The first case of mad cow disease in the U.S. in five years was discovered this week.
The first case of mad cow disease in the U.S. since 2006 was found in California this week. While the diseased cow didn’t enter the food supply, consumers, ranchers and officials are all watching and waiting to see what happens next.
So does Texas have cause to be concerned? The state’s agriculture commissioner, Todd Staples, said in a statement Tuesday that “American consumers can remain confident our food supply is the safest in the world, and Texas beef is as safe as ever.”
One possible effect of the mad cow case is a rise in beef prices. In an interview with KUT News, Staples said that he and the Texas beef industry are looking at beef futures markets to see what’s ahead. “I feel pretty good that we’ll be able to move forward,” he told KUT. “The fact that there is an all-time low in the number of Texas and U.S. beef herds also indicates that maybe it won’t have an economic impact.”
NPR’s food blog The Salt has a handy FAQ about the disease and the food supply. They say that “the cow in question wasn’t destined for the food supply. Its carcass had been sent to a rendering plant in California,” where it would likely end up as pet food or some kind of industrial product. And the cow had a rare form of mad cow disease, which is “different than getting the disease from eating feed made out of bone and tissue from infected cattle, which caused the outbreaks in England in the 1980s and 1990s.” You can read the full post here.Â
Photo courtesy of Pearsall Volunteer Fire Department
An explosion and fire rocked an oil fracking site in South Texas Jan. 19. Three were injured.
The Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA), a division of the Department of Labor, has issued citations for ten “serious safety violations” to High Roller Wells, Inc., a company that owns a disposal well in Pearsall, Texas, some 50 miles southwest of San Antonio in the Eagle Ford Shale.
As we reported earlier this year, a Jan. 19 explosion blew the lid off a storage tank, injuring three. A fire burned for over an hour as the all-volunteer Pearsall Fire Department (and three other nearby departments) battled the flames with twelve trucks and 33 firefighters. The explosion likely started when workers there were welding near storage tanks — a decision that had many in the industry scratching their heads. The site is used for disposing of fluids from hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.”
In a phone call with StateImpact Texas, OSHA’s San Antonio-area director Jeff Funke said that “we don’t issues citations lightly. We look at what’s legally sufficient. “These are measures that should have been in place before we got there.” In a news release, Funke also said that “if OSHA’s standards had been followed, it is possible this unfortunate incident could have been avoided.”
While the well is operated by a company called High Roller Wells (which doesn’t appear to have a website), it’s unclear who actually owns it. When asked about it earlier this year, the Railroad Commission would only say that it does not “have information on investors or owners of oil and gas facilities.” Continue Reading →
A new report says Houston's air is getting cleaner, but remains relatively dirty.
The winds of change are cleaner than usual in Texas’ biggest metropolitan area. According to the American Lung Association’s annual State of the Air 2012 report, Houston’s air quality index has improved slightly from last year, marking the best levels ever recorded in the city since the association first began following them thirteen years ago.
The association grades cities on three major categories: ozone, year-round particle and short-term particle. Houston ranked eighth worst in ozone pollution (receiving a grade of F) and 23rd worst in year-round particle pollution, but received a commendable B in short-term particle pollution. Continue Reading →
Texaco Inc. Photograph Collection, Courtesy Sam Houston Regional Library, Liberty, TX
The early days of drilling in East Texas but does anyone know where all the wells are now?
Scattered across the oil and gas fields of Texas where fortunes have been won and sometimes lost, there are at least 7,869 abandoned wells. The Texas Railroad Commission (RRC) which regulates drilling calls them orphans.
By the RRC’s count, there are an additional 5,445 wells that are inactive and whose operators are delinquent in meeting regulations. Add to all that an unknown number of orphan wells drilled decades ago for which records have been lost, if they ever existed.
You can find some of the orphans in the South Liberty Oil field in Liberty County. It’s just 45 miles east of Spindletop, the iconic oil field in Beaumont that a century ago was the most productive in the world.
Photo courtesy of the Texas House of Representatives
Warren Chisum has the lead in the race for the open seat on the Railroad Commission, according to the Texas Tribune's latest insiders poll
Our friends at the Texas Tribune and Texas Weekly released their latest ‘Inside Intelligence’ poll to the public today, a survey of several “insiders” with their projections for some of the upcoming races. The poll, conducted last week, takes a look at the Republican Primary race for the open seat on the Railroad Commission of Texas (currently occupied by interim appointee Buddy Garcia). Whoever wins the primary will go on to face Democrat Dale Henry (who’ll be running for the Commission for a third time) in the general election in November.
The poll found an edge for Panhandle Rep. Warren Chisum, R-Pampa, with 58 percent of the insiders favoring him to win. 37 percent give the primary rice to Christi Craddick, daughter of state Rep. Tom Craddick. Only five percent favor Roland Sledge, an energy attorney in Houston.
Some of the choice quotes from respondents? Here you go:
On Chisum: “Who would voters trust more than a good ‘ol boy from West Texas?”
On Craddick: “Daddy’s million will put her over the top but she is doing very well on her own.”
And lastly: “I’m working very hard to bring this one up to the level of indifference. Failing so far.”
A dead fish is seen on the beach May 5, 2010 in Pass Christian, Mississippi. The BP spill was the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history.
The first criminal charges in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill were filed today by the Department of Justice, two years after the disaster began. Former BP engineer Kurt Mix was arrested today and charged with two counts of obstruction of justice for “intentionally destroying evidence,” according to the Department. The former engineer is from Katy, Texas. NPR broke the story earlier today.
Mix is alleged to have destroyed more than 200 text messages he sent to a BP supervisor about the company’s efforts to stop the leak and estimate how much oil was flowing out of it, despite being told by the company to preserve all of his communications. The Justice Department says that Mix deleted the messages in early October 2010 after learning they would be collected by BP’s lawyers. “The deleted texts, some of which were recovered forensically, included sensitive internal BP information collected in real-time as the Top Kill operation was occurring, which indicated that Top Kill was failing,” the department says in a press release.
Yul Kwon is the host of a new PBS series that peels back the layers of our energy, foodn transportation and manufacturing.
We all use electricity – but what systems are in place to make sure it’s there when we need it? How does the whole grid work in the first place? Those are questions examined in the latest episode of a new series on PBS called America Revealed, which aims to peel back the layers of how complex systems like energy work in the U.S. Show host Yul Kwon spoke with StateImpact Texas lead station KUT Austin this week about the program. Kwon says the show looks at the massive systems that we use everyday in the U.S. but that most people don’t understand – or just don’t think about.
Q: Green energy has become a larger and larger thing in Texas. We are the top wind energy producer in the country. How have you seen, as you were producing your program, the green energy movement put its stamp on the electrical system?
A: It’s a making a huge impact. Again, we go through the evolution of how our energy grid developed, how the electric power grid developed. And you know, to this day, coal is still the dominant source of energy. In terms of producing power, it accounts for about half of the total power production. The average American uses about four tons of coal every single year. So, that’s not going to change any time soon. But, at the same time, we are seeing this huge growing awareness of the need to produce more sustainable resources. Continue Reading →
Water is becoming scarcer in Texas, and the solutions being passed around as of late are varied. Desalination, conservation and new reservoirs are all on the table. Another less, ummmm, palatable solution that is already being used in Texas? Treating “effluent” (i.e. waste water) to be used again for drinking, cooking and cleaning.
A new video op-ed in the New York Times by filmmaker Jessica Yu looks at the psychological barriers to adapting waste water for re-use, featuring cockroaches and a creative “Folgers switch“-style test marketing of bottled treated affluent called Porcelain Springs.
Every summer, residents of Houston enjoy what you could call “recycled” water sent down the Trinity River from their neighbors to the north in Dallas. It works for them, so why not do it everywhere we need water? “In Israel, more than 80 percent of household wastewater is recycled, providing nearly half the water for irrigation,” Yu writes. “A new pilot plant near San Diego and a national “NEWater” program in Singapore show it’s practical to turn wastewater into water that’s clean enough to drink. Yet, in most of the world, we are resistant to do so.”
You can watch the video above, which is culled from clips from a forthcoming documentary, Last Call at the Oasis.
The Deepwater Horizon rig seen before the explosion.
Multiple Coast Guard helicopters, planes and cutters responded to rescue the Deepwater Horizon 126 person crew after an explosion and fire caused the crew to evacuate.
Long slicks of oil could be seen for miles after the spill
Local fisherman who signed on to help with the oil clean-up operation on May 1, 2010.
Oil boom barriers that were expected to stop the spread of oil lie washed up on the beach after heavy swells and winds hit the coast of Louisiana on April 30, 2010.
Rescue crews hydrate a Northern Gannet bird that was covered in oil on May 1, 2010. A giant oil slick threatened economic and environmental devastation as it closed in on Louisiana’s vulnerable coast.
Workers prepare a ship loaded with oil barrier booms as they wait for heavy swells and wind to subside before continuing the oil clean-up operation. The wind started to strengthen and blow the 600-square-mile slick directly onto the coast, where a rich variety of wildlife were at risk in the maze of marshes that amounts to 40 percent of the US wetlands.
A worker from United States Environmental Services helps load oil booms onto a boat May 3, 2010 in Pass Christian, Mississippi.
A dead fish is seen on the beach May 5, 2010 in Pass Christian, Mississippi. The BP spill was the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history.
Environmental Protection Agency scientist Archie Lee collects a sample of sand as Peter Kalla also of the EPA watches May 3, 2010 on the beach in Biloxi, Mississippi.
Prisoners from the Elayn Hunt Correctional Center line up as they prepare to undertake a training exercise to learn how to cleanse oil from birds affected by the oil slick from the BP Deepwater Horizon platform disaster in New Orleans Louisiana, on May 3, 2010.
Workers put the finishing touches on the Pollution Control Dome at the Martin Terminal worksite in Port Fourchon, as BP rushed to cap the source of the oil slick from the BP Deepwater Horizon platform disaster in Louisiana, on May 4, 2010. The well wasn’t completely sealed until July.
In the slideshow above, you can see photos of the spill. And for a look at some of the lessons learned, read our earlier piece, The BP Blowout, 2 Years Later.
Barer speaks with a spokesman for the company behind the project, who tells him that “the waste will be encapsulated in reinforced concrete casks and buried in pits hundreds of feet deep in red bed clay, an almost impermeable material.” The company adds that “the entire storage area will be encased with a concrete-reinforced liner.”
But Barer also talks to an environmental group who has come to a very different conclusion:
Karen Hadden, executive director of the Sustainable Energy and Economic Development Coalition (SEED), an environmental group, believes the chance of a leak or contamination remains high.
She said that the six other low-level radioactive waste sites — including three active sites in Clive, Utah; Richland, Wash.; and Barnwell, S.C. — all have had leaks.
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