GONZALES, Texas—Extra than 500 gargantuan oil tanks dot the floodplains of the Guadalupe River and its tributaries where they wicked even handed one of Texas’ main oilfields, an Interior Climate Files investigation has discovered, posing threat of an environmental catastrophe.
Longtime residents of those historic ranchlands aloof take note the final time these plains stuffed up with water in a biblical inundation in 1998. That changed into sooner than the fracking pronounce hit this put and the oil-rich geological formation that lies under it, known as the Eagle Ford Shale.
On the unusual time, a repeat of the historic flood can even wreak havoc, locals anguish.
“There’s a whole lot of tanks fleshy of oil which would possibly presumably well per chance be going to drift away,” stated Sara Dubose, a fifth-generation landowner in Gonzales County with 10 tanks in the floodplain on her family’s ranchlands, every keeping as much as 21,000 gallons of oil or toxic wastewater. “Spill all through our land and kill it for 100 years.”
Nearly 20 toes of water can even submerge some of the tanks on the Dubose family’s land in an match reminiscent of 1998, in accordance with an Interior Climate Files evaluation of recordsdata from the Federal Emergency Management Company (FEMA).
Interior Climate Files scoured satellite tv for computer imagery on Google Maps to title batteries of oil tanks and other oilfield infrastructure shut to waterways of the Guadalupe River Basin where it crosses the Eagle Ford Shale. We then took the latitude and longitude coordinates of every and each tank battery and broken-down FEMA’s flood mapping records to extract the agency’s estimates for the depths of its benchmark flood eventualities at these locations.
In some areas, the 1998 flood exceeded the worst-case scenario regarded as by catastrophe planners. FEMA calls this the “500-yr flood,” a hypothetical match the agency estimates has a 0.2 p.c chance of taking place in any yr.
On the unusual time, a 500-yr flood across this whole field would quilt as a minimum 22 tank batteries containing 144 particular particular person oil and wastewater tanks with 10 or more toes of water, ICN’s evaluation discovered. Of those, 12 tanks would take a seat under as a minimum 20 toes of water.
FEMA’s estimates for a 500-yr flood understate newest threat in many locations, analysis displays, as warming air and oceans proceed to gas an intensification of grievous rainfall.
Dubose skilled the 1998 flood, when the Guadalupe River sprang from its banks and stuffed the shallow valleys here at the threshold of the coastal plains. The water practically reached her rental, seven miles from the river, where it trapped her for a week, covering Motorway 183 in each and each instructions because it drained slowly into San Antonio Bay on the waft.
In a warming world with more intense rainfall, a future flood shall be some distance more severe.
“Sometime, it’s going to happen,” Dubose stated. “We’ve all been angry by the oilfield flooding.”
Flood-Threatened Tank Batteries in the Eagle Ford Shale
When flooding hit a smaller oilfield in northeastern Colorado in 2013, authorities tallied two dozen overturned tanks and practically 90,000 gallons of oil and wastewater spilled. All the contrivance through Storm Katrina in 2005, thousands and thousands of gallons of oil spilled when several supersized storage tanks floated off their pads. In 1994, flooding on the San Jacinto River in East Texas severed eight pipelines, ignited large fires, injured many of of folk and released more than 2 million gallons of petroleum merchandise.
Last summer, severe flooding in the Texas Hill Nation shut to Kerrville washed away a girls’ summer camp and killed more than 100 folk along the Guadalupe River, 150 miles upstream from the Eagle Ford Shale.
The foundations for building in floodplains in Texas tumble to county governments, in total small and rural. The 78 tank batteries in the Guadalupe floodplains identified by Interior Climate Files through satellite tv for computer imagery all take a seat within Gonzales and DeWitt counties, which have a mixed population of round 40,000 folk.
It changed into left to the governments of those two counties to invent and put into effect floodplain insurance policies all through the shale oil pronounce.
“Those are no longer elements that most counties, on a particular person foundation, are smartly suited to address,” stated Todd Votteler, ragged govt manager of science, intergovernmental members of the family and coverage at the Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority. “It raises a request of how serious the narrate is about warding off future flood injure in high-threat areas if we don’t have a statewide coverage.”
Tank batteries at effectively sites aren’t customarily secured to the ground by anything however the burden of the oil and wastewater inner them. While they are in particular inclined, they aren’t the actual enterprise infrastructure that shall be tormented by flooding. Eight oil pipelines and about two dozen gas pipelines wicked the Guadalupe River in the Eagle Ford Shale, and others wicked native creeks.
The batteries in the floodplain on Dubose’s property had been beforehand operated by Canadian agency Baytex Energy, which offered all of its Eagle Ford Shale property in November for $3.2 billion to an undisclosed purchaser. Varied operators with reasonably a few batteries in the floodplains consist of EOG Sources, Devon Energy and Burlington Sources, a subsidiary of ConocoPhillips. Not even handed one of many companies replied to requests for comment.
These floodplains moreover have many open and buried pits of drilling kill. Dubose unsuccessfully sued an oil firm in 2018, alleging that the unlined pit where it buried drilling mud and wastewater on her property changed into to blame for the orange, gassy goo that seeped up from the earth all through heavy rainfall.
“Imagine the total stuff that’s soaked into the ground,” stated Blake Muir, a fifth-generation landowner with more than a dozen wells on his property. “They’ve bought thousands of chemicals that whisk into the drilling mud.”
Internet investigation The Flood of 1998
Muir’s land has been in his family for the rationale that 1840s. Launch air his ragged, single-tale ranch rental shut to the border of Gonzales and DeWitt counties, a non-public airplane hangar and a waterpark-style swimming pool commemorate the riches that fracking brought to this put.
Interior the rental, between clamoring canines, Muir sifted through containers of photos that predated the shale pronounce. He pulled out strips of 11 film photos taped together to expose the large landscape of water that overtook this rolling savannah on the morning of Oct. 17, 1998.
It rose some distance previous the tops of the bushes. It even lined a location on Muir’s land where a tank battery now stands, 1.5 miles from the Guadalupe River.
“I believed the whole world changed into going to flood,” he stated as he flipped through ragged photos. “We haven’t had a flood fancy that for the rationale that oilfield hit us.”
All of it gave the affect to happen in minutes, recalled Ben Prause, a ragged elected govt of DeWitt County who presided all through the flood. The water wasn’t even raging however practically restful because it impulsively rose as much as swallow about two thirds of the city of Cuero. In a single case, he stated, sheriff’s deputies entered a rental with water at their knees to assign an ragged lady, then walked out minutes later with water at their chests.
“It changed into so immediate,” stated Prause, 92, at his residence in downtown Cuero, a few blocks from the 1998 waterline. “It changed into moral terrible. Water changed into all through the draw.”
It wasn’t moral the Guadalupe River, he stated. Several main tributaries moreover flooded to comprise the venture worse. Torrential rains hit the upper reaches of Plum Creek and Sandies Creek, which each and each gushed concurrently into the Guadalupe.
“What made it so spoiled is they all hit about the same time,” Prause stated.
These creeks barely trickle for loads of the yr, stated Prause, a 1950 graduate of Cuero Excessive School, however on rare times their gargantuan floodplains beget.
In 1998 the floodwaters south of Gonzales had been several miles vast, stated a document issued the next yr by the Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority and FEMA, exceeding predicted worst-case eventualities in some areas.
“It changed into the flood that many belief would never happen,” the document stated. “Sadly, an glorious increased flood will happen sometime in the lengthy bustle.”
The 1998 flood precipitated a few oil spills, stated James Dodson, 71, co-founder of the San Antonio Bay Partnership and the son of a south Texas pipeline technician. His unhurried wife labored for Texas’ environmental regulator and spent weeks overseeing cleanups. However the extent of oilfield infrastructure today changed into nothing when put next with this day.
“That changed into lengthy sooner than the Eagle Ford Shale plays got here along,” he stated. “The landscape changed into lots completely different in that regard—there’s so many more facilities and effectively pads now.”
On the unusual time, along one eastward flip in the Guadalupe’s snaking direction, three batteries consisting of 15 tanks would take a seat under about 20 toes of water in a 500-yr flood. If truth be told one of them, operated by EOG Sources, sits moral 500 toes from the riverbank.
Two miles from the Guadalupe River, four tanks operated by Burlington Sources would elevate on practically 23 toes of water.
Terminate to Boggy Creek, east of the Guadalupe River by the small town of Dreyer, 10 toes of water would quilt EOG Sources’ Shiner Hub gas processing plant, a fancy of 14 tanks, pipes, motors, chemical separators and flares.
Alongside Peach Creek, southeast of Gonzales, batteries of 12 and 28 tanks beforehand operated by Baytex Energy would take a seat under 13 and eight toes of water, respectively.
The oil from toppled tanks potentially wouldn’t spill onto the land round them, stated Dodson, a ragged water department director for the metropolis of Corpus Christi who labored South Texas oilfields in the Nineteen Seventies. Instead, he predicted, it would possibly presumably well per chance float on the water and stop up at the threshold of the flood’s crest, fancy the rings in a shower. Extra of it, he stated, would wash over the creeks and estuaries of San Antonio Bay then into the Gulf of Mexico.
“It’s a catastrophe ready to happen,” stated Sister Elizabeth Riebschlager, an 89-yr-ragged Catholic nun from Cuero. “They’ve these oil wells all through these areas that flooded fancy it’s no venture.”
The oilfield infrastructure here dates help no longer as much as twenty years to the shale revolution, when improvements in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing unleashed an explosion of new oil exploration.
Aid then, Riebschlager, the daughter of a local civic chief, held town hall conferences for native households who had been baffled by the swarm of businessmen and legal professionals descending on their sleepy countryside, whipping up 100-online page contracts and casually writing assessments for mind-boggling sums.
Many landowners warned the oil companies about flooding, she stated.
Riebschlager linked the tale of 1 rancher: “After they had been making ready to drill there, he stated, ‘Please don’t drill them here, it’s a floodplain. They’ll flood.’ The oil man says, ‘Don’t anguish, we’ll have the total oil and gas out of this floor sooner than the next flood.”
Dubose, who overlooked out on the riches of the oil pronounce because her mom offered her family’s mineral rights, bought a an identical resolution when she mentioned 1998 to the firm drilling on her land. She recalls a man telling her: “That changed into a 100-yr flood so it obtained’t happen for one other 100 years.”
Internet investigation Misunderstanding the Risk
That’s a traditional false affect surrounding phrases fancy the 100-yr and the five hundred-yr flood, stated Matthew Berg, CEO of Houston-based fully mostly water threat administration agency Simfero. A ragged water specialist with Texas A&M AgriLife, he understands why the conventional public is misled.
“They’d realize a 100-yr flood finest happens once every 100 years,” he stated. “That’s a subject because statistics don’t work that contrivance.”
They don’t actually return finest once every century. Relatively, computer objects estimate that such an match has a 1 p.c chance of taking place at any given location in a yr. What took place in outdated years doesn’t change those odds.
Furthermore, Berg stated, these estimated probabilities are “to a few degree meaningless” where records whisk help barely 100 years. They are meant for functions of style planning, no longer climate forecasting. We don’t if truth be told know the likelihood of storms across centuries, or when the five hundred-yr floodplain of the Guadalupe River can even beget up all once more. Two things are sure: This would possibly beget all once more, and the probabilities are rising.
The warming native climate is making precipitation more intense in Texas and previous. A an identical quantity of rain falls in fewer, more concentrated storms than it broken-all the formula down to, in accordance with a 2024 document from the Jam of job of the Texas Relate Climatologist at Texas A&M College.
“Many studies have documented an extend in grievous rainfall in Texas and surrounding areas,” the document stated. “Outrageous rainfall is strongly tormented by increased temperatures.”
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In Texas, as someplace else in the realm, all 10 of the warmest years on file have occurred since 2011. Warming outcomes from the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, released in gargantuan share by burning fossil fuels fancy the oil in the tanks in the floodplains in the Eagle Ford Shale. And warmer air can withhold more water vapor, ensuing in heavier downpours.
If global fossil gas consumption and greenhouse gas emissions proceed to climb, so will grievous rainfall.
“Outrageous precipitation is anticipated to expand vast on common statewide,” stated the narrate climatologist’s document. “We wait for a further extend of about 10% in anticipated grievous rainfall depth in 2036 when put next to 2001-2020 and an total extend of over 20% when put next to 1950-1999.”
These adjustments in rainfall depth correspond to a 50 p.c extend in the likelihood of grievous precipitation when put next to 2001-2020, the document stated, and a 100% extend when put next to 1950-1999.
Nonetheless, heavy rains by myself don’t incessantly comprise a mega-flood. They want to tumble on moral the reliable areas, across multiple tributaries of a single river so as that their waters all converge straight away downstream.
Internet investigation A Terminate Call Last one year
If a 500-yr flood returns to the Eagle Ford Shale, it’s onerous to repeat how much oil, wastewater and other petroleum fluids can even spill. Faded oilfield tanks vary from 210 to 750 barrels in size, about 13,000 to 32,000 gallons. Trendy tank batteries in the Eagle Ford Shale in total consist of 5 500-barrel oil tanks and one 500-barrel wastewater tank, in accordance with an investor presentation by Baytex Energy. Some are out of exercise or empty, some are fleshy, most are in between.
Whatever fluids wash down the river would circulation into San Antonio Bay, share of the iciness grounds for the realm’s final flock of untamed, endangered whooping cranes, then into the Gulf of Mexico.
“With a flood it causes lots more dispersion. It breaks it up then you’ve bought oil mixed with sediment and particles. It goes to stink and it’s much, much more challenging to appealing up,” stated Diane Wilson, founder of San Antonio Bay Estuarine Waterkeeper and a 77-yr-ragged ragged shrimper who lives shut to the mouth of the Guadalupe River. “It would be unprecedented, the injure it will also comprise.”
Last summer, Dubose belief it changed into about to happen. As soon as she saw the records, unhurried at night on the Fourth of July, she rushed out and sped her white Hummer down ranch roads to the river.
Good rainfall changed into hitting the Guadalupe about 150 miles upstream in the Hill Nation shut to Kerrville. On-line posts stated the water had washed away a summer camp for ladies.
Dubose had flashbacks to 1998, when there had been moreover overnight rainstorms, some distance upriver, that set up this put underwater for a week. So she hurried to assign a cell residence parked at her fishing camp by the river, the same location where she’d misplaced a cell residence in 1998.
Nearly there, she handed nervously between the towering, three-tale tank batteries in the floodplain on her land, then previous the draw of the buried kill where, she stated, the grass dies each time heavy rains convey the water desk to the ground.
Luckily for Dubose, no torrent got here downriver. For Kerrville, in the Hill Nation, it changed into the worst flood since 1987. However the total heavy rain fell upstream of a critical dam and reservoir, where water phases had been low ample to absorb it. So the Eagle Ford Shale changed into spared, for now.
“What took place in Kerrville, if that happens here, that’s a extraordinarily spoiled venture,” Dubose stated. “We’ve instructed the oilfield, here goes to flood in some unspecified time in the future.”
Internet investigation About This Story
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Reporter, Austin
Dylan Baddour covers the vitality sector and environmental justice in Texas. Born in Houston, he’s labored the enterprise desk at the Houston Myth, lined the U.S.-Mexico border for worldwide shops and reported for several years from Colombia for media fancy The Washington Post, BBC Files and The Atlantic. He moreover spent two years investigating armed groups in Latin The US for the global security department at Fb sooner than returning to Texas journalism. Baddour holds bachelor’s levels in journalism and Latin American studies from the College of Texas at Austin. He has lived in Argentina, Kazakhstan and Colombia and speaks fluent Spanish.
Files Journalist
Peter Aldhous is a science and records reporter based fully mostly in San Francisco. He bought his spoil in journalism in 1989 as a reporter for Nature in London, fresh from a Ph.D. in animal habits. Later he labored as European correspondent for Science, recordsdata editor for Sleek Scientist and chief recordsdata & gains editor with Nature, sooner than transferring to California in 2005 to changed into Sleek Scientist’s San Francisco bureau chief. From 2015 to 2022 he labored on the science desk at BuzzFeed Files. Peter moreover teaches investigative and coverage reporting, records visualization, and recordsdata gains writing in the Science Communique Program at the College of California, Santa Cruz. He is a two-time winner in the International Editors Community Files Journalism Awards. His reporting has moreover been honored by the Affiliation of British Science Writers, the Affiliation of Health Care Journalists, the Society of Environmental Journalists, and the Royal Statistical Society.
