A 3.0 magnitude earthquake struck Fort Worth near the DFW airport tonight, according to the US Geological Survey. At 10:16 pm, the quake hit five miles Northwest of Irving, just off the President George Bush Turnpike. Its epicenter was ten miles below the surface.
On Twitter, people are reporting feeling the ground shake. “Loud and everything moved – we knew instantly! Scary!” tweeted @NatalieTX2012. The quake hasn’t resulted in any reported damage. Generally, an earthquake doesn’t do much harm until it’s 4.0 magnitude or higher.
The area where the quake occured was seismically quiet until a few years ago. That’s when the oil and gas industry began using deep underground wells to dispose of fluids from the drilling process known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,”
There is conclusive scientific evidence that the injection of those fluids is causing quakes in the U.S., in particular in this area of Texas. A University of Texas at Austin from study last summer found a definitive link between earthquakes in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and disposal wells, in the drilling area known as the Barnett Shale.
"Nano rust" collects where a magnet is held to vial of water mixed with the tracer
Scientists are developing ways to add non-toxic tracers to drilling fluid so if groundwater is contaminated, investigators would be able to pinpoint if an oil or gas drilling operation was to blame.
“What’s impossible at the moment is if you’ve got multiple companies in an area and it’s thought there is contamination, there is no way to tell which company caused the contamination,” said Andrew Barron at Rice University in Houston. Continue Reading →
Feeling the Heat: President Obama said the country had a duty to act on climate change in his speech.
Citing “the devastating impact of raging fires and crippling drought and more powerful storms” President Barack Obama put tackling climate change on a list of goals for his second presidential term today.
In an inaugural speech that served to set an agenda for the next four years, the president said that failure to respond to the threat of climate change “would betray our children and future generations.”
The issue of climate change was noticeably absent during much of the presidential campaign. One debate between the president and his Republican challenger Mitt Romney marked the first time in 24 years in which global warming was not mentioned even once.
With water on the minds behind the Texas legislature, Rep. Allan Ritter, R-Nederland, the chairman of the House National Resources Committee, sat down last week to talk with the Texas Tribune about what lawmakers can do to secure new water supplies for a growing state. Ritter recently filed a fill that would take $2 billion from the Rainy Day Fund to start a bank for water infrastructure projects. You can watch the conversation in the video above.
Photo Courtesy of the USDA. http://www.flickr.com/photos/usdagov/7732742494/in/photostream/
USDA workers inspect an unnamed beef processing plant in Plainview, Texas in 1991.
A beef processing plant in Plainview, Texas will close its doors today, citing a dwindling cattle supply in the region. Wichita, Kansas-based Cargill Beef said in a press release that about 2,000 jobs will be lost. The supply issue was brought on primarily by “years of drought in Texas and the Southern Plains states,” the company says.
“The U.S. cattle herd is at its lowest level since 1952,” Cargill president John Keating said in the statement. “Increased feed costs resulting from the prolonged drought, combined with herd liquidations by cattle ranchers, are severely and adversely contributing to the challenging business conditions we face as an industry.”
A rainier-than-expected winter and spring last year prompted some to think the Texas cattle industry might rebound, but the closure underlines the long-term effects that the years long dry spell has had on Texas agriculture.
“You can’t just bring cattle back the day it rains. You have to let grasses regrow and your forage base reestablish before you can bring cattle in,” Travis Miller, a scientist with Texas A&M’s Agrilife Extension Service, told KUT radio.
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, Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, HI.
StateImpact Texas’ Terrence Henry contributed reporting to this article.
Close to midnight last September 29th, the Tarrant County 9-1-1 call center lit up with phone calls from outside its usual service area. The ground was shaking again, and people in nearby Irving, Texas had overwhelmed their own 9-1-1 system.
“What’s going on are we having tremors?” one woman asked.
On the call, obtained by StateImpact Texas in an open records request, a child is heard yelling in the background.
“It was an earthquake, Yes ma’am. Apparently [Irving’s 911] phones are being inundated with calls and they’re overflowing into our police department,” said the operator.
The latest federal drought forecast doesn't provide much hope for Texas.
The rains that made their way across much of Texas last week were a welcome sight for the state, currently in its third year of drought. The latest U.S. Drought Monitor Map shows that drought levels decreased for the first time since October 2012. But they didn’t fall much.
About seven percent of the state is in the worst stage of drought currently, “exceptional,” down from over 11 percent last week. But over 90 percent of Texas remains in some form of drought condition, and the state’s reservoirs are currently only 67 percent full, according to the Texas Water Development Board.
The latest federal three-month drought forecast out today doesn’t bring encouraging news. The drought in Texas is predicted to persist, and develop even further in some regions. Continue Reading →
A Legislative Budget Board (LBB) report on how government can be more efficient and effective has recommended that the state reduce its gas tax exemption for hydraulic fracturing.
The expansive report released Wednesday by the LBB, a state body that offers budget and policy recommendations for legislators, recommended that the state change the method it uses to calculate the tax. That change would have the practical effect of increasing tax rates on gas produced through hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.
The push to increase taxes on frackers has surfaced periodically in the Legislature, especially given the spread of fracking in recent years and the state’s tight budgets. But the drilling industry has argued that higher taxes would force gas companies to drill in other states. Continue Reading →
Many rice mills and drying and storage facilities in Southeast Texas didn't see much work last year. If they're cut off again this year, the slow business will continue.
For the rice farmers of Southeast Texas, 2012 was a rough year. For the first time in history, they were cut off from water because there wasn’t enough in the main reservoirs of the Lower Colorado River to supply them. In 2013, they face the same situation: if there isn’t enough water in the Highland Lakes come March 1, they won’t get water again this year. The quasi-public agency making the call is the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA). But there’s some good news for rice farmers coming from the LCRA as well. Today the Agency approved the first phase of a new plan that will help both rice farmers and municipal interests in the years to come.
Ronald Gertson is a fourth-generation rice farmer in Wharton County. The industry is over a hundred years old, and was damaged by the cutoff last year. While crop insurance covered up to 85 percent of the losses for the farmers, and will do the same this year if they go without water again, Gertson says that they’ve been told they will not get crop insurance if they are cut off again next year. “A third year would definitely put some folks permanently out of rice farming,” he says.
And the ancillary businesses without crop insurance that rely on the South Texas rice industry, like grain storage and processing, have suffered. “There were about 53,000 acres that didn’t get planted in 2012 that normally would have been,” Gertson says.
Enter the idea of “off-channel” reservoirs, smaller sources of storage downstream, below the Highland Lakes and the City of Austin. During wet times, as the Lower Colorado River sees good flows, water will be diverted and held for later use, alleviating the strain on the Highland Lakes. Continue Reading →
A parched Brazos River wends its way through Knox County.
Even if the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) doesn’t send water downstream to rice farmers this year, the Colorado River will still flow. Without that constant flow, the river would dry up, destroying and inland ecosystems and the brackish estuary near the coast.
But how much water should be sent downriver to maintain the ecosystem? That’s the job of the rarely-mentioned Environmental Flows Advisory Group, which met yesterday at the Capitol to hear testimony from the representatives of science advisory groups and business and residential interests.
Most of the testimony heard involved talk of the perpetual lack of funds for the labor intensive studies of how much water a river needs.
“We have an obligation through federal mandate to make sure that we are taking care of the environmental needs of the bays and estuaries,” says Rep. Troy Fraser, R-Horseshoe Bay, Co-Presiding Officer of the group. “It’s a balancing act, making sure that we are also supplying water to the people upstream.”
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