Wall," HC, March 4, 1902, p. 6, col. 3.

(86) Willem J. H. Van Groenendaal, "Group Decision Support for Public Policy Planning," Information and Management, 40 (2003), 371-72.

(87) The council had to deal with the allegation that the city water company had illegally stored fuel oil in a substandard tank. This came to council attention on February 3, 1902. The council minutes indicated that the water company had two "standpipes," the smallest of which it had "cut ... down to half of its original height." It was probably unlawful because it made the oil supply source level with or above the ignition point. City Council Minutes, Book 2L, February 3, 1902, p. 458, February 17, 1902, p. 478 (quotations); "Meeting of the City Council," HDP, February 18, 1902, p. 6, col. 3; "To Build City Hall," HC, February 18, 1902, p. 6, col. 1. On March 3, 1902, Mayor J. D. Woolford, at the behest of the city attorney, requested that the water company comply with the requirements of the fuel-tank ordinance. "Council Adopts Salary List," HDP, March 4, 1902, p. 7, col. 1; City Council Minutes, Book 2L, March 3, 1902, p. 496.

(88) The committee accomplished this by introducing two repealing ordinances, which then went to the ordinance committee. City Council Minutes, Book 2L, March 10, 1902, p. 505, March 17, 1902, pp. 513-14. The Houston Chronicle considered these franchises particularly valuable because the Hogg-Swayne Syndicate had started building a pipeline from Beaumont to Houston. "Meeting of City Council," HC, March 17, 1902, p. 5, col. 4.

(89) Ibid.; "Some Things Council Did," HC, March 11, 1902, p. 5, col. 4; "Meeting of the City Council," HDP, March 11, 1902, p. 7, col. 2.

(90) "The Oil Tank Ordinance," HC, March 18, 1902, p. 5, col. 4; "Oil Field News," HC, March 18, 1902, p. 6, col. 5; "Safety of Fuel Oil," HDP, April 5, 1902, p. 5, col. 5.

(91) City Council Minutes, Book 2L, April 3, 1902, p. 522.

(92) "AN ORDINANCE TO REGULATE THE USE AND STORAGE OF CRUDE PETROLEUM AND FUEL OIL BY CONSUMERS AND THE ERECTION AND LOCATION OF OIL STORAGE TANKS IN THE CITY OF HOUSTON," four unnumbered typed leaves, Crude Oil Ordinance Folder. It includes an endorsement signed by members of the ordinance committee, with the notations "Report Adopted," dated April 8, 1902, and "Ordinance Adopted," April 8, 1902.

(93) "Meeting of City Council," HDP, April 9, 1902, p. 8, col. 2 (first quotation); "What City Council Did," HC, April 9, 1902, p. 5, col. 1 (second quotation); City Council Minutes, Book 2L, April 8, 1902, p. 535.

(94) See the decision by the Texas Court of Civil Appeals in Binz v. National Supply Co. et al., 105 S.W. 543 (1907). A demurrer is a common-law plea. The defense answers a complaint by saying in effect that even if the facts presented were taken to be true, they are legally insufficient to require an answer, to sustain the accusations made, or to proceed with trial. A general denial is a defense plea that the complainant's allegations or assertions made in the lawsuit (action) are untrue. A counteraction is a suit brought by a defendant in answer to the plaintiff's claims in the initial action. See Black's Law Dictionary ... (6th ed.; St. Paul, 1990), 285, 349, 432-33, 685. Regarding legal standards see L. Craddock and Company v. Wells-Fargo Company Express, 58 Tex. Civ. App. 551 (1910) at 553-54.

(95) Binz v. National Supply Co., 105 S.W. 543.

(96) Ibid. "Insurance Difficulty," HC, March 28, 1902, p. 6, col. 3, summed up these events and suggested that the only way out of this situation was to set up a "central oil company, with a franchise to pipe the streets...."

(97) Joseph K. Angell and Thomas Durfee, A Treatise on the Law of Highways (Boston, 1857), 15-16; Byron K. Elliott and William F. Elliott, A Treatise on the Law of Roads and Streets (2nd ed.; Indianapolis, 1900), 1-7, 15; J. E. Rose v. the State, 19 Tex. Ct. App. 470 (1885) at 471; City of Bloomington v. James M. Bay, 42 Ill. 503 (1867) at 506-8. See also H. C. Still v. City of Houston, 27 Tex. Civ. App. 447 (1901) at 447-49; and City Council Minutes, Book 2L, June 16, 1902, p. 43.

(98) "An Act to provide a charter for the City of Houston, Harris County, Texas" (S.B. No. 306), in Gammel, comp., Laws of Texas, X, 1405-6. See also "Meeting of City Council," HDP, October 29, 1901, p. 6, col. 2, for City Attorney Joe M. Sam's opinion about the city's power to "remove any obstructions off of any of the streets or sidewalks of the city of Houston...." Relying on section 29 of the city charter (cited above), Sam asserted the city's unassailable power to keep streets and sidewalks clear. This was in response to a controversy over merchants keeping fruit and other goods in sidewalk displays.

(99) "City's Books and Accounts," HDP, May 13, 1902, p. 6, col. 3; City Council Minutes, Book 2L, May 12, 1902, p. 582, and June 9, 1902, p. 35.

(100) "Voted for a New City Hall," HDP, July 1, 1902, p. 6, col. 1; "An Active Council Session," HDP, July 8, 1902, p. 7, col. 2; City Council Minutes, Book 2M, June 30, 1902, p. 61, and July 7, 1902, p. 73. A plea for this rejected container came up first in February 1902. According to "Santa Fe's Oil Tank," HC, February 11, 1902, p. 8, col. 3, GCSFRC had petitioned the city council the day before for permission to start building a thirty-thousand-gallon storage tank for switch engines. See also City Council Minutes, Book 2L, February 10, 1902, p. 467. But, as noted above, Alderman Halverton introduced an amended fuel-storage ordinance that delayed ordinance consideration for at least a week and in turn put off a decision on the GCSFRC request.

(101) "An Ordinance Regulating the Storage and Handling of Gasoline, or other Volatile, Inflammable Liquids within the City of Houston, and Providing Penalties," Crude Oil Ordinance Folder.

(102) Charter and Revised Code of Ordinances of the City of Houston. Harris County, Texas, to October 31, 1904, Chap. XXXVIII, Articles 900-911, pp. 353-56 (first quotation below on p. 354); The Revised Code of Ordinances of the City of Houston of 1914 (Houston, 1914), Chap. XVI, Article 4., pp. 115-18 (second quotation below on p. 116). The revised sections were identical to articles 900-911 from 1904, except that the change approved in 1913 to amend article 904 (which mandated that "in no case will oil tanks be allowed under sidewalks or streets") allowed supply tanks "outside of the buildings or under the sidewalks." See also The Revised Code of Ordinances of the City of Houston of 1922 (Houston, 1922), Chap. XXXVI, Article 4, pp. 800-804. Section 1848 authorized supply tanks up to 250 barrels in size to be "buried under sidewalks" (p. 801).

(103) Revised Code of Ordinances of the City of Houston of 1914, p. 116 (quotation in text and first quotation below); "'An ordinance amending Article 904 of Chapter 38 of the Revised Code of Ordinances of the City of Houston of 1904, entitled 'Regulations for handling Oil,'" Crude Oil Ordinance Folder. In early 1915 the city council amended eleven of the fourteen sections in the May 1913 fuel-oil ordinance and added section 279, which by error had been left out of the 1914 published version. The most noticeable change was the stipulation that oil-supply tanks with capacities of up to 250 barrels should be put underground. This was the first time an ordinance had mentioned the exact size of a supply tank, apart from limiting standpipes to ten gallons. Interestingly, section 283 of the 1915 amendment changed "oil tanks will be allowed ... under the sidewalks" to "Such tanks may be buried under sidewalks." It required buried oil-supply tanks to be five, not three, or more feet from a building foundation. Supply outlets still were required to be two feet below the furnace burner. Further, previous ordinance versions limited large oil tanks in the city limits to 10,000 barrels. Section 287 in the 1915 amendment approached this indirectly, limiting tanks "constructed all or partially above ground" to 250 to 10,000 barrels. The ordinance did not directly limit tanks within the city to 10,000 barrels, but the phrase "Tanks ... of more than 250 and not more than 10,000 barrels capacity" supported such an inference. More importantly, however, the amendments drastically shortened the permitted distance between any two large vessels from two thousand to two hundred feet, allowing tanks farms in Houston to have more tanks per acre than stipulated in earlier regulations. See "An ordinance amending Sections 278, 280, 281, 283, 284, 285, 286, 287, 289, 290 and 292 of the Revised Code of Ordinances of the City of Houston of 1914, and adding a new Section thereto to be known as Section 279, and declaring an emergency," Crude Oil Ordinance Folder.

(104) Mark D. Agee and Thomas D. Crocker, "Economies, Human Capital, and Natural Assets," Environmental and Resource Economics, 11 (April 1998), 261, 267, addresses the relationship between environmental hazards and human-capital formation.

MR. MCSWAIN is an associate professor of history at Tuskegee University.