âThe drought was abysmal,â Meinzer says. âI felt it was my duty to document it in all of its ugliness.â
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 (Wymanâs 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. Heâs known for capturing images that show the stateâs 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.
Still image taken from video posted to Flikr Creative Commons by Waifer X. http://www.flickr.com/photos/waiferx/2658307394/
A seismograph measures feet stomping nearby at the Thomas A. Jaggar Museum in Hawaii
Three earthquakes in six days. Those were the surprising numbers that greeted Texans on Monday morning. What’s becoming less surprising is the notion that they could have been man-made. All three of the quakes (two near Dallas, one around San Antonio) happened near areas with extensive oil and gas excavation.
A scientific consensus is forming around the notion that wastewater disposal wells, a common byproduct of oil and gas drilling, are causing quakes. As that understanding grows, the debate has moved from what is causing the quakes to what policymakers should do about it. Continue Reading →
Truck traffic on FM 81 in the Eagle Ford Shale formation area. Photo courtesy Texas Department of Transportation.
According to the Texas Department of Transportation it takes nearly1,200 trucks to bring a gas well into production. TxDOT says those trucks do damage to roads equal to nearly 8 million cars.
That’s a lot of wear and tear.
So it makes sense that the state of Texas roads would get some attention during the Texas House Committee on Energy Resources’ two-day marathon of hearings on the impact of state’s energy industry this week.
Phil Wilson, TxDOT’s Executive Director, and John Barton, the deputy director and chief engineer, went before the committee to discuss the problem. Continue Reading →
Researchers at UT’s Center for Electromechanics unveiled the new hydrogen hybrid bus.
CEM Director, Robert Hebner studies the bus at the demonstration kick off event.
StateImpact takes a tour of the hydrogen fuel station at the Center for Electromechanics.
The hydrogen dispenser station looks a lot like a regular gas station.
Six high pressure cylinders store hydrogen fuel on site. “At this station we can store approximately 80kg of hydrogen… With the amount of storage we have here we’re able to refill the bus daily to its full capacity,” said Program Director, Michael Lewis.
The working floor of CEM features numerous prototypes and ongoing demonstrations.
A series of gauges monitor the purity of the hydrogen gas produced. Only purified hydrogen gas is stored in the six high pressure cylinders.
State of the art cylinders store hydrogen gas safely, even in Texas heat.
CEM researchers have developed additions for the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at the McDonald Observatory.
At any given time, CEM sponsors more than a dozen engineering projects.
CEM has also developed flywheel energy storage technology.
The wheels on the bus go round and round … but water is the only exhaust.
That’s what researchers at the Center for Electromechanics (CEM) at the University of Texas at Austin have to say about their new Hydrogen Hybrid Bus. The new bus will be featured as part of UT’s shuttle system and will alternate between the Forty Acres and Intramural Fields routes.
“The advantage is, frankly, that it uses less hydrogen. We take advantage of batteries to provide most of the propulsion power. And the fuel cell just recharges the batteries,” said Robert Hebner, director of CEM in an interview with StateImpact Texas. Continue Reading →
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. âFifteen dollars was the price for a ton of hay, and [the U.S. Department of Agriculture] was paying half of it,â Kelton says. âBut whenever the government went to pay more, the producers just raised the price of the feed. So we didnât realize any more help from the government, but the farmers that were growing the feed, they realized a little more profit. Thatâs kind of the way things go.â
Sandy Whittley, 74, grew up in San Angelo and is the executive secretary of the Texas Sheep and Goat Raisersâ Association. âThe first year it was âNah, not too bad,ââ she remembers. âAnd 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.â
Preston Wright, 90, has been ranching in West Texas since 1948. He lives in Junction. âIt didnât start overnightâwe just kinda eased into it,â Wright says. âAnd when we got into it, it just stayed for a while.â
Mort Mertz, 88, has been ranching in West Texas since 1954. He lives in San Angelo. âIt started out west,â Mertz recalls. âIt tended to get dry out there and not rain, and that lack of rainfall just moved east. My dad kept saying, âWe have these things; theyâll just go about eighteen months. Itâll break.â But thatâs what caught everybody off guard: it didnât break. It just kept on going, and it lasted about seven years.â
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. âI grew up in Junction and then went into the banking business, and I would visit with men that Iâd always known as carpenters, painters, merchants,â he says. âAnd then visiting with them in deeper detail, Iâd 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 Texasâit 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 âSecoâ (Spanish for âdryâ). “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 itâs gonna rain.”
Bill Schneemann, 77, has been raising cattle in West Texas since 1954. He lives in Big Lake and describes himself as a âsemi-tired, wore-out rancher.â âAfter my wife and I got married, her brother drove home from Texas Tech through a duster in Lamesa,â Schneemann recalls. âThe first thing I noticed was that his license plate was as shiny as could be. It didnât have any paint left on it.â
“Boob” Kelton had to sell off his herds during the drought of record. “After you feed a few years and it doesnât seem like thereâs any relief a-cominâ, youâve spent most all your money on feed, so itâs best to sell âem,” he says. “And thatâs what we did. They were all gone, and youâd just look out there in the pasture and there wasnât anything. Kind of depressing. Itâs kind of like losing your children. Itâs just bad. Theyâre 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.
So far, so good as 100+ degree temperatures blanket much of Texas, stressing the ability of power plants to keep millions of air conditioners running.The manager of the statewide grid, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), said while the system was stressed with the second day of triple digit temperatures and there was concern there would be problems, none occurred. And some relief may be on the way.
“Tomorrow (Wednesday), the weather forecasts have the temperatures moderating a few degrees and right now were forecasting (peak demand) something between 64,000 and 65,000 (megawatts),” said Kent Saathoff, ERCOT’s vice president for grid operations.
That demand would be below Tuesday’s which Saathoff said they expected to break 66,000 megawatts which would be a new record for June. The old record was set yesterday with 65,047 megawatts. Continue Reading →
The court upheld an EPA regulation aimed at curbing emissions linked to global climate change.
Today a federal appeals court upheld the first ever federal regulations aimed at reducing emissions of gases blamed for global warming. The unanimous ruling came over challenges from industry groups and around a dozen states, including Texas.
Environmental groups lauded the decision. In a statement released early this afternoon, the Environmental Defense Fund singled out one section of the ruling that appeared to chastise the petitioners for downplaying the science behind climate change research.
Opponents of the regulations had claimed that the EPA had “delegated” the responsibility of proving that emissions were linked to climate change by relying on information from third parties. In it’s ruling the court called such a claim “little more than a semantic trick.”
The ruling continued “this is how science works. EPA is not required to re-prove the existence of the atom every time it approaches a scientific question.” Continue Reading →
We’ve been looking at drought and water issues in Texas here as part of our new series, Life By the Drop, a collaboration with KUT News and Texas Monthly. Nate Blakeslee, a senior editor at the magazine, looks at some of the solutions on the table in his new piece, ‘Drawing Staws.’ In it, he examines the state’s water plans, both past and present, and how Texas has struggled to come up with a comprehensive policy for dealing with drought.
Blakeslee recently sat down with StateImpact Texas’ Mose Buchele to discuss these issues.
Q: How is the stateâs water plan today informed by the catastrophic experience of the 1950s drought?
Photo courtesy of Texas Monthly
Nate Blakeslee says that "if Texas is going to continue growing at the pace that it is currently growing ... then either the people will have to move East, or the water will have to move West."
A: Well the 1950s drought, of course, is the benchmark by which all other droughts are measured in Texas. It was the largest drought in the stateâs recorded history, and it went on the longest â which is what I mean to say â and that drought really changed the way we think about water in Texas. It was the impetus for the first statewide water planning that we ever did, and it spurred an enormous building spree in terms of reservoirs, an enormous amount of investment in public infrastructure. Between 1950 and 1980 we built 126 reservoirs, totally changed the landscape in terms of water in Texas.
Q: Some of these same reservoirs that were built after the 50s are reservoirs that we we’re seeing dry up or come dangerously close to drying up today. We’ve one place right outside of Robert Lee in West Texas where the reservoirs has essentially dried up. That goes to show that the measures that were made back then may not be enough to help us in the future.
A hydraulic fracking operation in the Barnett Shale.
Call it a new Texas tradition: An earthquake hits and the ground has barely stopped shaking before people start looking for oil and gas drilling operations near the quake zone.
This past week saw a big jump in rare seismic activity across the state. Last Thursday, a 4.6 magnitude earthquake startled San Antonio residents early in the morning. And this Sunday, a 2.1 magnitude quake shook Keene, a small town just 25 miles south of Fort Worth. Then, early this morning, the U.S. Geological Survey says a 2.6 magnitude quake hit near Fort Worth.
All those places are relatively close to drilling operations and disposal wells.
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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.
