Southwestern Historical Quarterly

When widespread drilling for natural gas in the Barnett Shale underlying the Fort Worth metroplex took place after 2000, it presented area cities with new and perplexing problems. While the economic benefits of the gas drilling boom were obvious, cities faced safety issues raised by the production of large volumes of a highly flammable substance in heavily populated areas. They had to identify hazards and devise regulations in the interest of public safety, which was no easy matter. As James B. McSwain points out, cities on the Gulf Coast had faced similar challenges a century earlier when oil began to displace coal as a boiler fuel. That makes his study most timely. [End Page 367]

Working within the context of the modernization of the Gulf South and, more generally, the demand for cheap fuel in growing industrial centers of the early twentieth century, McSwain looks at how Mobile, Houston, New Orleans, and Galveston approached safety issues raised by increased use of fuel oil, particularly during 1901–02. The enormous Spindletop discovery made the use of crude or fuel oil far cheaper than coal and economically attractive for large-scale energy consumers. But a half century's experience with urban use of flammable liquids, principally kerosene, showed that public safety required regulation to prevent disastrous fires. As McSwain describes at length, cities elsewhere worked with insurers and engineers to construct a body of risk-reducing guidelines and regulations, information circulated by the National Board of Fire Underwriters. By 1901 all four cities could draw on that information to regulate such matters as location and size of storage tanks, proper tank construction, and transport of fuel to consumers. Applying national guidelines, however, proved a challenging matter.

City governments had to mediate between oil vendors and consumers, who argued that the economic advantages of fuel oil far outweighed hazards, and insurers who could threaten to cease underwriting in the absence of regulation. In this regard, Texas historians will be especially interested in how regulation was negotiated in Houston and Galveston. Business interests in both cities saw cheap fuel from oil as a tremendous spur to industrial growth; Galveston businessmen also saw it assisting recovery from the devastating hurricane of 1900. Locating substantial storage facilities in or near downtowns made it easier for fuel to reach consumers but created a significant fire hazard, an issue that took differing shape in the two cities. In Houston, the hottest controversy eventually focused on the size and location of consumers' storage tanks at downtown buildings. In Galveston, locals differed about where petroleum would be offloaded from barges docked at wharves; shippers feared offloading anywhere near their bales of cotton awaiting shipment, and Sealy family interests faced off against Charles Clarke's circle over which wharves would be used. McSwain minutely details how locals negotiated regulation. In an epilogue, he briefly indicates what happened after the turn of the century.

To describe McSwain's research as exhaustive would be an understatement. He consulted forty-seven newspapers and forty-three periodicals. There are eighty-nine pages of notes and forty-five of bibliography. This reader, however, found details of city fathers' deliberations slow going. Abbreviations of names of the many organizations and interest groups, while logistically necessary, meant constant referral from text to the abbreviations list at the beginning of the book, which grew tedious. That said, McSwain has made a welcome contribution to urban—and Texas—history. [End Page 368]