{"id":16945,"date":"2012-08-23T14:22:14","date_gmt":"2012-08-23T19:22:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/?p=16945"},"modified":"2012-11-14T12:40:29","modified_gmt":"2012-11-14T18:40:29","slug":"what-texas-can-do-about-roads-damaged-by-drilling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/2012\/08\/23\/what-texas-can-do-about-roads-damaged-by-drilling\/","title":{"rendered":"What Texas Can Do About Roads Damaged By Drilling"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Photo by Spencer Platt\/Getty Images<\/p>

Trucks with the natural gas industry drive through the countryside earlier this year in Springville, Pennsylvania.<\/p><\/div>\n

With the good can also come the bad, and that’s certainly been the case with the drilling boom going on in various parts of Texas these days. As drillers use thousands of trucks — hauling millions of gallons of water and other supplies to rigs — roads inevitably suffer. Naturally, people are questioning who is going to be responsible for repairing them.<\/p>\n

Phil Wilson<\/a>, executive director of the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT), talked to the Texas Tribune<\/a> about the issue. He says that to drill a well, it takes some 1,200 trucks.<\/a> And then it takes another 300 trucks each year just to maintain it. The impact of all those trucks is equivalent of 8 million cars annually<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And those roads — built in the fifties and sixties — weren’t constructed for heavy use, Wilson tells the Tribune<\/em>. “They were built as farm-to-market roads for country trucks and for agriculture,” he says. “They weren\u2019t built for 18-wheelers \u2026 so a road was built for 25 years and you get that level of traffic, it can diminish it down to six or seven years.” Damage from drilling trucks in the Eagle Ford Shale of South Texas alone was recently estimated at $2 billion by TxDOT.<\/p>\n

Some possible solutions? Wilson says the agency is looking at ways to do more about the issue:<\/p>\n

Related<\/h4>
Posts<\/h5>