Terrence Henry reports on energy and the environment for StateImpact Texas. His radio, print and television work has appeared in the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, NPR, The Texas Tribune, The History Channel and other outlets.
He has previously worked at The Washington Post and The Atlantic. He earned a Bachelorâs Degree in International Relations from Brigham Young University.
Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson wants to build desalination plants on state land.
Texas is sitting on a massive amount of âbrackishâ water. Too salty to drink, but far less salty than ocean water. A lot of it is just sitting there, below our freshwater aquifers. And thereâs enough of it to satisfy the current Texas population for a hundred and fifty years. But how do we get to it, and how much will it cost to do so?
That question is now on the mind of the Texas General Land Office. Today Commissioner Jerry Patterson proposed building some smaller desalination projects in Central Texas to help meet water demand in the region.
“Everyone says the state’s population is going to double by 2060,” Patterson tells StateImpact Texas. “And I guess you could say there’s enough water. But it’s not in the right place.”
Patterson, who’s running for Lieutenant Governor in 2014, is looking at several sites that belong to the commissionâs Permanent School Fund, all of them along the I-35 corridor between Austin and San Antonio. “Anything we do to produce water for Central Texas reduces the impact on the Highland Lakes,” Patterson says. “That’s not only good for the folks that live around the Highland Lakes, it’s also good for those downstream consumers.” Patterson says less water taken out of the lakes means more for rice farmers, bays and estuaries, utilities and the petro-chemical industry.
But isnât desalination expensive and energy-intensive? Continue Reading →
A cleanup team walks through the oily surf at Naked Island on Prince Williams Sound, a week after the Exxon Valdez oil tanker ran aground in March 1989 and spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil.
In his new book, ‘Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power‘, reporter Steve Coll takes a look inside the largest oil company in the world, a juggernaut with annual revenues of 450 billion dollars. “That’s more than economic activity of most countries,” Coll says in the first part of our interview.  In part two, we talk to Coll about how the company reacted to both disasters.
Q: One of the things you talk about in the book about the corporate culture at ExxonMobil. It’s clouded in secrecy; it almost resembles a cult. And youâre saying that culture came out of the aftermath of the Exxon Valdez spill.
A: If we follow the metaphor that ExxonMobil is like a state, then the Valdez spill is kind of like 9/11 for them. It was a huge shock, it cost them their reputation overnight. Fifteen years later, they would run focus groups on why they were so hated, and theyâd enter into wordplay games and say: ‘Iâll say Exxon,’ and all of their subjects would immediately say: ‘Valdez.’
So it was a huge stain on their reputation and their sense of themselves. Economically, it was costly, but they have the cash flow to deal with the settlements. But afterwards they undertook a series of sweeping reforms to try, essentially, to achieve a day-to-day practice in which nothing like that could happen again. Their goal was, basically, to ring all human fallibility out of their enormous daily industrial operations, whether at refineries, offshore oil platforms, or gas drilling. Everything.
The National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center released the latest drought outlook this week. This is a prediction of what lays ahead in the next three months, and the news for Texas isn’t great: for much of the state, the drought is expected to “persist or intensify.”
It was a different story this spring. In the March 15 outlook, the drought was predicted to improve. And that’s largely what it did. Back then, over twenty percent of the state was in “exceptional” drought, the worst stage. And over 40 percent was in the next worst stage, “extreme.” Today only nine percent of the state is at that level, and none of the state is in “exceptional” drought.
But the new report shows that for the summer, a lot of Texas, and much of the rest of the country, is likely to see ongoing drought conditions. Here’s hoping that the predicted arrival of El Nino in the fall will bring rain.
The Lower Colorado river is suffering from low oxygen levels. Is the drought to blame?
Some high school ecological enthusiasts have collected new data showing the Lower Colorado river ecosystem might be in jeopardy.
The river not only supplies much of Texas with its drinking water, itâs also a cherished destination for summer recreation. But all is not well on the Colorado, and authorities might not have known about the scope of the river’s troubles without the students’ research.
For about 20 years, the Austin Youth River Watch, an environmental education program, has organized groups of teens to monitor the water quality of the Colorado. Every week they check water at different parts of the river and its tributaries. And lately theyâve been getting some unusual readings.
âWeâve been picking up low levels of oxygen over the past few weeks and weâre pretty concerned,” says Brent Lyles, Executive Director of River Watch. He says the group is working with the City of Austin and the Lower Colorado River Authority to figure out why oxygen levels might be dropping. “If not for our studentsâ work, Iâm not sure anyone would know this is happening,” he says.
Less oxygen could spell trouble for fish and other wildlife. And the group has already observed a large number of dead Asian clams in the river, a troubling sign of what happens when oxygen levels get low. Continue Reading →
Victoria Hogue helps to move cattle into pens after they had been sold at the Abilene Livestock Auction in July 2011. The drought caused shortages of grass, hay and water forcing ranchers to thin their herds.
Yes, grass initially came back on the ranches of Central and East Texas, but it’s been a dry few months. “The hay fields aren’t doing any good at all,” says Elgin rancher Brent Johnson. “I mean, you know, you’re lucky to get a 50 percent production off of ’em at best, and that’s probably even stretching it.” But because there are less cows this year after last year’s sell-off, the little hay production Johnson does have can cover his herd for now.
“Most of the state is out of exceptional drought now,” says Gene Hall with the Texas Farm Bureau. “But the real problem is going to be feed, growing enough grass, [and] putting enough hay away to matter.”
Some think the state’s cattle industry may never fully recover from the drought. But Hall says the cattle business is cyclical. “You can track it over time,” Hall says. “The beef economists, the cattle economists can look at it and show you okay, cattle numbers will build to the point where prices decline, they sell off, and then they start building again. Ranchers want to be building their herds now.” Continue Reading →
Steve Coll has traveled the world reporting on nuclear weapons, the CIA, and terrorists in the Middle East for The New Yorker and Washington Post. But he may have found his biggest reporting challenge yet right here in Texas.
In his new book, âPrivate Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power,â Coll takes a close look at how the oil giant has become one of the most powerful organizations in the world. We recently spoke to Coll about his new book.
Q:Â So tell us why you decided to look into this company.
A: What’s so fascinating about ExxonMobil is their sheer scale. 450 billion dollars-plus in revenues last year, that’s more than the economic activity of most countries. But they’re rarely scrutinized by anyone, compared to the governmental departments that we cover in Washington as reporters. I worked on this project for four years and there was really no one in my side-view mirrors.
Q: How did you go about investigating them? What were some of the difficulties you came across?
A: It’s an outside-in process, when you take on a big, large, closed subject like this. And I find that, especially at the beginning, I have to do everything all at once. Explore all channels. Continue Reading →
The Colorado River winds it's way near the town of Robert Lee. The town's reservoir dried up last year and water is now pumped in by pipeline.
Running from headwaters near New Mexico, the Colorado cuts southeast through Texas, feeding cities, farms, power plants and ecosystems before flowing into the Gulf of Mexico. It’s the longest river to start and end all within the state of Texas.
In good years, its water is enough to sustain communities at every point as it cuts its course through the state. 2011 was not a good year.
To hear the voices of people who depend on the Colorado for their lives and livelihoods is not just to hear about the drought of 2011. It teaches us about the looming water crisis that faces Texas. If trends continue, our state will keep growing but our water supplies will stay the same, or even diminish. Continue Reading →
The carcasses of two Hereford cows that perished on the Patterson Ranch.
Wyman Meinzer, the state photographer of Texas, is used to finding beauty across the Lone Star State. But during the great drought, Meinzer was faced with the question of how to document devastation and destruction. In an interview with Jake Silverstein, editor of Texas Monthly, Meinzer talks about his work putting a lens to the drought.
Q: Letâs talk about last yearâs drought project. As someone raised in West Texas, youâve lived through many droughts, including the 1950s drought when you were just a boy. When did you start to realize that last yearâs drought was unusually bad?
A: Being an outdoorsman and a photographer not only are you a visual person, but also from my research background and my education as a biologist, you notice patterns. And I noticed in May and June things werenât right. High winds. Just ever-present high winds, just incessant, wouldnât end. Twenty, thirty, forty miles an hour. Temperatures way more than normal. Continue Reading →
âThe drought was abysmal,â Meinzer says. âI felt it was my duty to document it in all of its ugliness.â
On the 6666 Ranch, in King County, earthmoving equipment is used to clean out dry stock tanks in anticipation of potential rain.
With stock tanks at historic lows, cattle, such as this steer on the Patterson Ranch, in Knox County, are driven by desperation to wade into the quagmire that surrounds each remaining water source, where they become stuck.
On the Patterson Ranch, a cow, paralyzed after a prolonged struggle to free itself from the mud, is about to be dispatched by Kynn Patterson.
Rancher Kynn Patterson and his partner, Pate Meinzer (Wymanâs son), use an old mixer to produce their own cattle feed in order to avoid the high feed prices brought on by the drought.
The bacteria Chromatiaceae, which grows in oxygen-deprived water, turns Croton Creek, a tributary of the Brazos, eerily red during the 2011 drought.
Heel dust marks the path of cattle leaving a man-made water source on the Williamson Ranch, in Knox County.
A parched Brazos River wends its way through Knox County.
A coyote and a young whitetail, usually adversaries, eye each other cautiously near a dwindling water source in Baylor County.
The carcasses of two Hereford cows that perished on the Patterson Ranch.
Last year, Wyman Meinzer got an unsettling feeling. Meinzer was raised on a ranch in West Texas and has weathered many dry spells, including the drought of record, when he was just a boy. But last spring, he started to notice unusual patterns. High winds for days on end. Temperatures much hotter than normal. Waterholes shrinking and filming over.
Meinzer is the official state photographer of Texas. Heâs known for capturing images that show the stateâs beauty. But as the drought set in, he decided to document it in all its ugliness.
You can listen to Meinzer’s story and see some of his images in the slideshow above. And you can read Meinzer’s story in the new Texas Monthly.
Eugene “Boob” Kelton, 80, is an Upton County rancher and the brother of Elmer Kelton. âFifteen dollars was the price for a ton of hay, and [the U.S. Department of Agriculture] was paying half of it,â Kelton says. âBut whenever the government went to pay more, the producers just raised the price of the feed. So we didnât realize any more help from the government, but the farmers that were growing the feed, they realized a little more profit. Thatâs kind of the way things go.â
Sandy Whittley, 74, grew up in San Angelo and is the executive secretary of the Texas Sheep and Goat Raisersâ Association. âThe first year it was âNah, not too bad,ââ she remembers. âAnd then it was a little drier the next year. By about the third year, it was beginning to get really interesting, and then it got really serious. From then on it was just tough.â
Preston Wright, 90, has been ranching in West Texas since 1948. He lives in Junction. âIt didnât start overnightâwe just kinda eased into it,â Wright says. âAnd when we got into it, it just stayed for a while.â
Mort Mertz, 88, has been ranching in West Texas since 1954. He lives in San Angelo. âIt started out west,â Mertz recalls. âIt tended to get dry out there and not rain, and that lack of rainfall just moved east. My dad kept saying, âWe have these things; theyâll just go about eighteen months. Itâll break.â But thatâs what caught everybody off guard: it didnât break. It just kept on going, and it lasted about seven years.â
Brother and sister Nancy Hagood Nunns, 70, and Charles Hagood, 59, grew up in a ranch family that has had operations in West Texas since the nineteenth century. “There were no ticks in the fifties,” Nancy remembers. “It was just too dry for them.” Charles has been a banker and rancher in Junction since 1979. âI grew up in Junction and then went into the banking business, and I would visit with men that Iâd always known as carpenters, painters, merchants,â he says. âAnd then visiting with them in deeper detail, Iâd find out that they had been ranchers until the drought. Just like my daddy. The drought drove us to town. And that happened all over West Texasâit drove people to town.
Stanley Mayfield, 93, is the owner of the Mayfield Ranch in Sutton, Edwards, and Hudspeth counties, where it was so dry that when his son was born in 1956, he called him âSecoâ (Spanish for âdryâ). “When it gets dry, it gets dry,” he says. “You try to live with it till it rains. And you look every day to see if itâs gonna rain.”
Bill Schneemann, 77, has been raising cattle in West Texas since 1954. He lives in Big Lake and describes himself as a âsemi-tired, wore-out rancher.â âAfter my wife and I got married, her brother drove home from Texas Tech through a duster in Lamesa,â Schneemann recalls. âThe first thing I noticed was that his license plate was as shiny as could be. It didnât have any paint left on it.â
“Boob” Kelton had to sell off his herds during the drought of record. “After you feed a few years and it doesnât seem like thereâs any relief a-cominâ, youâve spent most all your money on feed, so itâs best to sell âem,” he says. “And thatâs what we did. They were all gone, and youâd just look out there in the pasture and there wasnât anything. Kind of depressing. Itâs kind of like losing your children. Itâs just bad. Theyâre part of the family just like everybody else.”
While the drought we’re only now making real progress out of is still fresh in every Texan’s mind, there’s a whole generation in the state that can remember a time that was arguably more trying.
The drought of record in the 1950s lasted for seven years. Imagine seven 2009s or 2011s back to back and you’ll get the idea. It was an event that changed the state forever.
The voices of that drought can still teach us something today. NPR’s John Burnett traveled to West Texas to hear firsthand from the survivors of the drought of record, and in his audio report below (and the slideshow above), you can listen to what those voices remember. And you can read the full story in Texas Monthly.
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