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By Martha Pskowski, Keerti Gopal Eighteen-year-old Danny Nolasco spent the day of July 15, 2024, mixing and hauling buckets of cement at a construction site in stifling heat. The neighborhood of sprawling four- and five-bedroom houses, west of the Austin suburb of Bee Cave, was worlds away from the small mountain town in Honduras where Nolasco grew up. He had come to Texas two years earlier, hoping for a better life, and was working in his free time while attending school. The crew started work…Continue Reading “Texas Workers Keep Dying in the Heat” →

By Martha Pskowski and Mark Olalde This story is a collaboration between Inside Climate News and ProPublica Texas regulators tout their efforts to curtail oil field emissions by requiring drillers to obtain permits to release or burn gas from their wells. Yet a first-of-its-kind analysis of permit applications to the Railroad Commission of Texas, the state’s main oil and gas regulator, reveals a rubber-stamp system that allows drillers to emit vast amounts of natural gas into the atmosphere. Over 40 months—from May 2021 to September…Continue Reading “Trump Says America’s Oil Industry Is Cleaner Than Other Countries’. New Data Shows Massive Emissions From Texas Wells” →

PECOS, Texas—Extreme drought has diminished the flows of the Rio Grande and Pecos River, two of the most iconic waterways in Texas. The advocacy group American Rivers recently named the Lower Rio Grande one of its most endangered rivers, describing a “near-permanent human-induced megadrought threatening all life that depends on it.” On the Pecos River, there hasn’t been enough water to distribute to irrigation districts below the Red Bluff Reservoir in recent years. While farmers and cities face increasing water scarcity, oil and gas companies…Continue Reading “Texas Oil and Gas Companies Drill With River Water During Extreme Drought” →

Texas agencies reported 252 new cases of groundwater contamination during 2023 in the Texas Groundwater Protection Committee annual report. The latest report compiles 2,870 open cases of groundwater contamination, some of which date back decades. Nearly every county in Texas is impacted by the problem. During 2023, Texas regulators notified 34 local authorities—from El Paso to Houston—that newly identified contamination could impact their public drinking water. An additional 289 property owners were notified that groundwater contamination may impact their private wells. Read my latest for…Continue Reading “Texas Regulators Report More Than 250 New Cases of Groundwater Contamination” →

The deaths of two elderly siblings and their 60-year-old caretaker at first mystified Brownsville. Extreme heat is a quiet but growing threat for Rio Grande Valley residents with chronic health conditions. Read the full story. Photos by Chris Lee.

Reporting supported with a grant from The Water Desk at the University of Colorado Boulder. Aerial photography support provided by LightHawk.  FAR WEST TEXAS—The year was 1897. Flood waters from the Rio Grande submerged entire blocks of downtown El Paso. The New York Times described the crash of crumbling houses and the “cries of frightened women and children” on its May 26 front page. The raging river displaced hundreds of people and destroyed scores of adobe homes. In Mexico, the Rio Grande is known as…Continue Reading “Holding Out Hope On the Drying Rio Grande” →

I recently report with my Inside Climate News colleague Jenaye Johnson on the federal program to help families pay for utility bills. “In San Elizario, Texas, tucked between cotton fields and the U.S.-Mexico border fence, nearly 30 percent of the population lives below the poverty line. When the summer heat hits here, electric bills skyrocket—and paying them is a struggle. Olivia Figueroa, executive director of the local organization AYUDA Inc., has lost track of how many people have sought help. ‘Let’s say that if we…Continue Reading “Funds to Help Low-Income Families With Summer Electric Bills Are Stretched Thin” →

By Martha Pskowski, Dylan Baddour April 28, 2024 Inside Climate News These days the Pecos River barely fills its dry, sandy bed where it crosses West Texas, but the river could be poised to flow again — with treated oilfield wastewater. Companies are racing to figure out what to do with the tremendous volume of noxious water that comes up from underground during oil and gas drilling in the Permian Basin, but a growing cohort of companies say they’ve developed a means to purify that…Continue Reading “Texas Companies Eye Pecos River Watershed for Oilfield Wastewater” →

Texas regulators recently authorized a company to operate ponds to store and recycle millions of gallons of oilfield wastewater laced with toxic chemicals next to a Baptist summer camp in the Permian Basin. The Richards Recycling Facility will store, treat and recycle produced water, a byproduct of oil and gas drilling, after obtaining a state permit on Jan. 30. Staff and board members at the Circle 6 Baptist Camp worry the facility will jeopardize their well water and expose campers to hazardous air pollution. “I…Continue Reading “Railroad Commission Approves Toxic Waste Ponds Next to Baptist Camp” →

Since January, I’ve been working at Inside Climate News as their Texas reporter. Today we co-published an investigation with the Texas Tribune on the scale of produced water spills in Texas. I teamed up with data reporter Peter Aldhous to analyze produced water spills data, provided in response to open records requests to the Railroad Commission.  The prolific oil and gas wells of Texas also generate billions of gallons of salty liquid known as produced water. A lot of this toxic water, just like crude…Continue Reading “Oil and Gas Companies Spill Millions of Gallons of Wastewater in Texas” →