Shrimp fisherman wait to board their boats following Hurricane Ike September 15, 2008 in Galveston, Texas.
Captain Dan, the ‘Flounder Man’ has been hunting flounder on the Texas coast for more than 30 years. In the dark of night, Captain Dan escorts his clients along the Gulf shore in his brightly lit skiff and stalks flounder laying on the sandy floor. Armed with miniature tridents set on poles, his clients wait until they see the tell-tale sign of a flounder, two reflective eyes peering up from the sand. Once the client is in striking distance, he or she plunges the trident down through the flat fish.
It’s called flounder gigging (yes, similar to the type of frog hunting where ‘Gig ‘Em‘ comes from) and it’s arguably the most popular way to catch flounder on the Texas coast. Unfortunately, commercial fishing, weather and certain types of gigging have put a hurt on Texas’ flounder. The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department is trying to stem the decline of flounder in Texas with a breeding program and stricter bag limits on flounder, and it seems to be working.
“I’m seeing a big increase in numbers,” says Captain Dan, who was a Gulf Coast commercial fisherman for 30 years before starting his own guide service three years ago. Continue Reading →
One source of water in the Texas State Water Plan involves "seeding" clouds to create more rain.
The Texas legislature got underway this week, and one bit of spending that many seem to agree on, regardless of their political stripes, is water. Several proposals call for funding the 2012 State Water Plan, a bottom-up approach to Texas’ water needs. It relies on regional districts to come up with a wish list of projects that will provide the growing state with enough water for the next 50 years.
The water plan calls for a variety of techniques to harness more water in the coming decades, from new reservoirs to conservation, and some of the ideas are more offbeat than others. We’ve culled a handful of the more novel and obscure methods outlined in the plan.
Weather Modification: Cloud seeding involves blasting silver iodide, a chemical with similar composition to ice, into a thunderstorm, thereby increasing the cloud’s ability to produce rain. It may sound like science fiction, but it’s already being done around the world, particularly in China (and even here in Texas). Starting in 2020, the water plan earmarks about 15,000 acre-feet (or 4,8 billion gallons) of water to be procured each year through weather modification or cloud seeding. Most cloud seeding taking place in Texas today is done East of the Interstate-35 corridor. There’s just one (fairly significant) drawback: if there aren’t any rain clouds to seed, like much of the summer of 2011, there’s not much seeding can accomplish. Continue Reading →
Photo Illustration by Christof Koepsel/Getty Images
The small city of Brownwood, Texas, wants to build a water plant that will treat sewage and return it to the city's drinking supplies. But locals are having a hard time getting used to the idea.
The small city of Brownwood, Texas could soon have something in common with the African nation of Namibia: a wastewater treatment facility that cleans wastewater (including the stuff from the bathroom) and returns it directly to city water pipes, where it becomes drinking water.
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality approved construction of the wastewater facility, with conditions, in late December, Brownwood City Manager Bobby Rountree announced at a City Council meeting Tuesday. City officials don’t know when they will begin construction.
“Some people are extremely supportive, some are not,” Rountree tells StateImpact Texas. “It’s one of those issues: Unless you know all the facts, it’s a difficult issue to get concurrence on.”
Brownwood, population 19,000, has been gripped hard by the ongoing drought. Lake Brownwood, the town’s sole reservoir, is at about 50 percent capacity and dry weather patterns don’t seem to be changing much, Rountree says.
“We’ve been at stage-three water restrictions for 2 years. We don’t want to stay on that forever,” Rountree said. Continue Reading →
In a unanimous vote today, the Board of Directors at the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) approved an emergency plan that could cut off water for most rice farmers downstream in order to protect supplies for the City of Austin. The plan is identical to the one that last year resulted in rice farmers being cut off for the first time in history.
The Highland Lakes of Buchanan and Travis, vital reservoirs for Central Texas, have suffered from record low inflows in recent years, beginning in 2006. They’re currently only 41 percent full. If they don’t rise to the level of 42 percent full by midnight March 1, water will not go downstream to most rice farmers this year.
Ronald Gertson, a rice farmer in Wharton County, testified that another year without water could be catastrophic for rice farmers.
A massive swatch of rain is coming to Texas. But you may not need that umbrella for long.
Soaking rains will hit Central Texas today and tomorrow, washing garbage, dirt and leaves down the drains. Flash flood and heavy rain warnings have been issed for a wide swath of the state, from Houston to Paris. But the drought will remain.
We are several years into a dry cycle and climate forecasters predict that will remain true for at least the next few months — despite today’s potential deluge. It’s going to take much more than a couple days of good rain to bust our current drought, according to weather watchers.
“We are hoping that a lot of this rain will soak into the ground and help with the aquifers. Hopefully some of it will actually run off into the rivers and reservoirs.” says Patrick McDonald, National Weather Service spokesperson.
Kurt Flippin wears the full hazmat suit he uses while cleaning homes contaminated with methamphetamine residues. Flippin says he knows of scores of homes that are contaminated but have never been cleaned.
It was one of Kirk Flippin’s saddest cleanup jobs. He remembers standing in a driveway in Grapevine, Texas a few years back, throwing a little girl’s toys, clothes and dolls into a dumpster as she watched in dismay. “Why are all my toys in the dumpster?” the girl said to her Mom.
“Because a bad man used to live here,” her mother replied.
Flippin tossed the girl’s toys out because her family had unwittingly moved into a home previously occupied by a methamphetamine cook. The family realized something was wrong when their dog died. It was chemical poisoning, according to their veterinarian. The children became chronically ill with respiratory problems. They had their home tested for meth, but unable to foot the bill for a proper cleanup, the family was forced to move out and eventually the bank foreclosed on the home. They lost their house and most of their possessions, Flippin remembers.
Flippin is the owner of Texas Decon Environmental Services, a waste cleanup company that counts meth lab cleanup as one of its specialties. Flippin was called in by the bank to detoxify the home. The name of the bank and family are proprietary information that Flippin could not disclose.
There aren’t many meth-lab cleanup jobs in Texas for Flippin though, since there are no laws that require homeowners to clean their property after a meth lab has been broken up. In Texas, there aren’t even laws requiring landlords to disclose if an apartment was once a meth lab, according to David Leibowitz, a former Texas House Representative from San Antonio. Continue Reading →
In 1980, Congress passed a federal law to cleanup sites with excessive industrial contamination. These were places that were so polluted that they required long-term federal cleanups, and they’re known as Superfund sites. StateImpact Texas reporter Dave Fehling reports today that thirty years later, some of these toxic places are still being cleaned up.
In the map above you can see the many Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Superfund sites in Texas. (There are also Superfund sites administered by the state environmental agency, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, that are not included on this map.) Some of the sites have been completely cleaned up (designated in green), while others are still being worked on (in red). Yellow points are places that have been proposed as EPA Superfund sites in Texas. 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 →
Photo by Flickr user Eric Constantineau/Creative Commons
A state representative says a new radioactive waste dump in West Texas is part of a cover-up.
There are some hot documents that may show a cover-up in the approval of a controversial radioactive waste dump in West Texas. Problem is, you can’t seem them.
Democratic State Representative Lon Burnam said at a press conference Monday at the state capitol that he’s obtained top-secret internal documents from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ). They reportedly show that the commission approved the low-level radioactive waste dump, owned and operated by Waste Control Specialists, despite environmental risks. But he says he can’t show the documents to anyone because he signed a confidentiality agreement. The storage facility is owned by Harold Simmons, a Dallas billionaire and major financial backer to Texas politicians. He’s given money to Governor Rick Perry and Attorney General Gregg Abbott, who’s received $495,000 from Simmons over the past five years.
The problem, Rep. Burnam says, is that groundwater exists too close to the radioactive storage area and the company building it downplayed the risks associated with contamination. Now he’s officially asking the attorney general’s office to release him from confidentiality so the public can see the documents.
“I don’t think that [it] should be top secret,” said Rep. Burnam. “I think the public has a right to know. I think public health and safety is involved in this right now.” The dump is due to begin receiving radioactive waste as soon as next Monday. Continue Reading →
Trip Doggett is the President of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas
Power moves Texas, but does the state have enough juice to make it through another blistering summer? Trip Doggett, President and CEO of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), discusses new power generation, conservation, alternative energy, weather and oversight at a Texas Senate hearing today.
Check out our Storify feed, featuring reporting by StateImpact Texas and tweets from Kate Galbraith and others at the hearing, after jump: Continue Reading →
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