Texas, Beaumont | featured news

Brightly colored tarps covered plants at The Giving Field, alligators huddled together for warmth, and icicles formed on fountains and pipes as Southeast Texans hunkered down through the third day of a brutal cold front. As temperatures hovered in the low 30s throughout the day and dipped well below freezing overnight, residents donned rarely needed outerwear, emptying stores' shelves of hats and mittens. Local flora and fauna, also unaccustomed to the winter weather, were readied for the arctic air, which is expected to stay over the region through the end of the week.

On the floor of Kelli Meredith's first-grade classroom, pairs of students faced off over a snowflake printed board game, racing to see whose plastic game piece could reach the finish line first.
Kylei Labergne, 7, held up a pink slip of paper, printed with "9 plus 8" on the front, and waited for Khloe White, 6, to answer. When she solved the problem, Labergne flipped over the
card, directing White to move her pawn three spaces, carefully tapping each spot as she moved.

A Beaumont teenager who has been missing since Oct. 30 has been found safe and reunited with her mother.

Beaumont firefighters battle fire and freezing temperatures at an abandoned bicycle repair store on Park Street Tuesday morning. The building was empty at the time of the fire and no injuries were reported. An investigation to the cause of the fire is ongoing.

Robert Hymes spent New Year's Eve 1985 trying to free his truck from the mud in his pasture. He tried to pull it out with a tractor, but the tractor got stuck too.
Standing in ankle-deep mud, Hymes and his then-wife, Kirby, used a chain hoist to free the truck and tractor.

When Mike Albanese decided to buy the 17-story Edison Plaza office building in downtown Beaumont in late 2011, he realized he had never been in it. Then he couldn't find the front door. If he couldn't figure out how to get into the building at 350 Pine St., Albanese thought, no one else could. That had to change, along with a lot of other things. Floor by floor and tenant by tenant, the longtime, often under-occupied white monolith on the Beaumont skyline underwent an extreme makeover.

Residents throughout the Golden Triangle are bundling and firing up their heaters as frigid temperatures make their way into the region. Overnight lows will continue to dip down below freezing throughout the week, with a forecasted upturn in temperatures expected by Friday.

To protect future fish stocks, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department will temporarily band saltwater fishing at Entergy Outfall near Bridge City and several other areas along the coast Tuesday.
All fishing will be closed from from the mouth of the Outfall at the Neches River Canal to the power plant.
state officials say that freezing temperatures compiled by regular fishing could cause a strain on resources.