A Dallas businessman, who for some unfathomable reason is choosing to stay anonymous, told an East Texas TV station that he has several photos of “a bigfoot,” taken in Shelby County and just outside Dallas. (The video above comes from KLTV.com-Tyler, Longview, Jacksonville, Texas | ETX News.) The man told…
The development of North Texas’ Barnett Shale did not go as smoothly as gas companies had hoped. The flaming water in Parker County, elevated levels of benzene in DISH, elevated rates of breast cancer in Flower Mound, and any number of other reports contributed to the perception among the general…
On Saturday, a tad more than 1,400 people are expected to turn out to clean up their local green space for Dallas’ It’s My Park Day. The city launched the annual event last year as a way to give neighbors a sense of ownership of their parks and, one assumes,…
The record-breaking drought that Texas endured in 2011 wasn’t good for much of anything. Farmers and ranchers suffered, as did the people in towns whose water supplies ran dry. And let’s not forget the owners of lakefront property whose lots fronted an empty stretches of parched earth. See also: A…
In this week’s print edition, staff writer Anna Merlan provides a handy guide to natural-gas drilling debate in Dallas. Read on for a primer, a glossary of terms, a look at the opponents and supporters and a special fracking board game! Important civic issues have a way of sneaking up…
The North Texas Municipal Water District, which serves 1.6 million people in Plano and a dozen northern and eastern suburbs, took a major hit in 2009 when zebra mussels were discovered in Lake Texoma. It’s a federal crime to transport the highly invasive bivalves across state lines and, because seven…
Update on Sept. 5: Industry groups naturally dispute Schermbeck’s conclusions. A response from Steve Everly from Energy in Depth follows the original post. Original postMuch of the fracking debate has focused on if and how carcinogens like benzene and hexane find their way into the air and water supplies. Less…
I met Will Becker just over two years ago on a nondescript residential street near Bishop Lynch High School in East Dallas. I was writing for Preston Hollow People at the time, and had wanted to meet him at a fetid, swimming pool in North Dallas, but he refused to…
Earlier this week, Time magazine opined that West Nile disease, which has now killed 12 people in Dallas County and sickened almost 300 more, is a “self-inflicted wound.” Bryan Walsh wrote that an extremely mild winter and scorching summer created a great breeding ground for mosquitoes. Climate change also isn’t…
There are many possible explanations for why this year has turned into the worst ever for West Nile. A mild winter and wet spring played a part, and maybe climate change contributed as well, but no one’s really sure. Except Time, that is. Bryan Walsh has a piece on one…
On Tuesday, you saw a glimpse of Dallas’ garbage future. The city’s long-term solid waste plan had some relatively progressive ideas — mandatory recycling, a plastic bag ban and “zero waste,” for example — but those won’t even be up for actual discussion for another couple of decades. Once the…
University of Texas prof Chip Groat’s ties to the natural gas industry raised a few eyebrows last month after a report he served as lead researcher on gave the hydraulic fracturing process a clean bill of health. “New Study Shows No Evidence of Groundwater Contamination from Hydraulic Fracturing,” the accompanying…
Best case scenario: The world’s largest retailer builds a spaceship that allows humanity to flee a trash-choked planet and spend several centuries growing ever fatter and lazier on an interstellar cruise, unwitting captives to a self-aware computer, until an oddly adorable trash-compacting robot unshackles us from our digital overlord and…
Just south of Dallas along Highway 67 in Midlothian is perhaps the country’s largest concentration of cement plants. TXI, Holcim, and Ash Grove all operate facilities within a couple of miles of each other, and the emissions they pump into the air tend to waft over Dallas when the winds…
Sherri Johnson’s condo butts up against a wooded creek a few blocks from Presbyterian Hospital. She likes to keep a few cats around, strays really, to keep the raccoons and possums and other creek denizens from making themselves too comfortable on her property. It works for the most part, but…
Shortly after it was established in 1970, the Environmental Protection Agency undertook a project called “Documerica,” which paid freelance photographers across the country to document the environmental and human conditions of the country. All told, more than 15,000 images were collected for the project, and then more or less forgotten…
There’s a reason State Farm wants to insure Johnson County homes against earthquakes. Injecting millions of barrels of fracking waste water loosens faults the way whiskey loosens tongues. Cliff Frohlich of the Jackson School of Geosciences deployed seismographs throughout a 43-mile grid in the Barnett Shale. They detected eight times…
So I was right yesterday. As Eric just reported, the pressure is on to escalate the local war on West Nile from truck spraying of pesticides to airplane spraying. This decision will be left to that august body the Dallas County Commissioners Court, scheduled at its next meeting to take…
So on the radio this morning I hear all about the spike in West Nile deaths in Dallas and how the county health department will be on the job tonight protecting us by sending the pesticide trucks through three more neighborhoods, this time in North Dallas. I just hope we…
Katherine Seale officially ended her five-year tenure as executive director of Preservation Dallas early this year, but she didn’t stop working. Instead, she’s been hanging around as a volunteer until the nonprofit found a new leader. That just happened. The nonprofit announced in a press release today. that David Preziosi,…
I suppose it was only a matter of time before Texas politicians, still on a high from their glorious victory over the evil, job-killing dunes sagebrush lizard, turned their attention to similarly insidious threats to our economic well-being. This time, the threat comes from four species of salamander — the…
Earlier this month, three East Texas hamlets with a collective population of fewer than 2,000 souls filed suit in a federal court in Oklahoma City to halt construction of the southern half of The International Pipeline Formerly Known as Keystone XL. The Keystone was to be a massive piece of…
