This earthquake thing is, at the very least, getting weird. A 2.6 magnitude quake shook the area near the former Texas Stadium site in Irving just after 8:30 Wednesday morning. It was the 10th earthquake to shudder the site since Tuesday. Before 2008, there was exactly one recorded earthquake in…
About 20 minutes ago, we felt it at the Observer offices in Oak Lawn. Now, the United States Geological survey verifies that the mid-afternoon rumble was, in fact, an earthquake. According to the USGS, the epicenter of this quake was, as so many have been in the last six weeks…
At this point, they’re not even a nuisance. The repeated small earthquakes that Dallas felt throughout 2014 haven’t caused any serious property damage or injuries. The quakes are a curiosity. They are happening more frequently, though, especially in Irving. Of the 27 earthquakes in 2014 , the last eight occurred…
Every winter, the world’s only flock of wild whooping cranes flies into Texas and stays along the Texas Gulf Coast, using water near the Aransas Pass. Maybe one day in the future, Greg Abbott can require the whopping cranes to obtain a permit before they take advantage of our state’s…
In Texas’ business-friendly climate, no industry spokesperson wants to be the weakling who admits that maybe water is sort of important. But it appears that some tough guys are finally letting their guard down. Last week, a rice farmer gave an interview in which he wasn’t so coy about water,…
After all of us and our children are dead, Texas will finally get this pesky ozone problem under control. That’s according to a state clean air plan that the Environmental Protection Agency just rejected but Texas environment officials are continuing to defend anyway. Texas environment officials, go pat yourself on…
Paul Friberg can’t say whether the earthquakes that shook North Texas on Saturday, Sunday and Monday were caused by fracking. He says that there are only a handful of instances in the world in which an earthquake strong enough to be felt — as all three of the recent quakes…
Density is good. Regionalism is bad. Dallas’ city government should focus on the city itself, not on getting in good with our suburban neighbors by forming partnerships that hurt the city itself. These are things Unfair Park has heard so often that it basically takes them to be true. For…
By the time Denton’s city offices opened this morning, officials already had two brand new lawsuits waiting for them. As Denton’s attorneys begin the weary post-election process of sorting through a legal defense against this inevitable barrage of suits, it’s clear the battle over the ban on fracking voters approved…
Texas has exactly one good sized natural lake that we share with Louisiana, and it’s totally not getting flooded with oil right now, officials have assured us these last few weeks. On October 13, workers noticed crude oil leaking out of a pipeline and into a Louisiana bayou. The pipeline…
On the last day of early voting in Denton, the Denton Civic Center parking lot was abuzz with one of the most controversial, high-cost issues in Denton history: The fracking ban. The city is considering what would be the state’s first citywide ban on fracking. In a state that has…
As early voting wraps up this week, Denton County has seen a surge in voters, as well as campaign spending. Much of that has to do with the fracking debate, which has also incurred more spending than any other campaign in Denton’s history. See also: Frackers Have Launched an Aggressive…
Slip through the right series of loopholes and it can be perfectly legal to inject benzene into oil wells. Naturally, drillers in Texas figured this out thousands of gallons of benzene ago. Using data disclosed by the oil industry, a new report calculates all the benzene that is legally going…
Lead makes you dumber, even if you only eat or inhale just a little bit. (Don’t take my word for it, see what the scientists are saying). So when Frisco became one of 21 places in the country that failed lead-air quality standards that the feds implemented in 2008, people…
If you’ve driven up I-35 to Denton in the last month, you may have seen one of the many billboards popping up around town. The billboards loudly proclaim the economic damage that a city ordinance banning natural gas and oil drilling could cause to the city, and encourage residents to…
A new report published by ShaleTest, an independent environmental research agency in Denton, found levels of benzene in several Denton parks that exceed the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality’s long-term exposure limitations. Benzene is a carcinogen found in cigarettes, gasoline and is a common byproduct of oil and gas drilling…
For years, Luminant’s Big Brown coal-fired plant has been described as one of the worst air polluters in the state, sitting at or near the top of the EPA’s list of plants spewing nitrogen oxide, which can cause respiratory illnesses. So, it would seem a ripe target for a Clean…
Regulation of the mysterious chemicals used in fracking fluid used in drilling for oil and gas has been pretty much off limits to the Environmental Protection Agency ever since Congress in 2005 stripped the EPA of its authority to regulate fracking fluid under the Safe Drinking Water Act. In a…
In a quiet, private vote yesterday, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality voted to approve a Dallas-based chemical waste management company’s request to triple capacity at its West Texas disposal site. Waste Control Specialists had proposed that it site grow from 2.3 million cubic feet to 9 million cubic feet…
Just a few weeks after Denton failed to pass a ban on fracking, the Texas Railroad Commission is proposing tighter regulation on oil and natural gas drilling in response to the north Texas earthquakes. At its monthly meeting yesterday, the commission accepted a new set of rule proposals regarding regulation…
When British artist Mishka Henner was looking through satellite photographs of the Texas landscape, he kept finding huge, brown pools of water. The pools, as he discovered, were the toilets of the beef industry, waste lagoons where all the feces and urine of factory farmed cows is funneled. Texas cow…
Freight trains that everyone says are way too old to still be working keep carrying more and more gallons of volatile crude oil through busy cities. What could possibly go wrong? Explosions. And do Unfair Park readers live in the path of these potential explosion sites? Probably. Dallas, like most…
