Mose Buchele is the Austin-based broadcast reporter for StateImpact. He has been on staff at KUT 90.5 in Austin since 2009, covering local and state issues. Mose has also worked as a blogger on politics and an education reporter at his hometown paper in Western Massachusetts. He holds masters degrees in Latin American Studies and Journalism from UT Austin.
MAP BY MICHAEL MARKS. A map of Texas Counties that participate in the National Flood Insurance Program. Counties in gray have insurance, counties in yellow have never had insurance, and counties in red do not currently have insurance, but have at some point. NOTE: Cities and towns may participate in the program even if their county does not.
The floods that killed five people and damaged over 1,000 homes in Austin on Halloween morning threw the danger of floods into stark relief. But when it comes to guarding against risky development in flood-prone regions, there’s little consistency from one Texas community to the next, with some areas still lacking any regulation.
The reason goes back to the way the state and local communities choose to adopt, or not adopt, the National Flood Insurance Program.
How Texas counties voted on Prop 6. Counties in Blue passed the measure; Counties in Red voted against it. Map by Matt Wilson/StateImpact.
There wasn’t much nail-biting on either side of the Proposition 6 debate as people watched the votes come in on Tuesday. The measure, which will move $2 billion dollars from the state’s Rainy Day Fund to start a fund for water projects, won approval from over 73 percent of the state.
But as poll watchers began digging into the turnout, competing versions of what those numbers mean for the future of water in Texas began to take shape.
Speaker of the House Joe Straus, R-San Antonio, led the Water Texas PAC, which spent nearly two million dollars to promote the measure, pointed to the broad base of support to call the victory a triumph for bi-partisanship and coalition building.
“Small businesses, manufacturing, the energy industry, farmers and ranchers all came together very strongly,” said Straus at his PAC’s election night party.
Opponents of the measure say the way people voted points to a looming confrontation between water-rich rural areas and thirsty urban consumers. Continue Reading →
When voters go to the polls this year, many of them will have only as much information about the constitutional amendments they’re voting on as is provided on the ballot.
That is to say, not much at all, especially when it comes to the major item on the list, Proposition 6.
The ballot refers to the creation of funds for the State Water Plan, a list of projects to improve water supplies across the state, but makes no mention of the dollar figure that would be involved. It mentions financing for water projects, but not why that financing might be needed, or how the projects will be chosen.
You might have better luck learning about Proposition 6 by asking someone whose job hinges on its passage. Bech Bruun is one of Governor Perry’s newly-minted Water Development Board Members, and if the proposition goes forward, they will decide what water projects to lend money to.
“What Proposition 6 would do is, it would move $2 billion from the state’s Rainy Day Fund into a new account, that we will refer to as SWIFT, the State Water Implementation Fund of Texas. And it would allow the Water Development Board to use money from the SWIFT fund for projects in the State’s Water Plan,” he said.
But a vote on the proposition is a vote on even more than that. That’s because of provisions in a law this year that overhauled the Water Development Board.
A map showing areas where smoke was heaviest in 2011 according to the NRDC.
Texans know all too well the devastation that wildfires bring to land, property, and community. Now, research claims to show how smoke from those fires could pose hazards hundreds of miles away, though researchers say there is a need “to look more closely” at the data.
The study was conducted by the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group that looked at NOAA satellite smoke plume maps from 2011 to gauge where heavy concentrations of smoke could affect people’s health. Its findings: many Americans lived in areas impacted by smoke even if they lived far from wildfires.
“Nearly 212 million Americans lived in counties affected by smoke conditions at some time in 2011,” Kim Knowlton, an NRDC environmental health staff scientist and Columbia University Professor said in a telephone press conference.
Bruce Bar is a certified floodplain manger and caretaker of his neighborhood dam in Bastrop County.
This is part four of a series looking at the infrastructure of dams in Texas, and what can be done to improve it. You can find part one here, and part two here, and part three here.
In a peaceful, wooded corner of Bastrop County, Texas sits one of the unluckiest dams in the state. In 2011 the Labor Day Wildfires burned soil and vegetation around Clear Springs Lake and its earthen dam. Then, half a year later, a massive rainstorm hit. Water poured over the structure and wrecked havoc on an already crumbling spillway.
“Our poor little dam has gone between being scorched to being flooded in a matter of six months,” Bruce Bar, a floodplain engineer and the manager of the community’s dam told StateImpact Texas. “So it’s handled about as much as nature can throw at it.”
In his role as manager of the dam, Bar has been looking to raise money for repairs.
“We had a homeowners association meeting and some people got rankled because they didn’t even know that we had a dam, and they had been here for ten or twelve years or so,” he said. “If all of a sudden if they start getting a bill saying they’re due so many thousands of dollars. I think that’s… that could be a problem.”
Aging and lack of maintenance are effecting both private and public dams in the state, but so is an absence of money says Warren Samuelson, the Manager of the Dam Safety Program for the TCEQ.
Texas has more dams than any other state in the country. This is a map of Texas dams from the USACE.
This is part three of a series looking at the infrastructure of dams in Texas, and what can be done to improve it. You can find part one here, and part two here.
In 1978 a massive storm hit the West Texas town of Albany. It dumped 23 inches of rain in just eight hours. Waters caused 9 deaths, flooded hundreds of homes, and broke through a local dam. Troy Henderson, who now works on the Brownwood Texas Lake Patrol, says since then he’s followed a simple rule.
“If I were to build a home somewhere, I’d make sure that if it was downstream from a lake that their dam is property maintained,” he told StateImpact Texas, “and the reason I say that is, I lived in Albany in 1978.”
The Federal Government echoes that advice. In the FEMA booklet “Living with Dams,” the agency urges people to “ask questions” about the condition and hazard rating of dams near their homes.
But here in Texas, no one needs to answer those questions.
A photo of a rusted out pipe taken during a TCEQ inspection of a dam. This picture is now used in dam safety workshops presented by TCEQ.
This is part two of a series devoted to looking at the infrastructure of dams in Texas, and what can be done to improve it. You can find part one hereand part threehere.
In 2008, the Texas State Auditor’s office released the kind of report that keeps public officials awake at night. It found that state regulators were not ensuring the proper maintenance of thousands of dams in Texas. The audit found that state inspectors had never visited hundreds of dams that could cause loss of life if they failed.
The Dam Safety Program with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality is in charge of inspecting the state’s dams. Warren Samuelson, the program’s manager, says that his department has added staff and made progress since that audit was issued.
“At the end of 2011 we had all of them… except a handful that we couldn’t get into. We were able to look at all of these high and significant hazard dams,” Samuelson told StateImpact Texas.
This picture of a dam that over-topped is used in dam safety workshops presented by the TCEQ.
This is part one of a StateImpact Texas series devoted to looking at the infrastructure of dams in Texas, and what can be done to improve it.Â
Of the 1,880 dams inspected by the TCEQ since 2008, 245 were found to be in bad condition, according to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. Around 2,000 of the state’s dams were built with federal help in the wake of the great drought of the 1950s. Almost all of those are now past or nearing their projected 50-year lifespan, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers.
Statistics like these don’t come as a surprise to the people who work with dams in the state of Texas.
“We’ve traveled and looked at different dams just to make sure that we do things right. And there’s a lot of dams that we did come across that would scare me to live downstream from them,” Troy Henderson, Chief of Lake Patrol for the Brownwood Water Improvement District, told StateImpact Texas this summer.
Downtown Odessa Texas, despite having a roaring hot economy, some storefronts remain empty in the oil-rich Permian Basin.
The Midland-Odessa region in West Texas has the highest GDP growth in the country, the lowest unemployment in Texas. This is oil country, and oil is one of the most profitable products in the world. But if you ask someone what it’s like to live there, don’t be surprised to hear answer like this:
“It’s terrible.”
During a recent visit I heard that sentiment from oilfield hands and office workers alike. One roughneck I ran into at an Odessa doughnut shop agreed to share his opinions anonymously. (He didn’t want his name included in this story because his company has a policy against talking to reporters).
“Everything’s overpriced, the food is overpriced, living is overpriced,” he said.
And that was just the start. His other complaints: housing is impossible to find, rents are high, traffic is terrible, crime is bad and there’s nothing to do.
“Everybody’s just trying to make as much as they can, wait for this boom to be over and get out,” he said.
Barber Bruce Conley with a client at The Barbershop in Odessa, Texas.
The Barbershop. In movies, TV, and popular culture it’s the place people go to catch up on what’s happening. If you want to get a feel for a place, it’s hard to beat the barbershop. People are in and out all day ready to shoot the breeze.
So on StateImpact Texas’ reporting trip to the Permian Basin, KUT’s Mose Buchele stopped into
“The Barbershop” on Dixie Avenue in Odessa. He heard from the regulars how life has changed during the current oil boom, and how things stacked up against the boom of the 1970s.
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