Jackie Young at San Jacinto River Superfund site tells why local lawsuits are important in our Radio Story
After being the target of intense lobbying that drew criticism in last year’s Texas legislature, lawmakers will again hear why big business wants restrictions on local governments that go after polluters in court. The House Judiciary Committee will take up the issue at a hearing May 16th.
Bills to curtail pollution lawsuits by local governments died in the last legislative session.
“I wasn’t surprised to see it still out there. There’s an effort to limit cities and actually it’s been going on for several years now,” said Bennett Sandlin, Executive Director of the Texas Municipal League.
Don't expect a lot of rain this summer in much of Texas. And beyond that, if an El Nino comes in the fall, it might not be the savior we expect.
Everyone’s waiting on El Niño, the “little boy” or “Christ Child” (since it usually shows up in the winter). This weather pattern that forms in the Pacific could end up redeeming Texas and other parts of the southwest in the form of above-average rain.
All signs point to one reappearing this fall, and typically El Niño means more rain for Texas. (Its sibling, La Niña, usually means drier-than-normal weather, a big factor in the last few years of extreme drought in the state.)
But one forecaster is saying El Niño may not be the blessing we anticipate it to be for Texas. Chris Coleman, meteorologist at the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (aka ERCOT, which manages the power grid that supplies much of the state), has put together a temperature and rainfall forecast for this summer and beyond. In it, Coleman notes that El Niños have mixed results in Texas.
“In fact, of the past six [El Niños], only one brought above-normal rainfall to the majority of the state,” Coleman writes in the forecast. “Some El Niño events have been dry.” That’s been the case in two of the past six El Niño events in Texas, where conditions were “predominantly dry,” including the monster El Niño of 1997-1998, Coleman said during a recent press call.
What’s worse, if we do get an El Niño this fall, it could bring something else along with it: hotter-than-normal temperatures. Continue Reading →
Brad Gilde is a lawyer representing Bob and Lisa Parr.
When a Dallas jury awarded three million dollars to a North Texas family in their case against a drilling company, people wondered what it could mean for fracking and its opponents. But the case also highlights a growing health concern in Texas’ booming oil and gas fields.
For years, a lot of the debate around the drilling boom focused on its potential to pollute groundwater. Lately concerns over water seem to have been overtaken by a new worry, one exemplified in the recent multi-million dollar jury verdict.
“This lawsuit was really a lawsuit about air emissions from the totality of unconventional shale gas development,” Brad Gilde, a lawyer for the Parr family, tells StateImpact Texas.
Next week's OTC conference will have a full session on offshore wind and wave energy. Pictured here: the Fukushima Offshore Wind Farm off the coast of Japan.
Tens of thousands of folks from the offshore drilling industry will gather in Houston starting Monday for the massive, week-long Offshore Technology Conference, aka OTC. Since 1969, the conference has been a hotspot for offshore oil and gas technology. Think of it as SXSW for offshore drilling.
But it’s not all fossil fuels grabbing attention. A full technical program at the conference Thursday will look at ‘Offshore Wind and Wave Energy,’ with a keynote by Greg Matzat, Senior Advisor for Offshore Wind Technologies at U.S. Department of Energy.
“It’s a component of energy resources that are going to be developed offshore, so it’s a natural fit for our program,” says Stephen Graham, executive director of the conference.
It’s not the first time offshore wind and wave energy have been explored at the conference, Graham notes. But there’s new support in Texas for researching offshore wind’s potential, including millions of dollars for research from the state and federal governments.
Another topic on tap next week will feature experts from Japan talking about their work producing natural gas from methane hydrates, which are trapped in ice deep below the ocean floor. There are potentially massive deposits of natural gas that could be produced if harvesting methane hydrates proves viable, including in the Gulf of Mexico.
The Parrs says drilling near their property made them sick. A Dallas jury agreed, awarding them nearly $3 million.
When a Dallas jury awarded a North Texas family $3 million for damages from natural gas drilling near their property last week, the Internet went wild. Opponents of hydraulic fracturing called it a landmark, a game changer, the first “anti-fracking” lawsuit to result in a jury award. In truth, the case involved not just fracking, but all the operations that go along with natural gas production.
It was brought by the the Parr family. They sued a drilling company, Aruba Petroleum, one of several gas companies that were operating near their North Texas ranch. The Parrs claimed they were poisoned by Aruba’s activities.
Their troubles started in late 2008. Lisa Parr had just married Bob and moved with her daughter, Emma, to his ranch in Wise county.
“I started feeling bad,” Lisa Parr recalls. “I blew it off as the flu.”
But as several months went by, she still felt sick.
“I had a rash throughout my body, my lymph node stuck out in my neck like the size of pecans,” she says. “There was four of them on each side.”
Rod Gonzalez lives in the Magnolia Park neighborhood, not too far from some of them. He just moved here three months ago from south Texas, and he said Houston’s air feels different from what he’s used to.
“It’s definitely a different quality of air,” he said. “You know, I do experience a lot of allergy and watery eyes, and sometimes I don’t really know if it’s actually, you know, nature or my allergies or if it’s something that’s triggering it.”
There is no telling if this has to do with the recycling plants in the area but what is known is that tests have found higher than usual levels of hexavalent chromium, also called Chrome VI, in the air around these plants. Chrome VI is a metal air pollutant and has been found to increase the risk of lung cancer in workers exposed to it on a daily basis. Continue Reading →
East Texans opposed to the Marvin Nichols Reservoir testified Wednesday before the Texas Water Development Board.
The Texas Water Development Board will soon decide whether to continue planning for the controversial Marvin Nichols Reservoir or take it out of the state’s water plan.
The decision is just the latest in a battle that pits the thirsty Dallas-Fort Worth metro area against rural residents in East Texas.
On Wednesday, a bus carrying dozens of East Texas land and business owners traveled to Arlington for the last public hearing before the water board makes its decision.
Most have been battling for years to take the 70,000-acre Marvin Nichols Reservoir off the table as a future water supply. Continue Reading →
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