Terrence Henry is the Austin-based online reporter for StateImpact. He has worked as an editor, writer and web producer for The Washington Post and The Atlantic. He has a bachelor’s degree in International Relations from Brigham Young University.
While some Texas towns ran dry during the drought, or came close to doing so, one community has been living without water regardless of how much rain falls in the state. In a rural subdivision less than ten miles outside of Austin, some thirty families live without running water. Most of them are low-income and don’t speak English. Andy Uhler of KUT reports the first of three stories in a series on the community of Las Lomitas. (You can also watch a video story above by KUT’s Jeff Heimsath.)
“Driving up the dirt road to Norma Escalante’s trailer home, you pass a string of double-wides in varying states of disrepair. Her yard is dotted with odds and ends: an old tube TV, a rusted-over kitchen range perched beside the front door, and the skeleton of a burned-down trailer that’s been converted into a chicken coop.
Inside the home, a couple of sofas with red slipcovers flank a big-screen TV. The ceiling is cracked and stained from water leaks. Norma, her husband and their 9-year old son have lived here for five years.
“I like living out here, I do,” Norma said. “But not having water here, in the United States, in the city — it’s like ridiculous.””
Photo courtesy of the University of Texas at Austin
Dr. Danny Reible will chair the 2012 Texas Water Summit.
Water, water everywhere. Let’s keep some drops to drink. But how? That’s why scientists, politicians, and water utility leaders are meeting up today for the 2012 Texas Water Summit from the University of Texas at Austin’s Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science. It will feature prominent statewide leaders on water issues like state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon, San Antonio Water System’s CEO Robert Puente and Robert Mace of the Texas Water Development Board.
To get a preview of the summit, StateImpact Texas’ Terrence Henry talked to its director, Danny Reible. He works at the University of Texas’s Center for Research in Water Resources. He is also the program chair for the summit. The interview was edited for clarity and content.
Q: Tell us about what people can expect from this conference.
A: The Texas Water Summit is an effort to explore the consequence of our drought. What is our availability of water? What are our needs for water? And ultimately how can we match the gap between the two now and in the future?
Photo by Filipa Rodrigues/StateImpact Texas permalink
Tomatoes on the vine at Village Farms new thirty-acre greenhouse in Monahans, Texas.
Photo by Filipa Rodrigues/StateImpact Texas permalink
The vines are suspended from the ceiling, with large cylinders circulating air beneath them.
Photo by Filipa Rodrigues/StateImpact Texas permalink
The tomatoes are grown in coco peat instead of soil, greatly reducing impact on land and waterways.
Photo by Filipa Rodrigues/StateImpact Texas permalink
Commissioner of Agriculture Todd Staples inspects the tomatoes.
Photo by Filipa Rodrigues/StateImpact Texas permalink
Computers control temperature, air and humidity. Bees are allowed in for pollination, but other bugs are kept out, eliminating the need for pesticides. Large tubes keep air circulating beneath the tomatoes.
Photo by Filipa Rodrigues/StateImpact Texas permalink
Photo by Filipa Rodrigues/StateImpact Texas permalink
Doug Kling says “there’s a peacefulness” to the greenhouse.
Photo by Filipa Rodrigues/StateImpact Texas permalink
The end product: bushels of Texas tomatoes.
Photo by Filipa Rodrigues/StateImpact Texas permalink
Precisely-beveled glass diffuses light on the tomatoes, providing equal amounts of sunlight to the crop.
Photo by Filipa Rodrigues/StateImpact Texas permalink
Commissioner of Agriculture Todd Staples and Village Farms officials tour the greenhouse.
Next time you buy a Texas tomato, check where it was grown. The answer might surprise you. That’s because ninety percent of the state’s tomatoes come from a few greenhouses in the arid deserts of Far West Texas. (You can see a detailed breakdown of how the process works in the slideshow above.)
The latest addition to that group is a massive glass facility in Monahans, outside of Odessa. It officially opened for business this week.
“Well, when you look at this, this is like a giant, 15-acre, indoor garden,” says Doug Kling, Senior Vice President for Village Farms, which owns and operates the greenhouse. “Pollinated [by] bees, and grown naturally. Where the sunlight comes in and you can smell the calyx. It’s kind of exciting. There’s a peacefulness to it.”
A telescope’s eyepiece projects a penumbra onto a screen during a solar eclipse over New Delhi on July 22, 2009. Only a partial eclipse was able to be seen from the Indian capital.
In this multiple exposure image taken on July 22, 2009 shows the various stages of the total solar eclipse in Baihata village, 30 kms from Guwahati, the capital city of the northeastern state of Assam.
Indian youths use solar viewing goggles to view a solar eclipse in Siliguri on July 22, 2009.
You’re going to need something better than wayfarers this weekend. The first annular solar eclipse of the 21st century for the continental U.S. is coming to Texas Sunday. You can see photos of some notable eclipses in the slideshow above.
The eclipse will start in Eastern Asia and cross east over the Pacific, ending in Central Texas. Here’s an interactive map of where the eclipse will pass, with peak viewing times. NASA says the eclipse will begin at 7:35 pm in Texas and peak at sundown. The best views will be from West Texas, particularly Amarillo, Lubbock and Midland-Odessa, where the eclipse will peak right around 8:30 pm. For those of you in the big cities of Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston and San Antonio, you won’t get to see the full peak phase of the eclipse because the sun will have set by then. But you’ll still be able to see some of it.
An annular eclipse is close to a total eclipse, but not quite. With an annular solar eclipse, the moon directly passes between the earth and the sun, casting a shadow on the earth’s surface. For a viewer on earth, the light from the sun is almost fully blocked creating a “ring of fire” around the moon.
NASA cautions viewers to not look directly at the sun and to not rely on standard sunglasses. Looking directly at the eclipse can cause permanent eye damage. “The ring of sunlight during annularity is blindingly bright,” Fred Ezpenack, an eclipse expert at NASA, warns on their website. Continue Reading →
The Pennzenergy Company Oil Exploration Drilling Rig In The Gulf Of Mexico.
If you were hoping to get in on some of the action in offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, time is running out. On Thursday the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) gave final notice of an upcoming sale of nearly 38 million acres of offshore leases.
Those leases run an area from three to 230 miles off the coast, the BOEM says, and range anywhere from nine feet to more than two miles deep. The bureau estimates that there’s somewhere around 31 billion barrels of oil and 134 trillion cubic feet of natural gas waiting there that are “currently undiscovered and technically recoverable.” (But they say the actual production would likely be much less, resulting in 1 billion barrels of oil and 4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.)
The sale takes place June 20th at the Mercedez-Benz Superdome. But bids must be submitted by mail no later than June 19th. The Department says that the minimum bid for deepwater leases is $100 per acre.
The sale had been put on hold following the 2010 BP Oil spill disaster at the Deepwater Horizon rig. So what’s being done to prevent that from happening again? Continue Reading →
Wind turbines provide a sustainable source of energy in that they don’t emit carbon dioxide or require water.
Texas has lots of ambition. Some Texans strive to open the world’s largest convenience store. But of more interest to us is another goal: the state wants to have10,000 megawatts of the power in its portfolio come from renewable energy by 2025. And according a new report by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the state continues to well exceed that.
While the state first achieved the goal, known as the renewable portfolio standard, in 2009, green energy in the grid continues to grow. Thirteen percent more power on the state’s grid came from renewables in 2011 than it did in 2010. In all, renewables provided enough power for about 31,000 Texas homes last year. (The state grid supplies about 85 percent of the juice in Texas.)
The big winners? Solar and biomass. Solar energy production jumped up 153 percent from 2010 to 2011, while biomass went up 40 percent. In the middle? Wind, which went up fifteen percent. But it still accounts for the majority of renewable energy generation in Texas, which has the most wind energy in the nation (and is the fifth-highest producer of wind energy in the world). Wind provided 30.8 million of the 31.7 million megawatt hours of renewable energy in Texas last year. Fossil fuels still produced about 80 percent of energy in Texas last year.
The big loser? Hydro-electric generation, which went down a whopping 56 percent in 2011. ERCOT says that “due to the ongoing drought in most of the state, generation of hydroelectric power decreased by more than half.”
The Rio Grande River in Eagle Pass at sunset, looking west toward the International Bridge to Piedras Negras, Mexico.
Our friends at the Texas Tribunereport today that the Kickapoo Traditional Tribe of Texas has dropped its opposition to a coal mining project along the Texas-Mexico border.
While some people in Maverick County welcome the jobs that could bring, many, including city and county governments, are vehemently opposed to it. Several locals have formed the Maverick County Environmental and Public Health Association to fight the mine.
“We’re sending coal over there that the United States will not use because it’s so low quality, and then we’re sending it to Mexico so they can burn it over there, and it pollutes us over there and it pollutes us over here when it goes through town every day,” Association member Martha Baxter told StateImpact Texas earlier this year.
Piles of petroleum coke sit uncovered on the ship canal in Corpus Christi.
On the northern end of the Corpus Christi ship canal, in the shadow of six major oil refineries, sit several large black mounds. They’re piles of petroleum coke, the carbon solids left over from the process of refining. Across the canal there are several hundred homes where locals live, known as Refinery Row. And until this week, the Las Brisas Energy Center was close to building a power plant that would burn that coke for energy.
In a letter Monday, Judge Stephen Yelenosky of the 345th Judicial District Civil Court said he intends to reverse the potential plant’s air permit. The Las Brisas power plant was given the permit in January 2011 by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ). But in his announcement, the judge found several things wrong with how the TCEQ processed the permit, and said it failed to meet the requirements of the Clean Air Act, among other issues.
“The letter basically says that he found a number of legal errors in the TCEQ’s decision to grant the permit,” says attorney Erin Fonken with the Environmental Integrity Project, which was one of the parties that brought the case to court. “These aren’t just little things where they didn’t check a box. There are substantial analyses that [the TCEQ] failed to have the applicant do at all. These are some pretty serious errors.”
Without the air permit, which the company called “an important project milestone” when it was issued, things get set back significantly. Continue Reading →
Photographer and author Thomas Bachand put the Keystone Mapping Project together. While he only has data for four states, he’s still hoping to map out the rest. In an email to StateImpact Texas he wrote that he started the project because “neither TransCanada Corporation nor the U.S. Department of State (DOS) have been forthcoming with this project’s GIS information. This has made it impossible to evaluate the potential environmental impacts of the Keystone XL pipeline,” he wrote. “While it’s a good start, the scarcity of data underscores the lack of transparency and inadequacy of the Keystone XL review process.”
Photo by Flickr user GrungeTextures/Creative Commons
The Texas drought has killed an estimated 5.6 million urban trees and 500 million forest trees, roughly 10 percent of the trees in Texas.
The Texas Forest Service plans to take a long look at Texas’ trees to see how much damage the ongoing drought has done.
Last December, the forest service released a preliminary estimate of between 100 and 500 million trees killed by the drought. A later estimate of tree losses in urban areas of Texas have been pegged at more than five million. Both of those surveys relied on satellite imagery of trees in Texas.
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