All this week we’re bringing you stories on the 2011 Labor Day Wildfires that destroyed over a thousand homes in Central Texas. On Monday, we looked at some of the complications that led to the fire beyond the well-known heat and drought. Later today, we’ll bring you a story of a narrow escape from the Pedernales Bend Fire that weekend.
Map by NPR
A new map by NPR shows you the fire risk in your area, and where major fires are currently burning in the country.
One takeaway from the series is that wildfires are becoming larger and more destructive. In the slideshow report above by NPR science correspondent Christopher Joyce, you can learn why the danger has grown.
What’s the current fire risk in your area? Well, there’s a map for that. Matt Stiles and the NPR digital team have put together an interactive map of wildfire dangers and active fires in the country, which you can see here. It’s updated daily. For the moment, Texas falls in the low and moderate risk categories.
Big industrial plants like these near homes in Houston don't have to pay into fund, homeowners do
It’s one of those charges on your electric bill that can be a blur of little figures. It’s called the Energy Efficiency Cost Recovery Factor and on a recent bill of a Houston customer it added $1.02 to the total. (It applies in “competitive” markets like Houston and Dallas but not in places with cooperatives or municipally-owned utilities like Austin and San Antonio.)
A buck may not sound like much but when you add up what’s collected annually from millions of Texas residential and commercial customers, it’s serious money. Continue Reading →
Hurricane Isaac could have a significant impact on drilling in the Gulf.
Updated: Sometime Tuesday, Hurricane Isaac could bring significant weather conditions to more than a thousand drilling rigs and platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. Oil prices are already on the rise.
As you can see in the map to the right by Accuweather, there are several Gulf drilling regions that are under a “high” or “moderate” threat by the storm. “While currently a tropical storm, Isaac is a storm that should not be taken lightly,” Accuweather cautions.
Some drilling platforms have already been evacuated, and others may need to be as well. “Current indications point toward waves of 20 to 30 feet (or higher) building in this region of the Gulf as Isaac gains strength and approaches the coast,” Accuweather says in a report today.
The hurricane had already shut-in 78 percent of production in the Gulf as of Monday morning, according to the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement. Some 346 platforms have been evacuated, over fifty percent of the platforms in the Gulf. And 41 rigs (over fifty percent of the rigs in the Gulf) have been evacuated as well.
The storm could affect much more than just drilling in the Gulf. Continue Reading →
Coppell firefighter Lin Whetstine walks through hot spots with a chain saw as on September 7, 2011 in Bastrop, Texas.
No Texan needs reminding of just how bad last year was. For months, Central Texas received only trace amounts of rain. It was the driest– and hottest — summer in the areaâs history.
How a ‘Perfect Storm’ Led to the Worst Fires in Texas History/audio]
Chris Barron, Executive Director of the Firemanâs and Fire Marshals Association of Texas, remembers that the 2011 wildfire season got off to an ominous start with the Possum Kingdom Lake fire in March.
âAnd Iâll never forget talking to Chief Steve Purdue of the Mineral Wells Fire Department,” Barrons says. “And I asked him what heâs up to. And his immediate response was, âIâve got fire all around me, I gotta talk to you later.â And that kind of set the tone for the rest of the season.â
The rest of the season was a scorcher. As the summer of 2011 wore on, temperatures broke records and the earth cracked. Vegetation died.
Then in the week before Labor Day, officials began to caution that Central Texas was beginning to look like a powder keg. Continue Reading →
A new infographic shows how tar sands oil is produced.
Construction is currently underway on the Keystone XL pipeline, which will take heavy oil harvested from sand and tar pits in Canada to refineries on the Gulf Coast of Texas. The pipeline and the oil that will flow through it have drawn controversy for several reasons: it’s a carbon-intensive process to drill for the oil; if oil were to leak, it would be very difficult to clean up; and the company behind the pipeline has used eminent domain to route it through private land, against the wishes of some landowners. This week a Texas farmer lost her court case fighting the pipeline company’s claims of eminent domain.
But just how does this heavy oil get out of those sand pits and into the pipeline? NPR has put together a helpful infographic on how the tar sands oil gets produced.
Trucks with the natural gas industry drive through the countryside earlier this year in Springville, Pennsylvania.
With the good can also come the bad, and that’s certainly been the case with the drilling boom going on in various parts of Texas these days. As drillers use thousands of trucks — hauling millions of gallons of water and other supplies to rigs — roads inevitably suffer. Naturally, people are questioning who is going to be responsible for repairing them.
And those roads — built in the fifties and sixties — weren’t constructed for heavy use, Wilson tells the Tribune. “They were built as farm-to-market roads for country trucks and for agriculture,” he says. “They werenât built for 18-wheelers ⊠so a road was built for 25 years and you get that level of traffic, it can diminish it down to six or seven years.” Damage from drilling trucks in the Eagle Ford Shale of South Texas alone was recently estimated at $2 billion by TxDOT.
Some possible solutions? Wilson says the agency is looking at ways to do more about the issue: Continue Reading →
Rotting corn damaged by severe drought on a farm near Bruceville, Indiana last week. Record heat throughout the US farm belt states have curtailed crop production and likely will send corn and soybean prices to record highs, according to the US Department of Agriculture.
Itâs a sad irony that just as much of Texas has pulled out of exceptional drought, the rest of the country has entered into it. But even though the severely dry weather is now outside of Texasâ borders, that doesnât mean the state isnât feeling the effects.
Remember last year when the Texas drought forced ranchers to sell off their herds or ship cattle to parts of the country where there was enough hay to feed them?
Well, times have changed.
âA lot of those cattle that went up north last year are now heading back south,â says Bexar County Agrilife Extension agent Brian Davis.
When you look at a map of the drought in the U.S. this summer, it almost looks like last yearâs weather pattern is turned on its head. The entire middle part of the country is suffering through something much like what Texas suffered through last year. And what do they grow in the middle part of the country? Well, among other things, corn. And it turns out that corn is key to understanding how drought in the Midwest is affecting Texas. Not to sound too insensitive about it, but, in a certain way, their loss is our gain. Continue Reading →
Julia Trigg Crawford has several hundred acres of land in northeast Texas. And the Keystone XL pipeline will likely go through it.
The ruling came by iPhone.
Late Wednesday evening, Judge Bill Harris of the Lamar County Court at Law released his decision in the case of the North Texas farmer, Julia Trigg Crawford, versus the Keystone XL pipeline, owned and operated by the Canadian company TransCanada.
In an email to lawyers involved in the case, the judge announced he was granting TransCanada’s motion for summary judgement and denied Crawford’s plea. The message ended with “Sent from my iPhone.”
After Crawford refused to allow the pipeline on her land, TransCanada used eminent domain last fall to seize her property. She fought back in court, and the case finally came before Judge Harris a few weeks ago. In the meantime, construction began on the southern leg of the controversial pipeline.
“It is absolutely unbelievable to me eminent domain abuse continues in Texas given the revelations made during our court case,” Julia Trigg Crawford says in a statement. Continue Reading →
Pipe is stacked at the southern site of the Keystone XL pipeline in Cushing, Oklahoma. Construction of the southern leg began last week.
For the third time, The Texas Supreme Court has ruled against a pipeline company’s use of eminent domain.
But the oil and gas industry did not give this one up without a fight.
Here’s some background: In a landmark ruling at the Texas Supreme Court last August, a rice farmer in Beaumont (along with a rice farming consortium, Texas Rice Land Partners) won his case against the Denbury Green pipeline company, which had used eminent domain to route a carbon dioxide pipeline across his land. The 24-inch line stretches from Donaldsonville, Louisiana to the Hastings Field, outside of Houston, Texas. The farmer, Mike Latta, argued that the pipeline wasn’t in the public interest, as it was a private pipeline that would only be used by one company. The Supreme Court of Texas agreed. (But the case took several years to make it to the Supreme Court, and in the meantime the company built the pipeline anyways.)
Then the pipeline company — joined by the Texas Oil and Gas Association and several others associated with the industry (including notable names like the Koch Pipeline Company, Kinder Morgan and Occidental Chemical) —  asked for an entire rehearing of the case, something of a rare move. In March, the Supreme Court said no, the decision stands. Then the pipeline company Denbury Green asked again for a rehearing.
This week comes the latest answer: No. And as the decision still stands, it could become the basis for more legal arguments against pipelines using eminent domain to seize private land. Continue Reading →
Robert Cervenka, a neighbor of the troubled coal power plant, has been ranching here for over seventy years.
What happened at the Sandy Creek power plant? The new coal-powered generator, one of the few developing coal projects in the state, had a strange malfunction last fall, setting back construction on the plant a year, and pushing the Texas electric grid even further into a tight spot. The power station in Riesel was set to produce 925 megawatts of electricity for Texas, enough to power an estimated 900,000 homes.
But what exactly happened wasn’t clear. The companies behind the project wouldn’t talk. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which oversees the grid that serves much of the state, said they couldn’t discuss it because it would be bad for market competition. And a video taken during a test startup seemed to show something going wrong. (It has since been removed.)
On Monday, Standard and Poor’s (S&P)Â downgraded the credit rating of the project, and for the first time we have some answers about what went wrong at the plant. In a press release explaining their reasons for a negative outlook on the project, S&P says that an October 17, 2011 accident set back the plant’s start date by nearly a year. On that day, “a number of tubes overheated that badly damaged the broiler,” S&P says. Now the plant is expected to come online in Spring 2013.
But the financial stability of the project is still in question. Continue Reading →
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