A Texan tragedy: ample oil, no water

[Eugene]

Source: The Guardian

A Texan tragedy: ample oil, no water

Suzanne Goldenberg in Barnhart, Texas
theguardian.com, Sunday 11 August 2013 15.07 BST

Beverly McGuire saw the warning signs before the town well went dry: sand in the toilet bowl, the sputter of air in the tap, a pump working overtime to no effect. But it still did not prepare her for the night last month when she turned on the tap and discovered the tiny town where she had made her home for 35 years was out of water.

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Across the south-west, residents of small communities like Barnhart are confronting the reality that something as basic as running water, as unthinking as turning on a tap, can no longer be taken for granted.

Three years of drought, decades of overuse and now the oil industry's outsize demands on water for fracking are running down reservoirs and underground aquifers. And climate change is making things worse.

In Texas alone, about 30 communities could run out of water by the end of the year, according to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

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Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/aug/11/texas-tragedy-ample-oil-no-water

[mbperrin]

1. Just four wells being fracked uses as much water as the entire town of 140,000

where I live uses each day.

That's 14 million gallons of water. The taxpayers paid for an "emergency" water line to another town 30 miles away that city officials claim will provide 30 million, but in the year it's been finished, we have never used it, so they say, while we still are on water restrictions.

I'm really thinking that the output of that $140 million line is being used by the oilfield and was never for us. No proof, except why build it in such a hurry that it costs double and then not use it, not a single day, in the year after completion.

I hate it because my family has been here for generations, but when the water goes, that's it.