Dave Fehling is the Houston-based broadcast reporter for StateImpact. Before joining StateImpact Texas, Dave reported and anchored at KHOU-TV in Houston. He also worked as a staff correspondent for CBS News from 1994-1998. He now lectures on journalism at the University of Houston.
The Galveston Seawall was built to protect a portion of the Island after the massive hurricane of 1900
Petrochemical companies are spending billions of dollars to expand facilities along the Texas Gulf Coast. Which means when the next hurricane hits, there will be just that much more expensive infrastructure that could be damaged by the massive amount of seawater — or “storm surge” — pushed inland by the hurricane.
“There’s more development, more industrial development, just more things that need to be protected,” said Helen Young, Deputy Commissioner of Coastal Resources at the Texas General Land Office.
After Hurricane Ike destroyed 8,000 homes and apartment units in Southeast Texas and did $10 billion in overall damage in Harris County alone, researchers said it would be cheaper in the long run to spend money now to build barriers to reduce storm surge flooding from future hurricanes. Continue Reading →
In the war on air pollution in Texas’s smoggiest cities, investigators say the state has slashed their funding even as they continue to find illegal vehicle inspection operations thriving in their communities.
“Hundreds of thousands of vehicles have fraudulent inspection stickers on them right now,” said Lt. Eddie Hazel who heads an emissions fraud task force run out of the Harris County Precinct 4 Constable’s office. And he’s talking about just in the Houston area. Continue Reading →
In 2008, Hurricane Ike damaged tanks at petroleum facilities along the Houston Ship Channel.
It was their fear and they had a name for it: toxic gumbo. It seemed fitting as officials braced for Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
What would be left in the water and soil after Katrina’s storm surge flooded New Orleans, a city known for its Cajun cuisine but also home to petrochemical plants, refineries and EPA Superfund sites?
“That very word was used, toxic gumbo, and there certainly were issues,” said Danny Reible, an environmental researcher at the University of Texas.
And yet, after studying the results of tests run on floodwater, soil and sediment, Reible wrote in a research article that “By and large…the environmental problems in the city are not significantly different now from environmental conditions before Hurricane Katrina.”
Fracking seems to be the gift that keeps on giving to Texans of all pay grades. Not only are roughnecks and engineers in big demand, so are lawyers who specialize in oil & gas. At the biggest firms, young lawyers can start at $160,000 a year. For top partners, their time can be billed at a rate of up $1,000 an hour according to the American Bar Association.
“The different clients that I have, fortunately enough, were all driven by fracking because without that technology that market would never have opened,” said James Collura.
Dave Fehling / StateImpact
James Collura is an oil & gas lawyer in Houston.
Collura is an oil & gas attorney with the Houston firm of Coats Rose. It’s not one of those “big” firms and says it prides itself on keeping costs low.
Nonetheless, Collura said his firm is paying higher starting salaries despite what has been happening in other states where hiring is down dramatically. Continue Reading →
As an FBI agent then as an assistant federal prosecutor, Malcolm Bales has investigated crooked judges in Chicago and drug dealers in Texas. Now, as the U.S. Attorney in Beaumont, he’s working amid one of the nation’s biggest petrochemical complexes.
Courtesy U.S. Department of Justice
Malcolm Bales is the U.S. Attorney in Beaumont
Bales says he’s finding there are plenty of criminal pollution cases. But not the agents to pursue them.
“We lack the appropriate number of investigators. EPA (the federal environmental regulator) is struggling to meet the caseload. There are not enough agents,” Bales told StateImpact.
“In fact, when we have cases worked over here in the Beaumont area — where we believe there is a significant number of unaddressed environmental violations — those agents have to come from Houston in every instance.”
Bales said the FBI used to work environmental cases but with changing priorities in the post-9/11 world, he says pollution cases are now way down the list. FBI Houston Division spokesperson Shauna Dunlap agreed, saying agents usually get involved only in big pollution cases like the Deepwater Horizon spill.
One recent case showed how his staff had to tackle a crime that was a bit out of their comfort zone. Continue Reading →
Plants handling dangerous chemicals work with communities through Local Emergency Planning Committees
The fertilizer explosion last month that killed 14 people — mostly firefighters — in the town of West is an example of the danger of using or storing large quantities of chemicals close to communities.
Another example came just last week when hydrogen chloride gas used for processing cottonseed leaked and caused the evacuation of residents in Lubbock.
For yet another example, you can look back 38 years to what happened in another small town in Texas.
A Cloud that Killed
In Denver City, a town of 4,500 south of Lubbock, Jack Watkins is now retired. But in 1975, he was working in the oil and gas drilling industry. He was also a volunteer firefighter.
Just before dawn on a Sunday morning in February that year, the fire department was called out to investigate reports of a gas cloud just outside town. What they found left Watkins with memories still vivid to this day. Continue Reading →
Tanker trucks arrive at the disposal well that was site of a 2012 explosion. It's approved to inject 30,000 barrels of wastewater a day.
Some people who live in Pearsall, the South Texas town where country star George Strait grew up, said they learned they had a disposal well nearby when they heard a big boom.
“Then I saw the billows of smoke coming out,” said Henry Martinez, Pearsall’s police chief.
He’s talking about the afternoon in January 2012 when investigators say a welder’s spark ignited oil vapors at a disposal site on the edge of town.Three workers were hurt and OSHA later cited the operator for alleged violations and proposed a $46,200 penalty.
Texas likes to be “business friendly” and as the state legislature considers bills to limit environmental regulation to keep it that way, some economists warn of the longer term consequences.
Dave Fehling / StateImpact Texas
Cattle ranch borders petrochemical plant in Calhoun County
“It’s not as simple as saying yeah, it’s a negative for everybody and everybody is going to move out of the state if we have more stringent regulation,” said Daniel Millimet, an environmental economist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
The idea that too much regulation can scare off business has been a main thrust of some of the state’s environmental regulators like David Porter, one of the three elected leaders of the Texas Railroad Commission. Speaking last October at oil and gas drillers conference in San Antonio, Porter contended that should Texas succumb to the stricter pollution regulation of the federal government, disaster would follow for the state’s booming drilling industry. Continue Reading →
Signs warn that fish may be contaminated at Superfund site along San Jacinto River
Some county governments have found that when it comes to suing corporations over polluted property, hiring a private law firm on a contingency fee basis is the way to go.
But against the backdrop of a multi-billion dollar dioxin case in Harris County, there’s an effort to outlaw those arrangements in pollution lawsuits.
(UPDATE: A Texas Appeals Court on July 25 ruled in favor of Harris County, denying a temporary injunction sought by the companies Harris County was suing using contingency lawyers) The House Committee on Environmental Regulation has scheduled a hearing today on a bill that would ban counties from using private firms, HB 3119. (UPDATE: On April 16, the committee delayed consideration of the bill by “leaving it pending”)
The bill has the support of the Texas Conservative Coalition Research Institute that compiled a report on what it calls the “dubious practice of employing private lawyers on a contingency basis.” Continue Reading →
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