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.
The toilet sink, imported from Japan, aims to educate people about conservation at Steve's Market and Deli.
Located just one county north of geographic center of Texas, Brownwood, population 20,000, might seem an unlikely place for high tech innovation. But about a year ago the town made headlines for proposing a cutting-edge solution to its water crisis: toilet to tap waste water treatment.
The future of that project remains unclear as the town explores other options (including simply digging new wells). But that hasn’t stopped some residents from taking matters into their own hands. On our recent reporting trip to to the oilfields of the Permian Basin, we ran into one of those people: Steve Harris, co-owner of Steve’s Market and Deli.
As a small businessman and self-described ‘activist’ Harris has turned his cafe into a sort of show-room for water conservation. The bathroom featured a toilet-sink commonly found in Tokyo. The cafe also captures rain water, and water from the AC system. It recycles trash in a town that has no city-wide recycling.
As oil and gas production and processing increases, who wins and who loses in Texas?
Texas Land Commission Jerry Patterson told a political luncheon in Houston that “oppressive federal government regulation” was a big threat to the Texas energy economy. Especially pollution regulation by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
“And more specifically, (by) the U.S. Wildlife Service and their Endangered Species designations for critters that probably ought to die anyway,” Patterson said, referring to federal efforts to protect species including salamanders, lizards and prairie chickens. The designations could restrict oil & gas drilling in West Texas.
Come to Texas
It’s an anti-regulation stance repeated by the state’s top officials including Governor Rick Perry. Perry has used radio ads to try to lure businesses from other states to Texas where he said there is “limited government” and a “pro-business environment.”
David Maidment says many rural parts of Texas lack proper floodplain maps.
Floods have devastated parts of Colorado and both the Gulf and Pacific Coasts of Mexico in the last week. While Texas had some rainfall during that time, it’s been years since the state has seen weather comparable to those disasters.
But that doesn’t mean that extreme stormy weather is gone for good.
“We know it’s coming, we just don’t know when,” Roy Sedwick, the Executive Director of the Texas Floodplain Management Association, told StateImpact Texas.
That’s the reason for mapping floodplains, so that when the rains do come, people will be ready.
“Think of a floodplain as a railroad track,” explained Sedwick. “Just like the track is put down to carry the train, a floodplain is put down by mother nature to carry the flood waters.”
“The only difference is we know the schedule of the train, we don’t know the schedule of the flood,” he added.
Power pole in Houston with antenna and equipment to allow remotely controlled switching
In the five years since Hurricane Ike knocked out power in most of metropolitan Houston, the city now has more high-tech power poles and fewer trees in power line rights-of-way. But there’s no real assurance of a better outcome the next time a big storm hits.
“If you get another direct hit from a large category hurricane such as Ike, you will probably still have the same amount of people impacted,” said David Baker, CenterPoint Energy’s Vice President in charge of 50,000 miles of wires and poles. “But we’ve tried to apply lessons learned from Ike to speed the recovery up and make that go faster.”
Hurricane Ike was a strong Category 2 storm when it made landfall in Galveston, leaving 95 percent of CenterPoint’s 2.26 million customers in the dark. Ten days later, 75 percent of them had power restored. It would take a week longer to get to everyone else.
Dominic Krus was among them. After two and a half weeks, the lights came back on in his home in Houston’s Sharpstown subdivision.
“My wife says the lights are on. I said, ‘Oh great, we can sleep with AC tonight.’ It was a pretty happy event,” said Krus. Continue Reading →
As the Texas Public Utility Commission (PUC) considers changing the electricity market so there’s more money to build new power plants, a mystery has popped up: why aren’t Texans using as much electricity as predicted?
“There’s something that’s been going on recently with the forecasts, which affects a lot of things,” said PUC commissioner Kenneth Anderson at the commission’s open meeting last week.
Who Turned the Lights Out?
Anderson said forecasts from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) had predicted electricity demand would increase in 2013 by 2.1 percent.
In reality?
“It’s been barely one percent, if it’s even hit one percent,” Anderson said. Continue Reading →
Cattle rustling, the age-old crime of stealing livestock, might seem like something for the history books. But, as our readers and listeners learned last month, Texas ranchers are seeing an increase in stolen cows, even as the number of cattle dwindles.
The report generated a lot of interest. It went viral online and was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered.
But, as is often the case, we still have more of the story to tell. This time in pictures.
Click the player above to view an audio slideshow of photos snapped on a recent reporting trip to Giddings, Texas and hear the NPR report. Peruse the text after the jump to learn more about black market bovines, and the people we met while reporting.
The Motiva refinery is bordered by neighborhoods in Port Arthur
When your neighbors process millions of barrels of crude oil, you notice when things aren’t going right.
“There has been some increase in flaring incidents, because whenever you shut down they have to flare to let off certain gases,” said Hilton Kelley.
He lives in Port Arthur and years ago he led community activists in negotiations with the companies behind the massive expansion of the Motiva Refinery.
Hilton said the companies promised the new refinery would run cleaner using innovations in pollution control. What the activists didn’t think to ask for was a promise the refinery — now the nation’s largest — would just simply … run.
“We had no idea that the unit would not start off working properly,” said Kelley, founder of Community In-power and Development Association. Now he wonders what a series of leaks, fires, shutdowns and start-ups will mean to the air residents breathe.
Fires, Leaks, and Vibrations
The Motiva Port Arthur Refinery is a $10 billion joint venture of Royal Dutch Shell and Saudi -Aramco. The expansion was finished last spring, but quickly ran into trouble. There were a couple of small fires, apparently related to leaks caused when a corrosive chemical was mistakenly allowed to flow through the new unit, causing extensive and costly damage. Continue Reading →
Air pollution in a can: air sample awaiting analysis at UT School of Public Health
For years now, Texas has tried to block Federal air pollution laws, contending they stifle economic growth. But just last week, the U.S. Department of Justice filed another lawsuit to force power plants in northeast Texas to reduce toxic air emissions.
As the battle continues over how clean the air in Texas should be and at what cost, It might be worth highlighting why any of this matters.
One way to do that is ask researchers what they’re learning about how air pollution affects people. Scientists are finding that it’s like a pack-day-smoker who ends up living into old age: polluted air doesn’t have the same impact on everyone.
Pollution Immunity
“What we now understand is people are quite different in terms of their immune systems,” said Dr. William Calhoun at the University of Texas Medical Branch on Galveston Island. He says there’s a lot of research now to find out exactly why immune systems react differently to pollution. Continue Reading →
Larry Schatte manages an auction house in Giddings.
The Giddings Livestock Commission holds its auction every Monday. Hundreds of cows pass through, brought in by their rightful owners to be sold to the highest bidder. But, every now and then, auction manager Larry Larry Schatte says, a contraband cow finds its way into the mix.
“Probably about a year ago. This one guy, he’d usually bring in some cattle for his mom,” Schatte told StateImpact Texas on a recent auction day that the man would always bring in the same kind of cow, a specific type of cross breed.
“And this one particular time he came in with a couple of long horns, and I thought it was kind of an odd deal,” he said.
StateImpact seeks to inform and engage local communities with broadcast and online news focused on how state government decisions affect your lives. Learn More »
