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.
We’ve been looking at drought and water issues in Texas here as part of our new series, Life By the Drop, a collaboration with KUT News and Texas Monthly. Nate Blakeslee, a senior editor at the magazine, looks at some of the solutions on the table in his new piece, ‘Drawing Staws.’ In it, he examines the state’s water plans, both past and present, and how Texas has struggled to come up with a comprehensive policy for dealing with drought.
Blakeslee recently sat down with StateImpact Texas’ Mose Buchele to discuss these issues.
Q: How is the stateâs water plan today informed by the catastrophic experience of the 1950s drought?
Photo courtesy of Texas Monthly
Nate Blakeslee says that "if Texas is going to continue growing at the pace that it is currently growing ... then either the people will have to move East, or the water will have to move West."
A: Well the 1950s drought, of course, is the benchmark by which all other droughts are measured in Texas. It was the largest drought in the stateâs recorded history, and it went on the longest â which is what I mean to say â and that drought really changed the way we think about water in Texas. It was the impetus for the first statewide water planning that we ever did, and it spurred an enormous building spree in terms of reservoirs, an enormous amount of investment in public infrastructure. Between 1950 and 1980 we built 126 reservoirs, totally changed the landscape in terms of water in Texas.
Q: Some of these same reservoirs that were built after the 50s are reservoirs that we we’re seeing dry up or come dangerously close to drying up today. We’ve one place right outside of Robert Lee in West Texas where the reservoirs has essentially dried up. That goes to show that the measures that were made back then may not be enough to help us in the future.
This report features contributions from Matt Largey and Emily Donahue of KUT News and Jake Silverstein of Texas Monthly.
While last year was the worst in Texas’ recorded history, it was only the latest in a long string of dry spells that stretches back through Texas history, to a time before it was even Texas.
Drought has been a recurring theme in the accounts of nearly everyone who has passed through this place. Around five hundred years ago, the Spanish explorer Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca wrote the first European chronicle of a voyage through Texas. His journals recorded the misery of the drought-stricken people he encountered.
“For anyone who has lived in west Texas, the presence of drought is every day,” says Roger Hodge, who writes about an early Texas civilization that struggled with water and drought in the new Texas Monthly. “It always seems like there is a drought going on.â
That was certainly true for the people who once lived along the lower Pecos. The ones who left behind magnificent paintings on the walls of caves â with messages weâre still trying to decipher. You can listen to their story above, or view the slideshow featuring some of Roger Hodge’s photos of the rock art up top. (To see more of his photos, visit his website.)
Earlier this year, walking along the dry river and lake beds of the Highland Lakes, you’d likely find yourself stepping on gravel, fish bones and fresh-water clam shells. After the lakes sat around sixty percent drained, water wells in the area also began to fail. That happened most noticeably in Spicewood Beach, where the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA), the agency that owns the well, needed to haul water in by truck for the people who live there.
In this installment of our series on water issues along the Colorado River, part of Life By the Drop: Drought, Water and the Future of Texas, we hear from two residents of Spicewood Beach at the start of the townâs water shortage.
As the LCRA hauls water into town and begins construction of a long-term water storage system, Robert Salinas and Martin Peterson speculate about what went wrong, and whether things will ever get better. The audio was produced by Mose Buchele and the slideshow by Filipa Rodrigues.
Since the well failed, little has changed in Spicewood Beach. Continue Reading →
A cow that perished on a ranch outside of Marfa was dried "like jerky" by the drought.
Jake Silverstein of Texas Monthly contributed to this article.Â
It’s a disaster unlike any other. Floods, hurricanes and earthquakes enter swiftly and destroy efficiently. But a drought doesn’t herald it’s arrival. And people usually don’t pay attention to drought until the damage is already done.
For most Texans, especially those living in big cities, a drought is usually little more than an irritationâa brown lawn or a high water bill.
But for Texans living in the country, itâs a little different. For them, a drought is impossible to ignore.It can mean the end of a family tradition or a way of life.
Yet it requires a truly extreme drought, like the one we suffered last year, before the average city-dweller sits up and takes notice.
They creep in slowly. Reveal themselves so gradually, that itâs easy not to notice. Until you do.
âA drought is kinda like a cancer, it just slowly eats and eats and eats,” says John Jacobs, the mayor of Robert Lee. That town nearly went dry last year. “Your water sources dry up. Your businesses start drying up,” he says. “Without water people aren’t gonna stay there.â
You can listen to Life By the Drop: Drought, Water and the Future of Texas Friday, June 22 at 3 p.m. on KUT 90.5 FM. The program will air again at 7 p.m. on Monday, and youâll also be able to hear the entire documentary here and on other public radio stations throughout the state. And you can learn more about the history of the drought at our interactive web page, Dried Out: Confronting the Texas Drought, and share your thoughts on Twitter with the hashtag #txwater.
John Jacobs, Mayor of Robert Lee, says drought is "like a cancer."
It wasn’t until recently that John Jacobs started sleeping well again. The mayor of Robert Lee, a West Texas town of some thousand people, has spent the last few years grappling with the same issue facing all of Texas: How to find water for our people.
The great drought of 2011 was the driest and hottest period on record in the state. But it crept in slowly. “Drought is like a cancer,” Jacobs says. “It just slowly eats and eats and eats. Your water sources dry up, your businesses start drying up. Without water, people aren’t going to stay there. It’s just a slow, declining death.”
The story of Robert Lee is one that played out in other small towns across Texas last year, like Groesbeck and Spicewood Beach. Rivers and reservoirs dried up. Wells failed. And city governments with little cash rushed to finance lifelines.
For John Jacobs, a fourth-generation West Texan and lifelong resident of Robert Lee, the moment his town almost ran dry was actually a long time coming. But it still felt sudden. The town had brushes with running dry before. “But every time we’d go get in a bind, it would rain,” Jacobs remembers. “We’d catch water, and then we’d spend all that money for something else.”
Congratulations, McMullen County, Texas. You officially have the highest number of farmers per capita in the United States. More than half of the population there are farmers (374 out of 707 people). The data comes from the U.S. Census Bureau and you can visualize it all in a new interactive map built by Slate, Agriculture in the U.S. and Around the World.
The farming belt stretches from Texas up to North Dakota, where in some communities, farmers are about a third of the population. Contrast that with the coasts, Slate notes, and you’ll find “just one or two out of every 100 people work as farmers, even in rural areas.”
The famous Lucas Gusher blows out oil January 10, 1901 on Spindletop hill in Beaumont, Texas. Anthony Lucas's gusher, the first in Texas, sprayed over 100 feet above the derrick for nine days until the well was capped. But is oil facing a decline?
Tomorrow, 38 million acres of offshore drilling areas in the Gulf of Mexico will go on sale. Drillers are clamoring for the rights, but lurking in the background is a question: What happens if oil prices keep going down?
Just months ago, everyone was trying to figure out why prices were rising so high. But recently they’ve seen a significant turn downward, and seem poised to continue their plunge. For some answers on what falling prices mean for Texas’ energy economy, KUT’s Nathan Bernier spoke with Robert Dye, an economist with Comerica Bank. He says heâs concerned about the possibility of a slump in European business activity pushing oil below $70 a barrel and forcing Texas producers to scale back activity.
Q: Â Whatâs the big story about the Texas economy thatâs happening right now that maybe the media is under-reporting?
A: Well, we all have to be aware of downside risks, particularly in this world of global interconnections, and so I do remain concerned about the crisis in Europe and the spreading recession there and slower growth in Asia. That can impact Texas a couple of ways directly: one is through technology and other exports, and the other, of course, is through oil prices and energy prices in general. A weaker global economy obviously puts some downward pressure on oil prices. Weâve seen oil prices now sag into the mid-80s for West Texas Intermediate. I think that is a number that can remain consistent with ongoing vigorous activity, but if it starts to fall much below that â I think below the 70-dollar barrel range â I would get concerned the drilling activity would slow down and we would see a cooler state economy. Certainly that remains to be seen. Itâs not my expectation that oil prices fall that low, but in a cooler global environment we do have to watch out for that.
Q: What would be the consequences of oil dropping below 70 dollars a barrel?
A: Â Well, I think we would see rig counts go down, exploration and production programs being scaled back. And we would see that the very important energy sector for the state, I think, would become much less vigorous at least in the near term.
So how’s the app? It’s okay. Much of the content is static, like conservation tips and some facts about the group. The main page, however, shows real-time load on the grid (as of this writing, 45,226 MW) and the forecast peak demand for the day. It’s the same info (and graphic) from ERCOT’s home page, and in the age of flashy energy apps and devices like NEST, it feels a little behind the times.
There’s also a push notification feature, which will alert you when the grid is getting close to reaching peak demand. So users have the option of getting a push message from ERCOT that says “Turn up your thermostat 2 degrees before you leave home today.” The idea is for people to cut back on their energy use at those times, which typically occur between 3 and 7 p.m. during the summer. (Maybe they should stop charging their phones?) Continue Reading →
This Friday we’ll be bringing you a special report, Life By the Drop: Drought, Water and the Future of Texas, a collaboration of StateImpact Texas, KUT News, and Texas Monthly.
Life By the Drop is a close look at the state of water and drought in Texas, looking both to the past and the future for answers on how the state can manage a growing population amid a shrinking water supply.
On Friday at 3 p.m., KUT 90.5 FM will air a one-hour documentary on the drought, hosted by Texas Monthly editor Jake Silverstein and produced by KUT News and StateImpact Texas. The program will air again at 7 p.m. on Monday, and you’ll also be able to hear the entire documentary here and on other public radio stations throughout the state.
Starting next week, each day we’ll individually bring you one of the features from the documentary, including reports from NPR’s John Burnett, an interview with Texas state photographer Wyman Meinzer, and audio reports from StateImpact Texas and KUT News. We’ll also have some web extras here at StateImpact Texas, with audio slideshows, interviews and more.
And you can pick up a copy of the July issue of Texas Monthly to read the stories from “Life By the Drop” as well. It hits newsstands Thursday.
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We’ve been looking at drought and water issues in Texas here as part of our new series, Life By the Drop, a collaboration with KUT News and Texas Monthly. Nate Blakeslee, a senior editor at the magazine, looks at some of the solutions on the table in his new piece, ‘Drawing Staws.’ In it, he examines the state’s water plans, both past and present, and how Texas has struggled to come up with a comprehensive policy for dealing with drought.
