Michelle Krusiec wrote to me about a story that has passed through my mind quite a bit. As of Jan. 11, her good friend Lisa had been waiting for her permanent fix for the Joy Oil gas station for almost two years.
This gas station was built in 1915 in partnership with the man who built it. The lease allows for the owner, Harvey Foveaux Jr., to do what he pleases with the property until he vacates it for another use. Foveaux has done some cosmetic things to it and re-roofed it, so that the storefront wouldn’t look as odd. But otherwise he hasn’t done much, except keep it open the best he can in the midst of severe flooding.
While living in an apartment right above the gas station when I was in college, I had written a lot about the gas station and all of the storage tanks that filled the entire parking lot. The tanks burst during the fire that broke out during Hurricane Matthew and plugged up my apartment, making me believe that it was a very good thing I wasn’t in the place when it happened. It did have a fire in 2010, too, and that was about the only other time I’d had a chance to explore the station. Now it serves as something of a gateway to their storage tank site, a definite eyesore next to the glorious 15-story building at the corner of Grand and Rio Grande.
And so when Foveaux tells people he doesn’t want to wait around for a complete replacement, a full-blown makeover from the ground up, I get very nervous. Because I’m not even sure he knows what he wants. According to Krusiec, Foveaux doesn’t want to replace the pumps themselves, which are reportedly in pretty good shape, but for what he sees as a safety reason. That means the rest of the gas pumps will need to be knocked down and rebuilt, starting from the ground up.
“It’s also going to take an awful lot of engineering hours,” he told Krusiec. “We could do the work in one day, but it would take half the year.”
There are, however, multiple stories to that story, such as the news that Foveaux has been so desperate to fill the station that he’s been coming down to the station from his home in Austin to pump gas just to pay for the cost of the repairs to the station and to plug the storage tanks with Superfund toxic contamination. Why? Because his power company didn’t like the smell of diesel from the Hess and again because Harvey Foveaux wants to be in a position to keep charging customers for the chemicals used to create the superstore. At times, he’s needed to drive to Corpus Christi to do it, because the fumes are too strong for his own electric company, so he’s being charged for both diesel and natural gas at the same time.
When I ran Krusiec’s story by Lisa’s mother, Debra Kolbar, she was downright upset about the whole situation.
“It has been torturous,” she said. “It’s been through hurricane season, through Harvey, all the business of it. I’m not an engineer, I’m just an ordinary citizen.”
Krusiec sent me this letter with video:
@shafercowley @lauramovlin
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