Photo from Nan Palmero via Flikr http://www.flickr.com/photos/nanpalmero
San Antonio is considered a leader in municipal water policy, and with much of the country in drought other cities may start taking notice.
With families picnicking, children playing, and ducks quacking along the river, visitors to San Antonio’s Brackenridge Park on a recent afternoon would be forgiven for forgetting the drought that’s plagued Texas for well over a year.
That is, until they hear the pumps.
Tucked discretely behind the Witte Museum, the water pumps produce a steady hum, churning treated waste water into the river and allowing it to flow with the strength of a waterway in a far wetter place. The water re-use system keeps the San Antonio River rolling, and keeps people visiting the popular River Walk.
That’s right, this park’s beauty is brought, in part, by water that was recently flushed down the toilets of the Alamo City. Continue Reading →
In South Texas, state environmental regulators are using helicopters equipped with infrared cameras to sweep across gas and oil well sites. They’re looking for toxic vapor leaks that otherwise would be invisible. The leaks are from open hatches or bad valves on tanks and pipes. But what the state is finding—and not finding—is part of the debate over whether fracking threatens to dirty the air in Texas towns where drilling is surging.
“We are being proactive in trying to look at and address these issues,” says David Brymer, director of air quality with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ). Continue Reading →
Retail electric providers (REPs) in Texas have to make a decision: should they pass on higher wholesale electricity costs to customers who’ve signed “fixed rate” contracts, contracts that were supposed to lock-in a per kilowatt hour price? If the REPs try it, the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUC) is just waiting for the first customer to file a complaint.
The suspense begins Wednesday (August 1) when the state-set peak price for wholesale electricity jumps 50 percent to $4,500 per megawatt hour. The PUC approved the hike last month. The peak price can be reached on the hottest days when demand soars. Sky-high peak prices last a matter of hours and come a few dozen days a year. Otherwise, prices for a megawatt hour can be as low about $30. The PUC took the action because it says higher profits will encourage utility companies to build more power plants to keep up with the state’s growth. Continue Reading →
Sandstorm: dust rises during off-loading at drilling site
Federal workplace watchdogs are warning that the boom in “fracking” is now exposing oilfield workers to hazards they can inhale. It’s an additonal risk for roughnecks and service company crews working in an industry that already has a much-higher-than average injury rate.
NRG's Cedar Bayou power plant expanded in 2009: "We could not do that today"
According to some industry insiders, when the state-regulated peak price for wholesale electricity jumps 50% next month, it will fail to do what the Texas Public Utility Commission (PUC) had hoped: encourage the construction of new power plants to avert shortages.
“The prices have to go up before you see any significant generation being built,” said Dallas energy consultant John Bick, formerly with TXU Energy, now with Priority Power Management.
A man herds cattle at the West Auction in the winter of 2012.
“There was nothing we could do.”
It’s a phrase that rancher Jerry Abel returns to often when talking about the the day that his cattle dropped dead on his ranch. Listening to him talk about it, one is struck by the sense of powerlessness he felt watching the animals succumb.
Abel raises cattle for rodeo events, and it was after a roping exercise last May that he set his cows to pasture.
“The field adjacent to their pen, it wasn’t really good enough because of the drought for haying,” Abel told StateImpact Texas. “But there was quite a bit of grass on there. So we decided we could just turn the cattle out on it so they could graze some.”
It was about two hours later that the cows started to bellow. Abel and his trainer rushed back to see what was the matter.
Along the Texas Gulf coast in cities where the skylines are formed by the stacks of refineries, they’re talking about a perfect storm headed their way. But this storm has nothing to do with the tropics and everything to do with natural gas.
“It’s almost a perfect storm of low energy costs, low financing costs, low construction costs,” said Bob Lieper, the city manager of Baytown.
“The drought was abysmal,” Meinzer says. “I felt it was my duty to document it in all of its ugliness.”
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 (Wyman’s 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. He’s known for capturing images that show the state’s 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.
There’s fear in Austin over what could happen if the state runs short of electricity and has to use rolling blackouts to keep the statewide electrical grid from collapsing.
The fear is for the state’s image.
At a meeting of the Texas Public Utility Commission (PUC) June 13th, Chairman Donna Nelson expressed concern that pleas to the public to conserve electricity during the late afternoon when demand is greatest might also send a message that Texas was running out of power and therefore was no place you’d want to do business. Continue Reading →
Eugene “Boob” Kelton, 80, is an Upton County rancher and the brother of Elmer Kelton. “Fifteen dollars was the price for a ton of hay, and [the U.S. Department of Agriculture] was paying half of it,” Kelton says. “But whenever the government went to pay more, the producers just raised the price of the feed. So we didn’t realize any more help from the government, but the farmers that were growing the feed, they realized a little more profit. That’s kind of the way things go.”
Sandy Whittley, 74, grew up in San Angelo and is the executive secretary of the Texas Sheep and Goat Raisers’ Association. “The first year it was “Nah, not too bad,”” she remembers. “And 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.”
Preston Wright, 90, has been ranching in West Texas since 1948. He lives in Junction. “It didn’t start overnight—we just kinda eased into it,” Wright says. “And when we got into it, it just stayed for a while.”
Mort Mertz, 88, has been ranching in West Texas since 1954. He lives in San Angelo. “It started out west,” Mertz recalls. “It tended to get dry out there and not rain, and that lack of rainfall just moved east. My dad kept saying, “We have these things; they’ll just go about eighteen months. It’ll break.” But that’s what caught everybody off guard: it didn’t break. It just kept on going, and it lasted about seven years.”
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. “I grew up in Junction and then went into the banking business, and I would visit with men that I’d always known as carpenters, painters, merchants,” he says. “And then visiting with them in deeper detail, I’d 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 Texas—it 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 “Seco” (Spanish for “dry”). “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 it’s gonna rain.”
Bill Schneemann, 77, has been raising cattle in West Texas since 1954. He lives in Big Lake and describes himself as a “semi-tired, wore-out rancher.” “After my wife and I got married, her brother drove home from Texas Tech through a duster in Lamesa,” Schneemann recalls. “The first thing I noticed was that his license plate was as shiny as could be. It didn’t have any paint left on it.”
“Boob” Kelton had to sell off his herds during the drought of record. “After you feed a few years and it doesn’t seem like there’s any relief a-comin’, you’ve spent most all your money on feed, so it’s best to sell ’em,” he says. “And that’s what we did. They were all gone, and you’d just look out there in the pasture and there wasn’t anything. Kind of depressing. It’s kind of like losing your children. It’s just bad. They’re 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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