Air pollution monitoring station at Croix Memorial Park in Manvel
At the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), they’re very familiar with a park in Manvel, a small town 15 miles south of downtown Houston. It’s a place where prairie land is quickly being turned into subdivisions but it still retains a rural appearance.
In Croix Memorial Park, between a soccer field and a playground, is one of the TCEQ’s air pollution monitoring stations, one of over 20 spread across the Houston area.
For some reason, the monitor in Manvel shows that ozone levels here are among the worst in the metro area. Consistently. And they haven’t come down as they have over the past decade at other monitoring sites, some of them near areas with far more sources of pollution from vehicles or industries.
“So the question is why, what’s different about that site,” said David Brymer, director of air quality at the TCEQ. “It’s south of town. Houston’s not really known for consistent north winds that would blow the urban core emissions towards that monitor. “ Continue Reading →
Dead fish washed ashore during a toxic bloom of golden algae in Canyon Lakes in Lubbock, Texas.
From the Asian Carp to the Zebra Mussel, Texas has its fair share of invasive species. Some of them get a lot of attention (I’m looking at you, voracious feral hog). Others tend to sneak under the radar even when they damage ecosystems.
Take Golden Algae. Originally from Europe, the microscopic plant was discovered on the Pecos River in 1985 when an algae bloom killed hundreds of thousands of fish. Since then, it has colonized other Texas river basins and killed millions more fish. Unlike deadly algae blooms in the Gulf of Mexico that kill fish by taking all the oxygen, golden algae is, itself, toxic. Under the right circumstances, it produces a poison that kills fish, bivalves (and probably any other animal with gills) in the affected waters.
So, it’s no surprise that scientists are trying to learn about it.
Azle Mayor Alan Brundrett has been disappointed by the Railroad Commission's refusal to provide answers or acknowledge that disposal wells have caused earthquakes elsewhere.
After dozens of quakes have rattled a small community outside of Fort Worth over the last few months, the Texas Legislature is creating a committee to look into the issue and allegations that the quakes are linked to oil and gas drilling activity.
State Representative Jim Keffer, R-Eastland, chairman of the House Energy Resources Committee, announced today the creation of a ‘Subcommittee on Seismic Activity.’ The subcommittee will be chaired by state Rep. Myra Crownover, R-Denton, and also include Representatives Phil King (R-Weatherford ), Terry Canales (D-Edinburg), and Chris Paddie (R-Marshall).
Rep. Crownover tells StateImpact Texas the subcommittee will meet this year, likely more than once, before the full legislature convenes next year. “Texans deserve answers,” Crownover says, “We are going to be very, very careful to make sure that we follow the science and ask all the questions we need to ask. I think people have questions and no one has the answer.”
The link between manmade quakes and disposal wells in Texas and other parts of the county is well established, with several peer-reviewed studies showing that waste water from oil and gas drilling injected underground for disposal can cause faults to slip. That was the culprit behind other swarms of quakes nearby in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, as well as other manmade quakes in Oklahoma, Arkansas and Ohio.
There’s an old saying that it’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future. But for the near future, University of Texas at Austin professor Michael Webber recently put together what he thinks will be the big stories in the year ahead for energy and the environment. At the annual Webber Energy Group research symposium earlier this month, Webber, Deputy Director of UT’s Energy Institute, noted that “predictions are often wrong,” like the current domestic drilling boom few saw coming, but there are some developing trends we may see more of this year.
Among his predictions:
Exploding Trains: As more and more oil and gas is being produced in the U.S. and Canada, infrastructure for moving that fuel around is lagging behind. While pipelines take time to be built (or face political and environmental hurdles, like the Keystone XL pipeline), the oil and gas still has to get to the market. Shipping it by rail has become the preferred Plan B of the drilling companies until pipelines come on line. But moving fuels by rail can bring considerable risk when those trains go through towns and cities, like the July crude train derailment in Quebec that killed 47 people. Webber predicts more pipelines will alleviate some of the infrastructure strain pushing fuels onto rail, but it will take time. “In the meantime, we’ll use trains,” Webber said. “And those trains will derail, crash, and explode.”
Less Flaring: More pipelines will mean less flaring, or burning off of gas, from oil wells, Webber said. Right now the Bakken Shale in North Dakota flares off 30 percent of the natural gas it produces. “There is no way the Bakken Shale gets to keep flaring” at that level, Webber said. (Texas, by comparison, flares about one percent of its natural gas.) Â With more pipelines, that gas could be captured and sold. Webber predicts that will happen as regulatory and political pressure increase on the industry to stop wasting gas. Continue Reading →
An Azle resident signs up to receive more information from environmentalists.
Just 10 days after a contentious public hearing with state officials, residents in Reno and Azle gathered Monday night to try and make sense of the swarm of earthquakes that keep rocking their part of North Texas. The latest quake hit just hours before the public meeting.
Several hundred people listened to a panel of speakers that included the former mayor of Dish, Calvin Tillman.
“I’m not some rocket scientist,” Tillman told the crowd. “Just a normal guy, who moved to the country, who got pissed off by the oil and gas industry, just like you.”
Tillman is working with environmental groups like Earthworks Action and the North Central Texas Communities Alliance to seek tougher restrictions and regulations on the oil and gas industry. Some point to gas drilling wastewater injection wells as the culprit of the quakes. No industry representatives spoke Monday night. Continue Reading →
Texas has by far the most miles of natural gas pipelines and is the state with the most accidents. But according to federal pipeline regulators, Texas also grants the most exemptions (along with Florida) regarding who must notify a pipeline or utility company before digging.
Federal data show that in the past decade, 11 percent of serious pipeline accidents in Texas were caused by work crews doing excavations. According to CenterPoint Energy, a Houston comnpany that distributes natural gas to over 3 million customers in Texas and other states, over half the damage to its pipelines last year was “caused by an excavator failing to Call 811.” Continue Reading →
View Earthquakes Near Azle, Texas in a larger map Map created by Andrew Weber for KUT News and StateImpact Texas. Orange circles represent earthquakes, wavy blue lines represent active wastewater disposal wells.
Another minor earthquake shook the North Texas community of Azle on Monday. It’s one of dozens to hit the region over the last few months that have residents on edge and complaining of property damage.
Many see a link between the quakes and increased oil and gas activity. But challenges confront scientists researching the quakes for the U.S. Geological Survey and Southern Methodist University. For one, they’ve needed to more accurately pinpoint the epicenters of the Azle quakes.
“The closest seismograph station used by the National Earthquake Information Center to locate the Azle earthquakes is over 60 miles to the south, the next closest is 125 miles to the West,” USGS Seismologist Williams Ellsworth explained in a letter to Azle Mayor Alan Brundrett in a December letter obtained by StateImpact Texas (embedded below).
In that same letter, Ellsworth explains how he has produced a more accurate map of the quakes, one that shows them clustered in a more concentrated location than previously thought.
“To date, it looks like the earthquakes are all in one very localized zone,” Ellsworth confirmed to StateImpact Texas over the phone.
Photo illustration by: Todd Wiseman via Texas Tribune.
This article originally appeard in the Texas Tribune.
More than 600 children in a South Texas border town may be prevented from returning to school on Monday because of a long-standing dispute over water rates, which have skyrocketed in recent years amid attempts to make badly needed upgrades to the town’s water infrastructure.
Several attempts at negotiation between the city of La Villa and the La Villa Independent School District have failed, after the district refused to pay more than $50,000 in overdue water bills and the city cut off its water service. School officials say they are being charged too much for water from a mismanaged utility, while the city contends that it needs money to cover millions of dollars in needed repairs to water and sewer treatment systems.
This photo courtesy of Tad Arensmeier via Creative Commons http://www.flickr.com/photos/11304433@N00/446771802/sizes/l/
An Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake.
Update, Jan. 23: The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department announced this week that they will delay consideration of the proposed rule outlawing the gassing of rattlesnakes. A revised rule will be proposed and considered by the department in March.
Original Story: Pouring gasoline or other noxious chemicals into the earth to force rattlesnakes and other animals from their underground homes has been a tactic of some hunters and snake wranglers for years. But it has a harmful effect on the environment and wildlife. Now, Texas Parks and Wildlife (TPWD) is considering following in the path of 30 other states and banning the practice in most circumstances.
The technique, known as “gassing” is used to capture and/or kill many different types of animals, including prairie dogs. But its greatest defenders appear to be those involved in “rattlesnake roundups” that are a tradition in parts of the state.
On the other side, scientists, animal welfare advocates and state regulators say that the time for a ban has come. When a similar ban was considered in Alabama, professionals in the snake venom collection business supported it as well, saying snakes that had been captured through “gassing” generally died before they could produce much venom, reports Outdoor Alabama.
Looking for someone to blame for cedar fever? Try your ancestors.
This story originally ran in 2013, but judging from the tickle in our throats, it seems appropriate to post again for your perusal.Â
Your Grandpa’s Cheeseburger Might Be Making You Sneeze
For many Texans, ‘Cedar Fever’ has its own place in the region’s pantheon of demons, alongside the likes of the Chupacabra, Yolanda Saldivar, and chili with beans. If you’re one of those Texans, the onset of winter, when male mountain cedar plants release their pollen and set the world a-sneezin’, is cause for dread.
It is not unheard of for mountain cedar pollen to amass in the air and create a haze in the Hill Country sky. We’ve been conditioned to look upon a cloud of pollen with unease, but this does little to explain the link between pollen and ‘Cedar Fever.’ Just what is it about this speck of plant material that brings misery to some people? More importantly, how did it become so problematic in Central Texas?
Dr. Edward Brooks researches allergy at the UT Health Science Center in San Antonio. While admitting that establishing true causality for cedar pollen allergy is “scientifically tricky,” he reveals that scientists have identified certain correlations that suggest some explanation. So far, it appears that incidence of allergy is determined by several factors coming together: an individual’s genetics, the structure of the pollen grain, and how much of that pollen is around. And one of the key factors for that last one is the result of specific land use and management practices by Texans in the late 19th century. If you want to blame someone for cedar fever, you could start with them. Continue Reading →
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“To date, it looks like the earthquakes are all in one very localized zone,” Ellsworth confirmed to StateImpact Texas over the phone.
