The current drought in Texas, which broke single-year records, has shown dramatic abatement in recent months as rains surprised the state. It was supposed to be a drier-than-average winter, but thankfully forecasts can be wrong.
Maybe you’re curious to see how far Texas has to go before things get back to “normal?” Quite a way. These three maps from the National Drought Monitor show the progression (and, hopefully, regression) of the drought, from its beginning in October 2010, to its arguable peak in October of the following year, to the improved-but-far-from-out-of-the-woods condition we find ourselves in today:
When it comes to beef production, Texas is at the top. There are twice as many cows in the state as Nebraska, the second biggest cattle-producing state. But after the devastating effects of the drought, with agricultural losses estimated in the billions, hay prices nearly tripling and massive selloffs of cattle, will Texas be able to make a comeback?
Ranchers sold off cattle in droves last year, sending prices temporarily lower as beef flooded the market. The United States Department of Agriculture says the number of cattle in Texas dropped by 10 percent in 2011. That’s an especially large decline when you consider Texas is the biggest beef producer in the country.
One livestock economist tells Bernier that there are fewer cows now in the country than there’s been in fifty years. Many cattlemen in Texas are now facing the big question: take their young cows and sell them off, assuming the drought will continue? Or keep them and breed them for more cattle, believing the drought will soon end? Continue Reading →
Dr. Cliff Frohlich of the University of Texas at Austin is researching the links between fracking and earthquakes.
Accidents at drilling sites, new links between fracking and earthquakes, and a farewell party for La Niña (the main culprit behind the current Texas drought) were among our readers’ favorite stories over the last week. In case you missed them, here are the top five new StateImpact Texas stories:
Mark Your Calendars for La Niña’s Farewell Party: When will the drought end? It’s truly too soon to say, but one of the main culprits, La Niña, is going to be leaving us soon. But there’s a catch.
A case before the Texas Supreme Court could have big consequences for landowners and pipeline companies.
The Texas Supreme Court could decide by later this week if it will reconsider its opinion on the use of eminent domain by companies to take private land. At issue: companies that want to build pipelines to transport oil and gas as the need surges with increased drilling.
Those companies say the opinion the Court issued last August is now allowing the owners of private land to hold pipeline companies “hostage” and “extort” money from them.
In a petition filed by a pipeline company ETC NGL Transport, the company contends that “without the right of eminent domain, acquiring easements is a much more lengthy and expensive process—if it can be done at all.”
In a petition filed by the Texas Oil and Gas Association (TXOGA), the group predicts there will be “a devastating impact on an industry that serves as the economic engine for the State’s economy.”
A water hauler readies a pump to hook up to Spicewood Beach's system.
It’s been a few weeks since the small community of Spicewood Beach, which about 1,100 people call home, ran out of water. It was the first town to run dry during the Texas drought.
Since then, the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA), which owns and operates the wells in the town, has been paying an outside contracter to truck in water. That cost the LCRA $200 a load, and at anywhere from four to five loads a day, costs were adding up. (The LCRA has come under fire for selling over 1.3 million gallons from the wells last year to water haulers before the wells started to fail.)
But as of today, the LCRA has its own truck. An 18-wheel, 6,000 gallon behemoth that will make its way from a private water system about ten miles away to the tanks in Spicewood. The LCRA has had the truck for a while, but first had to teach its team how to drive it.
“The streets around Spicewood Beach are pretty tight, they’re pretty narrow,” says LCRA Water Operations Manager Ryan Rowney. “I want to make sure that my staff is fully aware and fully versed in how the truck operates, the turning radiuses. Just want to make sure that they feel comfortable operating this bigger truck, cause it’s much bigger than what we’ve been driving around.”
But Spicewood Beach residents are worried that this bigger truck will wreak havoc on their roads and potentially damage their property. Continue Reading →
Mysterious messages about the drought popped up around the UT campus Thursday evening.
Yesterday evening on the way home from work, the above note was found on the windshield of one of our cars. Another was found on the car of a KUT News reporter, our local radio partners.
There was 0.01 inches of rain recorded there in September, a big departure from normal. On each of the days listed on the note, there was no rain recorded. On average, ABIA gets about two-and-a-half inches of rain during that month. So to correct our tipster: the drought was in no way “neutralized” in September, though recent rains have allowed much of  Travis County to move from “exceptional” and “extreme” to “severe” drought .
But there may be trouble on the horizon. In a news release Thursday, Parks and Wildlife warned of rising detections of a new algae bloom, Dinophysis in Port Aransas. While the bloom is not toxic like red tide, it is consumed by oysters and makes them inedible, according to the department. While that bay is not open to harvesting, the algae has also been found further up the coast.
A dock sits on the dried up bed of the Pedernales River in Travis County, Texas.
Stop me if you’ve heard this question before: When will the drought end?
It’s truly too soon to say, but there are some indicators that one of the main culprits, La Niña, is going to be leaving us soon.
What is La Niña? It’s a weather pattern where the surface temperatures are cooler in the Pacific, which creates drier, warmer weather in the southern U.S. (You may also know her counterpart, El Niño, which generally has the opposite effect.) La Niña sticks around for a year, sometimes longer, and tends to return once every few years. (The last La Niña was in 2007, but it was a much lighter one.)
The National Weather Service says today that a “majority of models predict La Niña to weaken through the rest of the Northern Hemisphere winter 2011-12, and then to dissipate during the spring 2012.” This jibes with previous forecasts.
Trip Doggett is the President of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas
Yana Skorobogatov contributed reporting to this article.
If the state encounters another scorching hot summer like we had last year, the choice will be between rolling blackouts or ramped-up conservation, said Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT ) President Tripp Doggett at a State House hearing today.
“If we have the same summer as last summer, we had to have conservation [last summer] and everyone made a tremendous difference during those peaks on the hot summer days of last August. We’d have to have that, plus some [more], to survive this summer without rotating outages,” Doggett testified before the House Committee on State Affairs.
The state grid is expected to have a reserve margin of electricity slightly higher than 13.75 percent this year. That’s the safety cushion of electric capacity that exceeds forecast demand. And that cushion will be thinner this year. Last year, the margin was 17 percent and Texas still came dangerously close to rolling blackouts on two occasions.
Part of the problem the committee is looking into is how to encourage more power plants to be built. That’s difficult in a deregulated maket. When questioned whether state agencies had looked into encouraging public-private partnerships to build more plants Donna Nelson, Chair of the Texas’s Public Utility Commission said “my perception is that our market is premised on private investment… so no we haven’t.”
Water demand in Texas is expected to rise 22 percent by 2060, according to the state’s Water Development Board. They say if we have another drought like the one of record from the 1950s, losses could total $116 billion by then.
One part of the report worth noting doesn’t come until the end, and that’s what can Texas learn from other places that have had to deal with growing populations, less water, and persistent drought. Let’s take a look.
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Photo by Getty Images
The city of half a million discovered twenty years ago that its “aquifer was being drawn down twice as fast as nature could replenish it,” the report says. After enacting “aggressive” conservation and education campaigns, the city’s per capita usage fell by almost 38 percent. How’d they do it?
Pass on Grass. The city passed strict requirements on landscaping for new devlopments, “such as prohibiting the use of high-water-use grasses on more than 20 percent of a landscaped area.” Continue Reading →
About StateImpact
StateImpact seeks to inform and engage local communities with broadcast and online news focused on how state government decisions affect your lives. Learn More »
