Forrest for the Trees

Houston Chronicle has the goods:

GALVESTON — A seaside getaway on Galveston Island used by pop star Beyoncé Knowles’ family has run afoul of the Texas Open Beaches Act.

Hurricane Ike pummeled the beachfront vacation house that the General Land Office says is owned by Knowles’ father, Mathew Knowles, a successful music executive who manages Beyoncé and her sister, Solange. Mathew Knowles also is founder of Houston record label Music World Entertainment and was executive producer for Obsessed, the 2009 film staring Beyoncé.

A contractor hired by the elder Knowles to repair the home, which was on the tax rolls for $423,000 in 2008, poured a concrete slab under the structure, GLO spokesman Jim Suydam said.

The problem is that Ike scoured away the beach in front of the house, placing it on the public beach where hard structures like concrete slabs are prohibited, Suydam said.

Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson said Knowles is being cooperative and his department won’t seek any penalties as long as he’s correcting the problem.

Probably the most shocking about this story is that GLO Commissioner Jerry Patterson hadn’t heard of Beyonce.

“I didn’t know who Beyoncé Knowles was,” Patterson said. “If he’s getting special treatment it’s not because of me.”

He?!!! The man needs to get out more.

The Fort Worth Weekly has a great story, “Sacrificed to Shale,” out today on DISH.

Reporter Peter Gorman finds a town more or less destroyed by gas companies: People’s ranchettes chewed up by eminent domain; plunging property values; dying trees coated with sulfur dust; young, healthy folks suddenly having neurological problems; and, of course, horses dropping dead.

Here’s the lede:

Lloyd Burgess owns the Lucky B horse farm in Denton County. He made a good living raising and boarding horses there from 1993 until 2006, good enough to pay for a $350,000, 45-stall barn a few years back. These days though, it’s not so lucky.

Everything changed for him in October 2006, when an explosion occurred at a gas compressor station just beyond the edge of his 30 acres. Burgess, who had been out of town, returned to discover that one of his mares had aborted her foal. Two weeks later, the same thing happened to a second mare.

Bad things just kept happening after that, on his farm in the oddly renamed town of DISH, just up the road from Justin. Several months later one of his stallions got sick and finally had to be put down. Then a mare went blind. Then another stallion, a valuable quarter horse, got sick and was saved only when a friend offered to take if off Burgess’ property, away from the compressor stations on Burgess’ back fence line, to nurse it back to health.

The whole story is worth reading.

On the morning of July 19th, a fire broke out in the alkylation unit of Citgo’s Corpus Christi refinery, severely burning one worker and leading to a major release of hydrofluoric acid, one of the most dangerous chemicals in the American refining industry.

Hours later, the top regional official for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality was walking into a movie theater to spend two hours with Harry Potter.

In August, I published a long-ish story in the Observer about the Citgo refinery fire.

In the piece, I looked at TCEQ’s failure to test for hydrofluoric acid in the neighborhoods surrounding the Citgo refinery.

After the story ran, I received a large box of emails and other documents I had requested through open records laws.

I haven’t had time to go through the thousands of pages of TCEQ records but some of the emails from the early hours of the July 19th fire are very telling about the agency’s disaster response.

As I wrote in a short piece for this issue of the Observer:

E-mails reveal that hours after the fire started, Susan Clewis, the Region 14 TCEQ head, still had little idea what was transpiring. In one e-mail, almost three hours after the incident began, Clewis wrote that she was “walking into the Harry Potter movie.”

“Apparently there is a fire at Citgo,” Clewis wrote in that same e-mail to Donna Phillips, the area head for the Texas Coast and East Texas. The e-mail states that an agency employee had called Larry Elizondo, a Citgo spokesman and Corpus city councilman, but “he refused to give [the employee] any information.”

“We think the fire is out but not sure,” Clewis wrote. In fact, the fire, which burned for three days, was visible from miles away. By the time Clewis was writing, the Corpus Christi Caller-Times had already posted a story about the incident.

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Who’s in control here? The state environmental agency charged with protecting people and the environment or a refiner that’s a convicted corporate criminal? Note that Citgo refused to give TCEQ any information on what was transpiring. And shockingly, the Citgo spokesman mentioned in the email, Larry Elizondo, is also a Corpus Christi city councilman. I hope he doesn’t treat his constituents that way.

Clewis assumes, for no apparent reason, that the fire was out… and walks into the movie theater to enjoy two hours of Harry Potter learning new spells to battle Voldemort.

Later in the day, the TCEQ officials decide that maybe it’s a good idea to monitor the fence-line neighborhoods for toxic emissions. After all the media is watching.

“With the media attention this event is getting, I think it would be best to conduct air monitoring,” Kelly Ruble, a Region 14 employee, wrote to Clewis and Phillips at 3:41 p.m., nearly seven hours after the fire started. “The old saying ‘negative data is better than no data.’”

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Nice of them but their air monitoring was mostly pointless.

TCEQ didn’t test for HF or many other key pollutants that could have escaped the refinery. Neither TCEQ’s 16 Corpus-area air monitors nor its mobile monitoring equipment is capable of measuring for HF.

“At the time of this email, the investigator had been to a couple of the target neighborhoods and had not measured any VOCs or H2S [volatile organic chemicals or hydrogen sulfide] at those locations,” Phillips wrote on the evening of July 19.

It’s no surprise that TCEQ didn’t find hydrogen sulfide, says Neil Carman, a former state environmental regulator, who’s now an air pollution expert with the Lone Star chapter of the Sierra Club. H2S isn’t even present in the process unit where the fire and chemical release occurred, according to Carman. (TCEQ did not respond to requests for comment.)

As usual, TCEQ didn’t respond to a request for comment until after my deadline had passed. You can read their response below the fold.

Last night, about half the town of DISH turned out to hear city-commissioned experts confirm what they already suspected: That the eleven natural gas compressors near their town are emitting potentially dangerous levels of toxic gasses.

As I wrote previously, DISH city officials, fed up with inaction from state regulators, hired a consulting firm earlier this year to test the air. The recently-released study found levels of cancer-causing chemicals and neurotoxins in the air well-above the TCEQ’s health standards.

The DISH controversy has resonance far beyond the tiny town.

Natural gas production is booming across the U.S. as companies go after huge caches of gas contained in shale – the Barnett Shale in North Texas, the Fayetteville in Arkansas, the Haynesville in Louisiana, and the Marcellus in Pennsylvania and New York State.

As the drilling frenzy spreads, so are environmental and health concerns.

The industry will live or die on its ability to convince communities that extracting gas is beneficial. And if they can’t do it in Texas, where can they?

At the meeting, city leaders blamed state regulators for taking a hear-no-evil-see-no-evil attitude and called on the gas companies to shut the compressors down until more tests can be done.

Today, Peggy Heinkel-Wolfe, a dogged reporter for the Denton Record-Chronicle, relates some of the consulting firm’s findings that didn’t make it into the report:

During the study, Rich interviewed residents and learned that some experienced farmers were having trouble with their animals, including young ones that fall asleep and never wake up, with no external signs of trauma.

“You hear about more things like that in rural areas,” Rich said. “In urban areas, you don’t have the larger animals. You’re not breeding animals and seeing the changes in healthy animals versus those that are sick all the time.”

One collection site was near a horse farm, she said. The breeder had a reliable breeding mare that birthed a sickly foal that eventually died. After 2 1/2 years, the breeder also gave up on a gelding that had health and behavior problems. He gave it away, only to learn later that the animal is now healthy.

If air pollution can take down a horse, imagine what it could do to a child.

TxSharon has more on last night’s meeting.

Despite the recent rain, the drought lingers on, albeit not as severe as a couple months ago.

In fact, as the Statesman‘s Asher Price reports, rivers and lakes in Central Texas are still at or near historical lows. One water supplier is preparing for drastic cuts:

Lower Colorado River Authority officials told water customers Friday to prepare for a 35 percent cut in their use.

The LCRA board could declare the drought the worst-ever at its Oct. 21 meeting. That would mean an immediate and total cut of water to downriver farmers and give water customers about 90 days to start cutting their use by 35 percent. The possibility of such cuts was floated at the board’s September meeting.