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Harold and Nell Myers live in Lakeside Beach. He used to manage the community’s water system before it was sold to LCRA.
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Spicewood Beach was placed under stage 4 water restrictions on Tuesday, meaning residents can only use water for cooking, cleaning and drinking.
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A beached boat dock on upper Lake Travis near Spicewood Beach sits dozens of feet from the water’s edge.
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Clayton “Buddy” Howell, a Navy Veteran shares a modest home with his daughter in Spicewood Beach.
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Boat docks that once floated on Lake Travis now sit on dry ground in Spicewood Beach.
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Joe Barbera, the current president of the Spicewood Beach POA, sits in the community recreation center.
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LCRA trucks parked outside a water pumping station in Spicewood Beach, where workers took measurements for the river authority engineers.
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The Lakeside Beach community, along with Spicewood Beach, was put under stage 4 water restrictions Tuesday.
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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 →
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The Tausch family is trying to make Christmas “as normal as possible”
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The Tausch family (clockwise from upper left): Chuck, Kasey, Connor and Jesse
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Connor wears a bracelet in support of local firefighters
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A charred, empty mailbox is all that’s left of a home in Bastrop
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The hardest loss for the Tausch family were things that couldn’t be replaced
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“You can’t describe losing everything,” Kasey Tausch says
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For some homes, all that remains is the chimney
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Amid the ruins of Bastrop, many new homes have already been built.
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Some families have taken to making their own road signs
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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 →
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A view of the Flint Hills East Refinery from the Hillcrest Neighborhood in Corpus Christi
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Tammy Foster is leading a group of residents trying to leave the neighborhood.
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A flare erupts from a refinery stack in Corpus Christi
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An Abandoned Playground in the Hillcrest Neighborhood
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One of many boarded-up houses in the Hillcrest neighborhood, which sits next to the Citgo and Flint Hills refineries.
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How do you get eminent domain in Texas? Just check a box.
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A sofa sits outside the Citgo East refinery in what was once the Oak Park Triangle neighborhood. 288 homes here were bought out by oil companies in the late nineties.
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Holding tanks on refinery row
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There are Of the six major refiThere are six major refineries in the area. The EPA has flagged five of them for serious or repeated violations of the Clean Air Act
Tammy Foster is a lifetime resident of Refinery Row in Corpus Christi. After years of living surrounded by refineries and smoke stacks, she says many of the families there are sick. Now she’s leading a group of residents who think they’ve found a way to fix that.
Continue Reading →
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Protesters against a proposed tax break for Valero gathered outside the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality today.
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Groups arrived in large buses from Houston and surrounding areas like Pasadena.
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Parker, from Houston, said “Rick Perry oughta be ashamed. We need children to have a vibrant education without big interests in their pocket.”
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Juan and Emilia Portia, their son Miguel, and daughter Jennifer Lopez were very vocal at the protest.
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“Just Say No to Valero!” was a popular chant at the protest.
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“There are too many dropouts right now,” Chad and Crystal’s mother, Leila Mikel, said. “Kids need to go to school to get a diploma. Without that piece of paper, they can’t make a living.”
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A woman protests against the proposed tax exemptions for Valero Energy Corporation
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The daughter of Marta Corona, a Houston area parent, looks up at Alain Cisneros, a protest organizer
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A protester speaks to members of the TCEQ to oppose the proposed tax break
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Gonzales, a 13-year old student in the Pasadena Independent School District in Houston, testified in front of the TCEQ. She spoke of her asthma, which she believes is caused by emissions from nearby refineries.
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Texas Governor Rick Perry appointed the three members of the TCEQ board, who will decide on the proposed Valero tax exemption
Early Wednesday morning, a caravan of buses set out from the Houston area, headed for Austin and the headquarters of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. Their goal? To protest a request from Valero Energy Corp. for tax breaks for some of its oil refineries through a system that could give millions of dollars back to one of Texas’s most profitable corporations.
So far this year Valero has earned more than $2 billion. That makes the possible millions Valero wants in tax exemptions kind of seem like small potatoes.
But that, in turn, might be what has the 150 community activists and environmentalists chanting “Say ‘no’ to Valero” in front of TCEQ headquarters on Wednesday so angry. Continue Reading →