Residential and Commercial Pool Resurfacing in Texas City, Texas

Commercial pool resurfacing for shared and public pools

A quarter of Texas City's housing units, 25.2%, are in buildings of five or more units: about 3,041 in buildings of 5 to 19 units and about 2,906 in buildings of 20 or more. The shared pools at complexes like these, and at hotels, clubs and homeowners associations, fall under the Galveston County Health District, whose pool order counts Texas City among the 14 local governments it serves; pools at single-family homes sit outside that program apart from its fence rule.

State law lets a county or a city require a permit to operate a public swimming pool, inspect it, charge a reasonable fee and close it by order when it breaks the state pool law or the local permit rules. The Texas Department of State Health Services describes public pool safety as shared work among its Environmental Health Program, local health departments, local code enforcement offices and other governments, and its rules for public pools and spas were last made effective April 26, 2024.

Planning a larger public pool renovation

For public pools, the CDC's Model Aquatic Health Code, a national model code rather than a Texas rule, calls work a "substantial alteration" when its total cost is more than half the pool's replacement cost, and says no one should begin such work until the construction plans have been submitted to and approved by the authority having jurisdiction. On a big renovation of a shared Texas City pool, ask the Health District and the City which approvals the job needs before the pool closes. The City runs a public pool of its own, the Nessler Family Aquatics Center on 5th Avenue North; its 2026 season opened on weekends from May 2, ran Tuesday through Sunday from May 25 to August 7, and ended on Labor Day, September 7.

Resurfacing a pool on storm-surge ground

The USDA's soil map shows Ijam loam, 2 to 8 percent slopes, at Texas City's Census center point, a map unit whose very name reads "rarely flooded, storm surge". It's poorly drained, in the slowest-draining hydrologic group, and the soil database puts its water table right at the surface at the shallowest point of the year. Ijam swells little in its top layer, with a linear extensibility of 1.9 percent, but up to 7.4 percent in layers within 5 feet, in the high class. For house foundations it carries the USDA's very limited rating, citing flooding and the saturated zone, and the same rating for shallow excavation, since trench walls there are unstable. This is a single mapped point, and other streets lie on other soils.

Water has shaped the city. Hurricane Carla brought four feet of floodwater over much of Texas City in 1961, the Handbook of Texas records; building began on a 23-foot seawall in 1962, with the last section finished in 1985, and in 1982 the city put up an eight-foot inner levee on Moses Lake with Archimedes screw pumps. Because subsidence was also causing floods, Texas City stopped pumping groundwater and turned to Brazos River water for its industries. On ground where the water table can reach the surface, the groundwater check comes before any water is pumped out of a pool.

Shoal Point, the Myers brothers and the 1947 disaster

In 1891 three brothers from Duluth, Minnesota, Jacob R., Henry and Benjamin F. Myers, were on a duck-hunting trip to the Shoal Point marshes on Galveston Bay when they saw the place's promise as a major port, the Handbook of Texas says; Duluth shippers bought 10,000 acres of bay frontage and renamed it Texas City. The Texas City Improvement Company filed the first townsite plat on May 17, 1893, and the city incorporated on September 16, 1911. On April 16, 1947, the French ship Grandecamp, loaded with ammonium nitrate fertilizer, blew up in the harbor and set off fires and a second ship explosion; the disaster killed 576 people and injured more than 4,000. The city rebuilt, and its population, 32,065 by 1960, had nearly doubled in a decade.