In Midland, they try not to call it an oil boom because last time that happened in the 1980s, the economy went bust and stayed that way longer than anyone here wants to remember. But these days, things sure are boom-like.
K.C. Stallings, a landman, Â found that out when he moved last summer to Midland from Houston. He tried to buy a house.
“It’s the exact opposite as most of the country,” Stallings said.
Harold and Nell Myers live in Lakeside Beach. He used to manage the community’s water system before it was sold to LCRA.
Spicewood Beach was placed under stage 4 water restrictions on Tuesday, meaning residents can only use water for cooking, cleaning and drinking.
A beached boat dock on upper Lake Travis near Spicewood Beach sits dozens of feet from the water’s edge.
Clayton “Buddy” Howell, a Navy Veteran shares a modest home with his daughter in Spicewood Beach.
Boat docks that once floated on Lake Travis now sit on dry ground in Spicewood Beach.
Joe Barbera, the current president of the Spicewood Beach POA, sits in the community recreation center.
LCRA trucks parked outside a water pumping station in Spicewood Beach, where workers took measurements for the river authority engineers.
The Lakeside Beach community, along with Spicewood Beach, was put under stage 4 water restrictions Tuesday.
Ryan Rowney, LCRA manager of water operations, sits in his office near Red Bud Isle.
Andy Uhler and David Barer of KUT News contributed reporting to this article.
(Update: On Monday, January 30, the wells in Spicewood Beach began to fail, and water was trucked in. It was the first time during the current drought that a Texas town has run out of water. Read our latest reporting on the story here.)
The drought has come close to drying up several small Texas towns. Without exception they’ve all been spared, whether through rain, new water pipelines, or a mix of the two. But for the first time since the drought began, within a few days, one community’s well is expected to run dry.
Spicewood Beach sits on a peninsula along the northern reaches of Lake Travis. Inflows into the lakes that provide for the region are at a historic low, while water demand is at an all-time high. The two main water sources for Central Texas, Lakes Buchanan and Travis, are currently only at a combined 37 percent of their full capacity.
There are 500 water meters in the Spicewood Beach area, serving an estimated 1,100 people. Water is drawn from wells managed by the Lower Colorado River Authority.
The irony of running out of water right next to a lake isn’t lost on locals like Joe Barbera, who is president of the Spicewood Beach Property Owner’s Association. “If you go down there, it’s nothing but sand,” he says. “If you actually walk down there, it’s unbelievable how far you have to go down to the creek bed just to see water.”
How Did This Happen?
Around here he’s known simply as “Buddy.” But his given name is Clayton Howell, an 85 year-old retired Navy vet who lives in a single-story home next to a golf course. Until about six months ago, you’d find him playing nine holes a day there. Now he’s more or less confined to his La-Z-Boy with a bad back problem. Over a late breakfast, he tells the story of how the local water wells came to be the property of the LCRA, and why they’re beginning to run dry. Continue Reading →
Photo by Flickr user Sharon Drummond/Creative Commons
Deregulation turns ten years old in Texas this year.
Anniversaries are horrible things to forget, so here’s one that you might have let slip by. This month marks ten years of de-regulation in the Texas electricity market.
But it hasn’t all been smooth sailing for rate payers since then, according to one new study.
A typical electric customer paid $3,000 in added costs over the last ten years because of deregulation, according to a history commissioned by the Texas Coalition for Affordable Power. The report estimates that Texans spent $11 billion cumulatively because of higher rates. Continue Reading →
The field behind Robert Cervenka’s ranch in the small town of Riesel, Texas is scattered with historic equipment. There are horse-drawn plows and pickup trucks from bygone eras. Want to know what a 1954 John Deer tractor looks like? He’ll be happy to oblige. Cervenka’s been ranching since he was eight years old.
And now he’s eighty-one. “At my age I don’t want to buy any new tractors or anything,” he says, chuckling.
But not everything here is antique. A few years ago, much to his chagrin, Cervenka got a brand new coal-fired power plant as a neighbor, right next door to his ranch. The Sandy Creek Power Station was set to produce 925 megawatts of electricity for this energy hungry state, enough to power an estimated 900,000 homes. The chimney from the plant rises 360 feet in the air, higher than the Taj Mahal.
Cervenka opposed it, but in the end he watched from his field as it was built, and watched as plumes of steam and smoke first rose from it last fall. “They were what’s called cooking the boilers,” he recalls. “They were heating them up and making steam and trying to blow out all the pipes and tubing that may had welders slag or tools or anything in the pipes. And then one day, all of a sudden, it quit.”
It’s still not clear exactly what happened at the plant the day it quit on Oct. 17th last year. Continue Reading →
Trailers housing drill workers line a city park in Gonzales
Rancher Tim Pennell says you need only look out the window in DeWitt County to see what “fracking” has brought to the gently rolling terrain of South Texas.
“If you want to work, you come to DeWitt County and you can damn sure get a job,” said Pennell.
Fracking is helping create a gusher of jobs as evidenced by the the line of oil field workers at a barbecue stand that operates along the road next to Pennell’s house. A few hundred yards away, a drilling rig is running 24/7.
But all the trucks servicing the drilling rigs are ripping up the roads. And there is concern over how the fracking process is using enormous amounts of groundwater during a record drought. Continue Reading →
Marjorie Farabee was stopped from bringing her wagon to the steps of the capitol. But she did deliver around 100,000 signatures collected online to protest the burro killings.
Words matter in life. And the case of the the wild donkeys of West Texas is no exception.
If you call them “Wild Burros” you could be inclined to see them as scrappy survivors, emblems of the Old West. If you call them “Feral Donkeys,” well, then they sound like pests that need to be exterminated.
In Texas, what we have here is a failure to communicate.
If you were near the State Capitol Wednesday, you got a first-hand glimpse of the fight heating up between the two camps. Six donkeys (including “Miss Abby,” a Donkey with her own blog), and about a dozen protesters were there to deliver a message to the Texas Governor: “Stop killing the wild burros of Texas.” Continue Reading →
May 2010: Shrimp boat deploys oil boom around slick in Gulf of Mexico
The Federal government’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) held a public hearing last week in Houston on the environmental impact of its plan to sell more leases to drill in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Texas. But almost nobody showed up to testify.
The Texas Senate Business and Commerce committee heard testimony from state agencies, scientists, environmental groups and others Tuesday about how an extended drought might affect the state’s power grid. There was talk of cloud seeding, demand response, and even input from the ambassador to Australia on how to best generate power during a drought.
The meeting went for hours, and while it didn’t yield any direct results, there were plenty of ideas for dealing with the drought. It will be interesting to see which of them the committee picks to present before the next session of the state legislature in 2013.
Rays of Hope
State meteorologist George Bomar testified on where things may be headed, saying that “we have just come through the worst one-year drought in Texas history and it’s not over.” He said the current drought is a “once in a lifetime experience” and that lakes and reservoirs have reached alarmingly low levels. His testimony hit notes of both pessimism and hope: Continue Reading →
Pump jack in Pierce Junction oilfield south of downtown Houston
The Texas Comptroller’s office is adding auditors to increase scrutiny of tax breaks claimed by drilling operations.
“We are currently re-deploying resources and hiring auditors so that five auditors will work on oil and gas audits,” said Comptroller spokesperson R.J. DeSilva in an email to StateImpact Texas.
Photo Courtesy of Jim Gossen, Louisiana Foods - Global Seafood Source
An Asian Tiger Prawn caught last September near Little Lake in Larose, LA
The Asian Tiger Prawn can grow over a foot long. It’s a species from the Western Pacific Ocean that first showed up off the coast of Alabama in 2006, when a single, solitary prawn was reported. If the story ended there, we wouldn’t have much to talk about.
But it doesn’t.
“The next year in 2007, you had some pop up in Louisiana just one or two, in 2008, three or four, [and in] 2009 a couple,” Leslie Hartman, the Matagorda Bay Ecosystem leader with Texas Parks and Wildlife, told Stateimpact Texas.
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