From the SMU progress report: “Preliminary earthquakes locations near Reno-Azle using the current seismic network. Events are scaled by magnitude and color coded by time of event. Two Salt Water Disposal Wells (SWD wells) that occur within a few kms of the earthquake sequence are shown.”
North Texas is no longer a place you can expect to live earthquake-free. That’s the big takeaway from a progress report out this week from Southern Methodist University on their study of tremors around the towns of Reno and Azle that began last fall.
“This sequence, with the first felt event [earthquake] occurring in November 2013, follows several other earthquakes sequences of earthquakes occurring in Tarrant and Johnson Counties since 2008,” the report says. A team of scientists from SMU, with help from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), installed monitors to better measure the quakes in region.
While the larger quakes have stopped, with the most recent occurring in late January, smaller earthquakes continue, the report says. There’s been hundreds of them large enough to be recorded by multiple monitoring stations since December, with “thousands of very small events during periods of swarm activity.”
And the scientists aren’t sure when they’re going to happen. “Swarms of 100s of events can occur in a day, but weeks with few to no earthquakes have also occurred,” the report says. Continue Reading →
Imagine a blimp, like the one you might have looked up at in awe when you were a kid. Now, imagine that blimp cut into a cylindrical shape, with a wind turbine in the middle.
It’s called the Buoyant Airborne Turbine (BAT), and it’s what Altaeros Energies imagines will be the future of wind energy. By wrapping a helium-filled shell around a conventional three-blade turbine and letting the device into the air with strong tethers, the company says in a press video that the turbine can reach altitudes up to two thousand feet above the ground.
CEO Ben Glass says in the video this means the turbine can capture winds that “are on average five to eight times as powerful as what you get near the ground.”
In addition to producing higher yields of energy, these turbines have environmental advantages over conventional land turbines. Altaeros’ turbine is mobile, limiting its footprint on the landscape. Also unlike land turbines, the airborne turbine’s design limits its threat to birds.
Altaeros is a startup formed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2010, and they’re working with the Alaska Energy Authority to launch the turbine in Alaska for 18 months, at a cost of 1.3 million dollars. Altaeros isn’t the only company looking to develop and introduce a version of an airborne wind turbine, but they will be first, with the world’s first commercial airborne wind turbine. Continue Reading →
In Texas, many people suffer from "cedar fever," a winter allergy caused by the Ashe Juniper.
Thanks to all the pollen in the air, I spent the last few weeks coughing, wheezing and blowing my nose. Austin is infamous for bad allergy seasons. We have three of them: fall, winter, and spring. In the summer, it’s too hot for pollen (but the heat gives me something else to complain about).
An little-noticed part of the National Climate Assessment, released yesterday by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, explains how: climate change results in “more frost-free days and warmer seasonal air temperatures,” according to the report. That can mean longer pollen seasons.
An exploratory well drills for oil in the Monterey Shale, California, April 29, 2013. Voters in Denton, Texas could decide whether or not to outlaw fracking within their city's limits through a ballot initiative.
Nearly as many people signed a petition to outlaw fracking within the city limits of Denton as voted in the last municipal election.
Denton’s Drilling Awareness Group (DAG) will formally file its petition with the City Secretary this afternoon. The petition has 1,871 signatures, though just 596 (25 percent of the last election’s 2,385 votes) were enough.
“A lot of the work really begins now to make sure we turn out people to the polls,” DAG Vice President Adam Briggle said.
The City Secretary has 20 days to verify that the signatures on the petition are registered Denton voters, after which it will move on to the City Council. Denton’s City Council must then vote on the initiative within 60 days, and can pass the initiative directly into law. Continue Reading →
The Harris County Attorney is urging the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to order the cleanup of a local Superfund site.
Tuesday, Vince Ryan formally made the request for the agency to force the companies responsible for pulling the San Jacinto River to remove the worst-contaminated soil.
If you’ve ever driven across the San Jacinto River on I-10, you’ve passed through one of the most polluted parts of the country. That’s where International Paper, along with Waste Management, dumped tons of dioxin – a byproduct of paper production.
“The pits themselves are only twelve acres. But the area around it is several hundred acres that’s got contamination, and the dioxin itself has spread to all of Galveston Bay,” said special assistant Harris County Attorney Terrence O’Rourke. Continue Reading →
A tree trunk is exposed where water used to be in Bridgeport Lake, which was over thirty feet (9 meters) below normal levels, in Bridgeport, Texas, in September 2013.
A new federal report out today from offers a stark warning about our changing climate. As carbon dioxide reaches levels never before seen during human history, we’re already feeling the effects of climate change, and it’s likely to get worse.
The National Climate Assessment is the product of hundreds of experts and scientists, organized by the U.S. Global Change Research Program. They claim it’s “the most comprehensive, authoritative, transparent scientific report on U.S. climate change impacts ever generated.”
The report focuses on current and future climate change impacts to the U.S. For Texas and the Great Plains region, climate change caused by carbon emissions will exacerbate the issues the region has long faced: droughts, heat waves, storms and flooding. Agriculture will suffer, water wars will increase, and it’s going to get even hotter.
Climate scientists liken the impacts of climate change on weather to steroids: take a place like Texas already known for extreme weather, and then imagine if it started juicing. Our region is already known for “floods, droughts, severe storms, tornadoes, hurricanes, and winter storms,” the report says. It’s a dry region that needs more water than nature provides. “These variable conditions in the Great Plains already stress communities and cause billions of dollars in damage; climate change will add to both stress and costs,” the report says. Continue Reading →
Wichita Falls could soon become the first in the country where half of the drinking water comes directly from wastewater.
Yes, that includes water from toilets. For some citizens, that’s a little tough to swallow.
Mayor Glenn Barham says three years of extreme drought have changed life for 104,000 people living in Wichita Falls, which is about 140 miles northwest of Dallas.
“(There’s) no outside irrigation whatsoever with potable water. Car washes are closed one day a week. If you drain your pool to do maintenance you aren’t allowed to fill it,” he explained.
The mayor says citizens are pitching in and have cut their city’s water use by more than one-third. Still, water supplies are still expected to run out in two years, which is why the city has built a 13-mile pipeline that connects its wastewater plant to the plant where water is purified for drinking.
That’s right: What residents flush down the toilet will be part of what’s cleaned up and sent back to them through the tap. Continue Reading →
Jackie Young at San Jacinto River Superfund site tells why local lawsuits are important in our Radio Story
After being the target of intense lobbying that drew criticism in last year’s Texas legislature, lawmakers will again hear why big business wants restrictions on local governments that go after polluters in court. The House Judiciary Committee will take up the issue at a hearing May 16th.
Bills to curtail pollution lawsuits by local governments died in the last legislative session.
“I wasn’t surprised to see it still out there. There’s an effort to limit cities and actually it’s been going on for several years now,” said Bennett Sandlin, Executive Director of the Texas Municipal League.
Don't expect a lot of rain this summer in much of Texas. And beyond that, if an El Nino comes in the fall, it might not be the savior we expect.
Everyone’s waiting on El Niño, the “little boy” or “Christ Child” (since it usually shows up in the winter). This weather pattern that forms in the Pacific could end up redeeming Texas and other parts of the southwest in the form of above-average rain.
All signs point to one reappearing this fall, and typically El Niño means more rain for Texas. (Its sibling, La Niña, usually means drier-than-normal weather, a big factor in the last few years of extreme drought in the state.)
But one forecaster is saying El Niño may not be the blessing we anticipate it to be for Texas. Chris Coleman, meteorologist at the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (aka ERCOT, which manages the power grid that supplies much of the state), has put together a temperature and rainfall forecast for this summer and beyond. In it, Coleman notes that El Niños have mixed results in Texas.
“In fact, of the past six [El Niños], only one brought above-normal rainfall to the majority of the state,” Coleman writes in the forecast. “Some El Niño events have been dry.” That’s been the case in two of the past six El Niño events in Texas, where conditions were “predominantly dry,” including the monster El Niño of 1997-1998, Coleman said during a recent press call.
What’s worse, if we do get an El Niño this fall, it could bring something else along with it: hotter-than-normal temperatures. Continue Reading →
Brad Gilde is a lawyer representing Bob and Lisa Parr.
When a Dallas jury awarded three million dollars to a North Texas family in their case against a drilling company, people wondered what it could mean for fracking and its opponents. But the case also highlights a growing health concern in Texas’ booming oil and gas fields.
For years, a lot of the debate around the drilling boom focused on its potential to pollute groundwater. Lately concerns over water seem to have been overtaken by a new worry, one exemplified in the recent multi-million dollar jury verdict.
“This lawsuit was really a lawsuit about air emissions from the totality of unconventional shale gas development,” Brad Gilde, a lawyer for the Parr family, tells StateImpact Texas.
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