A third earthquake shook Timpson,Texas early this morning. It measured a 2.4 on the Richter Scale and comes on the heels of two stronger quakes that hit on Labor Day. At least one of those prompted reports of damage.
If you visit this site often, chances are you’ve read about Timpson. It’s an East Texas community home to just over 1,100 people that seems to get more than its fair share of earthquakes.
Up until the recent spate of quakes, Timpson had never felt an earthquake before, at least not since the USGS started keeping records. That might be related to something else that Timpson has in abundance: injection wells for storing waste water produced by hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.
Science has proven the link between injection wells and seismic activity (which is the same thing as earthquakes). And researchers are studying that link in Timpson.
AMARILLO — By an interstate overpass along the languid Canadian River near Amarillo, off-road vehicles zooming by are a common sight.
“They get in the river and run up and down it,” said Gene Wilde, a professor of biology at Texas Tech University. It’s legal, he said, but “they’re not supposed to get in the water. Technically, if there was a federal marshal out here, that is harassing the fish.”
Wilde has reason to care: The Arkansas River shiner — not a beer but a small, silvery minnow — likes to spawn in this river, with its sandy shores. The fish, which is no longer found in Arkansas, has a prime spot on the federal government’s list of threatened species. Drought diminished the river — and the fish — so badly two years ago that Wilde and others collected shiners to take to a hatchery in Oklahoma.
But the Canadian’s challenges go well beyond off-roaders bumping through delicate habitat. The river itself is “pretty puny,” said Kent Satterwhite, general manager of the Canadian River Municipal Water Authority, which supplies water for Panhandle cities and industries. Despite its name, the authority now gets its water from the Ogallala Aquifer, and two years ago it spent tens of millions of dollars to buy more Ogallala rights from the oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens. Continue Reading →
As the Texas Public Utility Commission (PUC) considers changing the electricity market so there’s more money to build new power plants, a mystery has popped up: why aren’t Texans using as much electricity as predicted?
“There’s something that’s been going on recently with the forecasts, which affects a lot of things,” said PUC commissioner Kenneth Anderson at the commission’s open meeting last week.
Who Turned the Lights Out?
Anderson said forecasts from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) had predicted electricity demand would increase in 2013 by 2.1 percent.
In reality?
“It’s been barely one percent, if it’s even hit one percent,” Anderson said. Continue Reading →
VIDEO: The First Festival in West, Texas Since the Explosion
After a deadly explosion at a fertilizer plant in the town of West, Texas this April that killed 15, the federal government issued updated recommendations for the safe storage of ammonium nitrate Friday.
The recommendations, known as a chemical advisory, had not been updated since 1997. The new guidelines warn that ammonium nitrate can become “much more likely to explode” under conditions like those found at the fertilizer plant in West and other facilities in Texas.
But the advisory is just that — advice. It is not a regulation itself, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and “cannot and does not impose legally binding requirements on the agencies, states, or the regulated community,” the agency says. Rather the purpose of the advisory is to “raise awareness” and “share lessons learned from past incidents.”
Ammoniun nitrate can explode “when stored near other material that can add fuel to the ammonium nitrate — such as grain, sugar, seeds, sawdust, and most especially petroleum fuels such as diesel,” the advisory says. It adds that “the presence of fuel and/or heat (and especially both) near ammonium nitrate is a very high hazard situation,” especially when stored in confined spaces.
The plant in West stored ammonium nitrate in wood buildings, and had no sprinkler system. Continue Reading →
Click image to see the location of the two quakes that hit this Monday. They are represented by yellow dots. Find more info here: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/
If you visit this site often, chances are you’ve read about Timpson. It’s an East Texas community home to just over 1,100 people that seems to get more than its fair share of earthquakes.
Up until the recent spate of quakes, Timpson had never felt an earthquake before, at least not since the USGS started keeping records.
Timpson now has somewhat frequent earthquakes, but it also has a lot of something else: injection wells for storing waste water produced by hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. By our last count, Shelby County where Timpson is located, is home to 27 active injection wells.
Science has proven the link between injection wells and seismic activity (which is the same thing as earthquakes). And researchers are studying that link in Timpson.
Cattle rustling, the age-old crime of stealing livestock, might seem like something for the history books. But, as our readers and listeners learned last month, Texas ranchers are seeing an increase in stolen cows, even as the number of cattle dwindles.
The report generated a lot of interest. It went viral online and was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered.
But, as is often the case, we still have more of the story to tell. This time in pictures.
Click the player above to view an audio slideshow of photos snapped on a recent reporting trip to Giddings, Texas and hear the NPR report. Peruse the text after the jump to learn more about black market bovines, and the people we met while reporting.
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AMARILLO — By an interstate overpass along the languid Canadian River near Amarillo, off-road vehicles zooming by are a common sight.
