Page 132 - The First Fifty Years

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126 HOUSTON LAW REVIEW

February 2000, thanks to one of its recently published articles
having received the most views of any article on Westlaw the
previous month.55

In the summer of 2001, eight years into its fourth decade,
Houston Law Review’s future looked brighter than ever. The
skies ahead were clear as far as the eye, or at least the eyes of
HLR’s editors, could see. So much having been accomplished so
recently, what could possibly go wrong? Except, perhaps, an Act
of God?

Almost Undone: All About Allison

Faithful readers of these essays will recall occasional
mention heretofore of the peculiar history attending Houston
Law Review’s physical location during its now half-century at the
Law Center. HLR’s first home had been a tiny office in the
University of Houston main library’s basement.56 The new
College of Law buildings opened in 1969 had contained a level
(just above the basement) suspiciously denominated “Ground
Floor,” which meant that the floor was in fact half-sunken into
the ground—and thus into the buried watercourse of a sometime
tributary of nearby Brays Bayou.57 Sure enough, in keeping with
tradition, the Review had been assigned space there. The
consequences could be amusing, as when the periodic “water
intrusions” experienced by the new buildings allowed members of
the Review to witness confused elevators mindlessly going up-
and-down, floor-to-floor, their doors opening and closing at each
stop, and occasionally, depending on the state of their short-
circuited wiring, presenting pyrotechnic displays to astonished
onlookers.58

All funning aside, however, basements and “ground” floors
are chancy places to locate anyone or anything where flooding is
a constant threat, as it is on the Gulf Coastal plain where
Houston, Texas, lies. Someday, something could go badly wrong.

On the night of June 9, 2001, something did.59
Tropical Storm Allison had swept through Houston only
days earlier, heading off toward East Texas with relatively little
damage left behind. But then the storm stalled, drifted
backwards, and parked itself over downtown Houston, the city’s
namesake university, and the University of Houston Law Center.
In total, 35 inches of rain fell that night.
Utilities at the University of Houston are connected to the
various colleges through large underground tunnels. Stray water
occasionally invades the tunnels. But the tunnels feature
submarine doors to ensure that no water leaks into the basement