Governor Rick Perry will continue campaigning for president despite his fifth-place loss in Iowa. But with his presidential prospects diminished, the governor might start wondering what challenges await him in Texas if he doesn’t end up in the White House.
His underwhelming campaign performance also has political analysts wondering whether the governor will be equipped to face those challenges.
“Perry’s absence doesn’t do him good politically in the state,” University of Texas at Austin professor Bruce Buchanan told StateImpact Texas.”People want the Governor on the scene when there are problems and crisis and he has not been, and his critics will call that to his attention.” Continue Reading →
Gas and oil well blowouts are the stuff of legend in Texas. But in Pennsylvania, a state with little modern experience with wells, a surge in drilling has some residents on edge. The thought of a geyser of fire erupting in an otherwise peaceful pasture can sound like a nightmare.
“(A blowout) scares the heck out of me,” said Skip Roupp , the Deputy Emergency ManÂageÂment Director of Bradford County in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Experts told him to expect one major blowout for every thousand wells drilled. The well count in Pennsylvania is already at 3,000.
“We’re due for a major blowout at some point,” Roupp said. Continue Reading →
But at the end of the year, a scientist in Austin has brought a little sun into the forecast. Meet Xiaoyang Zhu, a chemistry professor at the University of Texas, and director of the Energy Frontier Research Center.
For the last few years Zhu and his team have been working on a way to dramatically increase the amount of energy harvested from Solar technology. Now, they think they’ve done it.  Continue Reading →
J.D. Hancock via Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/jdhancock/
Jump into your time machine and take a trip to post-drought Texas.
Years from now, when Texans talk about 2011 they’ll probably remember one thing above everything else: the weather.
The drought , the extreme heat and the fires that came with it have made this an historic year for Texas. And it will leave a mark that will be felt long after the drought is over.
How will it be felt? Let’s take a hypothetical ride to the grocery store. Continue Reading →
Dead trees are cut, some made into chips south of downtown Houston .
The Texas drought killed millions of trees this summer but only a small percentage will be salvaged for lumber or even wood chips according to state’s Forest Service. And time may be running out.
“If you wait too long, they will not be suitable for most forest products. Decay will set in and the trees will become much less useful,” said Burl Carraway, head of Sustainable Forestry at the Texas Forest Service office in College Station. Continue Reading →
Amid the ruins of Bastrop, many new homes have already been built.
Some families have taken to making their own road signs
A Texas flag sits on a sign advertising a construction company.
This story was co-reported with Andy Uhler of KUT News.
On the Sunday of Labor Day weekend in Bastrop County, Kasey Tausch had just woken up from an afternoon nap. She heard her son come into their house yelling. “Mom! There’s a fire!” her son called out. She opened the front door and saw a sea of pitch black smoke. “It seemed like the fire was right there, but it was really miles away,” she remembers.
The family quickly grabbed some things and left their home. It would be gone when they came back. “We were literally driving through fire,” Kasey says. “We were just watching in amazement.”
For Kasey and her family and thousands of others in Bastrop this year, it won’t be Christmas as usual. After fires that destroyed 34,000 acres, more than 1,600 homes and claimed two lives, the holiday is going to be markedly different. Continue Reading →
Birdwatchers at a recent trip at the Hyatt Lost Pines Resort.
Tens of thousands of birdwatchers across the country are participating in the Audubon Society’s annual Christmas Bird Count this month. But in Central Texas, the tradition has a special importance. During a year of exceptional drought, heat and wildfires, conservationists across Texas are paying close attention to the welfare of local bird populations.
This is the 112th year of the count, which helps Audubon and other groups to do a wildlife census of birds. Houston birdwatcher Michael Jewell didn’t know what to expect from the outing this year. When he drove to Austin last weekend to do the count, it was his first opportunity to see the devastation wrought by the Bastrop wildfires. “Although the fire to us may be big, maybe from a birds-eye-view, maybe it’s not as large as we think it is,” he said.
FM 3278 crosses the Trinity River just downstream from the Lake Livingston Dam
Once called the “River of Death” because it was so polluted with sewage and waste from slaughterhouses, the Trinity River has defied the great drought and helped maintain one of Houston’s critical supplies of water. And much of the credit goes to what a century ago made the river so polluted: the wastewater from Dallas-Fort Worth.
The Trinity flows past Dallas and goes south 200 miles to Lake Livingston. Even after the long summer of record drought and heat,
Map courtesy TRA
Click on the image above to trace the Trinity River Basin's route.
thousands of gallons of water still cascade every second down the lake’s spillway. From there, the flow again takes the form of a river and 80 miles later, the Trinity ends at Trinity Bay on the Gulf of Mexico.
A draft report from the Environmental Protection Agency sent shockwaves through the industry this week. The report showed that the technique of oil and gas drilling called hydraulic fracturing lead to water contamination in Pavillion, Wyoming.
Railroad Comissioner David J. Porter believes the report is flawed, but says more research should be done.
The EPA continues to research the impacts of fracking. Â But this study came at the request of residents of Pavillion, Wyoming. They asked the agency to investigate drinking water they suspected was tainted from nearby wells. It took three years, but this month, the EPA announced it had found chemicals associated with Hydraulic fracturing in the water.
The news comes at a time of growing acrimony between Texas’ overwhelmingly Republican state government and the Obama administration’s Environmental Protection Agency. So it came as little surprise when the results came under fire from some state policymakers.
Electricity transformer station in downtown Houston
Even in Texas, where it may seem the sky’s the limit for making fortunes in the energy business, there are rules. Or at least, there are rules when it comes to the price of one form of energy: electricity.
In this case, there is the rule called a “price cap” and it’s imposed by state regulators on the wholesale price of electricity (what retail providers pay for the electricity they then sell to you). Now, the state’s Public Utility Commission (PUC) may raise the cap, letting big power generating companies make more money during times of enormous demand. Continue Reading →
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Governor Rick Perry will continue campaigning for president despite his fifth-place loss in Iowa. But with his presidential prospects diminished, the governor might start wondering what challenges await him in Texas if he doesn’t end up in the White House.
