(Dave Fehling/State Impact Texas)
In a large, two story home in a wooded subdivision near where for years the Texas oil industry has drilled for black gold, three women have gathered around the kitchen table.
“No one could believe what was happening,” said Rebecca Kaiser, whose two young children played upstairs.
She’s talking about a day some ten months earlier when she and carloads of her fellow Montgomery County residents angrily left a meeting of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ).
“It’ll be horrible,” Hoagland said of the project, which will inject toxic waste into old oil wells near her town of Conroe. She fears it’ll not only threaten the purity of the well water she drinks but fill the road out in front of her house with tanker trucks bringing the waste in from petrochemical plants outside Houston. “Benzene, anti-freeze, caustic acid,” said Karen Darcy, another resident at the kitchen table, reciting a list of what might be in the waste water.
…The three women are at the center of what you often find in environmental battles fought across Texas: the interests of the industries that so dominate the state’s economy colliding with the interests of communities whose tax bases and residents more often than not have some reliance on the oil and gas industry.
(Read and listen to the full story at State Impact Texas/NPR)
OTHER NEWS LINKS:
- Fostering Sustainability in Houston (The Atlantic Monthly)
- Houston Proposes Allowing Higher-Density Housing Outside (Houston Chronicle)
- Houston Fire Department & KPRC-2 Kick-Off Toy Drive (Cypress Times)
- Green Groups Blast Clinton’s Strategy in Climate Talks (The Hill)
- National Arthritis Foundation Honors Montgomery Woman (Your Houston News)