This text initially appeared on Inside Local weather Information, a nonprofit, non-partisan information group that covers local weather, power and the surroundings. Join their publication right here.
GONZALES, Texas — Greater than 500 huge oil tanks dot the floodplains of the Guadalupe River and its tributaries the place they cross one in every of Texas’ main oilfields, an Inside Local weather Information investigation has discovered, posing threat of an environmental catastrophe.
Longtime residents of those historic ranchlands nonetheless bear in mind the final time these plains stuffed up with water in a biblical inundation in 1998. That was earlier than the fracking increase hit this area and the oil-rich geological formation that lies beneath it, often called the Eagle Ford Shale.
At present, a repeat of the historic flood may wreak havoc, locals fear.
“There’s an entire lot of tanks filled with oil which can be going to drift away,” stated Sara Dubose, a fifth-generation landowner in Gonzales County with 10 tanks within the floodplain on her household’s ranchlands, every holding as much as 21,000 gallons of oil or poisonous wastewater. “Spill throughout our land and destroy it for 100 years.”
Nearly 20 toes of water may submerge among the tanks on the Dubose household’s land in an occasion much like 1998, in line with an Inside Local weather Information evaluation of knowledge from the Federal Emergency Administration Company (FEMA).
Inside Local weather Information scoured satellite tv for pc imagery on Google Maps to determine batteries of oil tanks and different oilfield infrastructure close to waterways of the Guadalupe River Basin the place it crosses the Eagle Ford Shale. We then took the latitude and longitude coordinates of every tank battery and used FEMA’s flood mapping knowledge to extract the company’s estimates for the depths of its benchmark flood situations at these places.
In some areas, the 1998 flood exceeded the worst-case state of affairs thought of by catastrophe planners. FEMA calls this the “500-year flood,” a hypothetical occasion the company estimates has a 0.2 p.c likelihood of taking place in any 12 months.
At present, a 500-year flood throughout this whole space would cowl not less than 22 tank batteries containing 144 particular person oil and wastewater tanks with 10 or extra toes of water, ICN’s evaluation discovered. Of these, 12 tanks would sit beneath not less than 20 toes of water.
FEMA’s estimates for a 500-year flood understate current threat in lots of places, analysis reveals, as warming air and oceans proceed to gasoline an intensification of utmost rainfall.
Dubose skilled the 1998 flood, when the Guadalupe River sprang from its banks and stuffed the shallow valleys right here on the fringe of the coastal plains. The water nearly reached her home, seven miles from the river, the place it trapped her for per week, masking Freeway 183 in each instructions because it drained slowly into San Antonio Bay on the coast.
In a warming world with extra intense rainfall, a future flood may very well be much more extreme.
“In the future, it’s going to occur,” Dubose stated. “We’ve all been involved in regards to the oilfield flooding.”
Flood-threatened tank batteries within the Eagle Ford Shale
Tooltips present the variety of tanks in every battery and FEMA’s estimated depths for a 100-year and 500-year flood at every location, outlined as occasions with a 1 p.c and 0.2 p.c likelihood of taking place in any 12 months, respectively. Supply: Inside Local weather Information evaluation of FEMA knowledge.
When flooding hit a smaller oilfield in northeastern Colorado in 2013, authorities tallied two dozen overturned tanks and nearly 90,000 gallons of oil and wastewater spilled. Throughout Hurricane Katrina in 2005, tens of millions of gallons of oil spilled when a number of supersized storage tanks floated off their pads. In 1994, flooding on the San Jacinto River in East Texas severed eight pipelines, ignited huge fires, injured tons of of individuals and launched greater than 2 million gallons of petroleum merchandise.
Final summer time, extreme flooding within the Texas Hill Nation close to Kerrville washed away a women’ summer time camp and killed greater than 100 folks alongside the Guadalupe River, 150 miles upstream from the Eagle Ford Shale.
The principles for constructing in floodplains in Texas fall to county governments, usually small and rural. The 78 tank batteries within the Guadalupe floodplains recognized by Inside Local weather Information via satellite tv for pc imagery all sit inside Gonzales and DeWitt counties, which have a mixed inhabitants of round 40,000 folks.
It was left to the governments of those two counties to design and implement floodplain insurance policies throughout the shale oil increase.
“These usually are not points that the majority counties, on a person foundation, are nicely suited to deal with,” stated Todd Votteler, former government supervisor of science, intergovernmental relations and coverage on the Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority. “It raises a query of how severe the state is about avoiding future flood injury in high-risk areas if we don’t have a statewide coverage.”
Tank batteries at nicely websites aren’t usually secured to the bottom by something however the weight of the oil and wastewater inside them. Whereas they’re particularly susceptible, they aren’t the one trade infrastructure that may very well be affected by flooding. Eight oil pipelines and about two dozen fuel pipelines cross the Guadalupe River within the Eagle Ford Shale, and others cross native creeks.
The batteries within the floodplain on Dubose’s property had been beforehand operated by Canadian agency Baytex Vitality, which bought all of its Eagle Ford Shale property in November for $3.2 billion to an undisclosed purchaser. Different operators with quite a few batteries within the floodplains embody EOG Assets, Devon Vitality and EOG Assets, Devon Vitality a subsidiary of ConocoPhillips. Not one of the corporations responded to requests for remark.
These floodplains additionally include many open and buried pits of drilling waste. Dubose unsuccessfully sued an oil firm in 2018, alleging that the unlined pit the place it buried drilling mud and wastewater on her property was chargeable for the orange, gassy goo that seeped up from the earth throughout heavy rainfall.
“Take into consideration all of the stuff that’s soaked into the bottom,” stated Blake Muir, a fifth-generation landowner with greater than a dozen wells on his property. “They’ve acquired hundreds of chemical compounds that go into the drilling mud.”
The Flood of 1998
Muir’s land has been in his household because the 1840s. Outdoors his previous, single-story ranch home close to the border of Gonzales and DeWitt counties, a non-public airplane hangar and a waterpark-style swimming pool commemorate the riches that fracking delivered to this area.
Inside the home, between clamoring canine, Muir sifted via bins of images that predated the shale increase. He pulled out strips of 11 movie images taped collectively to indicate the huge panorama of water that overtook this rolling savannah on the morning of Oct. 17, 1998.
It rose far previous the tops of the bushes. It even coated a spot on Muir’s land the place a tank battery now stands, 1.5 miles from the Guadalupe River.
“I assumed the entire world was going to flood,” he stated as he flipped via previous photos. “We haven’t had a flood like that because the oilfield hit us.”
All of it appeared to occur in minutes, recalled Ben Prause, a former elected government of DeWitt County who presided throughout the flood. The water wasn’t even raging however nearly calm because it swiftly rose as much as swallow about two thirds of the city of Cuero. In a single case, he stated, sheriff’s deputies entered a house with water at their knees to avoid wasting an previous girl, then walked out minutes later with water at their chests.
“It was so speedy,” stated Prause, 92, at his house in downtown Cuero, a couple of blocks from the 1998 waterline. “It was simply horrible. Water was in every single place.”
It wasn’t simply the Guadalupe River, he stated. A number of main tributaries additionally flooded to make the scenario worse. Torrential rains hit the higher reaches of Plum Creek and Sandies Creek, which each gushed concurrently into the Guadalupe.
“What made it so unhealthy is all of them hit about the identical time,” Prause stated.
These creeks barely trickle for a lot of the 12 months, stated Prause, a 1950 graduate of Cuero Excessive College, however on uncommon events their massive floodplains fill.
In 1998 the floodwaters south of Gonzales had been a number of miles broad, stated a report issued the following 12 months by the Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority and FEMA, exceeding predicted worst-case situations in some areas.
“It was the flood that many thought would by no means occur,” the report stated. “Sadly, a good larger flood will happen someday sooner or later.”
The Fracking Growth
The 1998 flood brought on a couple of oil spills, stated James Dodson, 71, co-founder of the San Antonio Bay Partnership and the son of a south Texas pipeline technician. His late spouse labored for Texas’ environmental regulator and spent weeks overseeing cleanups. However the extent of oilfield infrastructure at the moment was nothing in contrast with in the present day.
“That was lengthy earlier than the Eagle Ford Shale performs got here alongside,” he stated. “The panorama was a lot totally different in that regard—there’s so many extra amenities and nicely pads now.”
At present, alongside one eastward flip within the Guadalupe’s snaking course, three batteries consisting of 15 tanks would sit underneath about 20 toes of water in a 500-year flood. One among them, operated by EOG Assets, sits simply 500 toes from the riverbank.
Two miles from the Guadalupe River, 4 tanks operated by Burlington Assets would tackle nearly 23 toes of water.
Close to Boggy Creek, east of the Guadalupe River by the small city of Dreyer, 10 toes of water would cowl EOG Assets’ Shiner Hub fuel processing plant, a posh 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 Vitality would sit underneath 13 and eight toes of water, respectively.
The oil from toppled tanks most likely wouldn’t spill onto the land round them, stated Dodson, a former water division director for the town of Corpus Christi who labored South Texas oilfields within the Nineteen Seventies. As a substitute, he predicted, it could float on the water and find yourself on the fringe of the flood’s crest, just like the rings in a bath. 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 occur,” stated Sister Elizabeth Riebschlager, an 89-year-old Catholic nun from Cuero. “They’ve these oil wells all via these areas that flooded prefer it’s no downside.”
The oilfield infrastructure right here dates again lower than 20 years to the shale revolution, when improvements in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing unleashed an explosion of latest oil exploration.
Again then, Riebschlager, the daughter of a neighborhood civic chief, held city corridor conferences for native households who had been baffled by the swarm of businessmen and legal professionals descending on their sleepy countryside, whipping up 100-page contracts and casually writing checks for mind-boggling sums.
Many landowners warned the oil corporations about flooding, she stated.
Riebschlager associated the story of 1 rancher: “Once they had been on the brink of drill there, he stated, ‘Please don’t drill them right here, it’s a floodplain. They may flood.’ The oil man says, ‘Don’t fear, we’ll have all of the oil and fuel out of this floor earlier than the following flood.”
Dubose, who missed out on the riches of the oil increase as a result of her mom bought her household’s mineral rights, acquired an identical reply when she talked about 1998 to the corporate drilling on her land. She remembers a person telling her: “That was a 100-year flood so it received’t occur for one more 100 years.”
Misunderstanding the Threat
That’s a standard false impression surrounding phrases just like the 100-year and the 500-year flood, stated Matthew Berg, CEO of Houston-based water threat administration agency Simfero. A former water specialist with Texas A&M AgriLife, he understands why most people is misled.
“They might perceive a 100-year flood solely occurs as soon as each 100 years,” he stated. “That’s an issue as a result of statistics don’t work that method.”
They don’t actually return solely as soon as each century. Slightly, pc fashions estimate that such an occasion has a 1 p.c likelihood of occurring at any given spot in a 12 months. What occurred in earlier years doesn’t change these odds.
Moreover, Berg stated, these estimated chances are “to some extent meaningless” the place data return barely 100 years. They’re meant for functions of improvement planning, not climate forecasting. We don’t actually know the chance of storms throughout centuries, or when the 500-year floodplain of the Guadalupe River might refill once more. Two issues are sure: It’ll fill once more, and the probabilities are rising.
The warming local weather is making precipitation extra intense in Texas and past. The same quantity of rain falls in fewer, extra concentrated storms than it used to, in line with a 2024 report from the Workplace of the Texas State Climatologist at Texas A&M College.
“Many research have documented a rise in excessive rainfall in Texas and surrounding areas,” the report stated. “Excessive rainfall is strongly affected by elevated temperatures.”
In Texas, as elsewhere on the planet, all 10 of the warmest years on file have occurred since 2011. Warming outcomes from the buildup of greenhouse gases within the ambiance, launched largely by burning fossil fuels just like the oil within the tanks within the floodplains within the Eagle Ford Shale. And hotter air can maintain extra water vapor, resulting in heavier downpours.
If international fossil gasoline consumption and greenhouse fuel emissions proceed to climb, so will excessive rainfall.
“Excessive precipitation is predicted to extend in depth on common statewide,” stated the state climatologist’s report. “We anticipate a further enhance of about 10% in anticipated excessive rainfall depth in 2036 in comparison with 2001-2020 and an general enhance of over 20% in comparison with 1950-1999.”
These adjustments in rainfall depth correspond to a 50 p.c enhance within the chance of utmost precipitation in comparison with 2001-2020, the report stated, and a 100% enhance in comparison with 1950-1999.
Nevertheless, heavy rains alone don’t all the time make a mega-flood. They need to fall on simply the fitting areas, throughout a number of tributaries of a single river in order that their waters all converge directly downstream.
A Shut Name Final 12 months
If a 500-year flood returns to the Eagle Ford Shale, it’s laborious to inform how a lot oil, wastewater and different petroleum fluids may spill. Standard oilfield tanks vary from 210 to 750 barrels in measurement, about 13,000 to 32,000 gallons. Typical tank batteries within the Eagle Ford Shale usually embody 5 500-barrel oil tanks and one 500-barrel wastewater tank, in line with an investor presentation by Baytex Vitality. Some are out of use or empty, some are full, most are in between.
No matter fluids wash down the river would circulate into San Antonio Bay, a part of the winter grounds for the world’s final flock of untamed, endangered whooping cranes, then into the Gulf of Mexico.
“With a flood it causes much more dispersion. It breaks it up you then’ve acquired oil blended with sediment and particles. It may well stink and it’s a lot, a lot tougher to wash up,” stated Diane Wilson, founding father of San Antonio Bay Estuarine Waterkeeper and a 77-year-old former shrimper who lives close to the mouth of the Guadalupe River. “It might be unbelievable, the injury it may do.”
Final summer time, Dubose thought it was about to occur. As quickly as she noticed the information, late at evening on the Fourth of July, she rushed out and sped her white Hummer down ranch roads to the river.
Unbelievable rainfall was hitting the Guadalupe about 150 miles upstream within the Hill Nation close to Kerrville. On-line posts stated the water had washed away a summer time camp for ladies.
Dubose had flashbacks to 1998, when there have been additionally in a single day rainstorms, far upriver, that put this area underwater for per week. So she hurried to avoid wasting a cell house parked at her fishing camp by the river, the identical spot the place she’d misplaced a cell house in 1998.
Nearly there, she handed nervously between the towering, three-story tank batteries within the floodplain on her land, then previous the location of the buried waste the place, she stated, the grass dies every time heavy rains convey the water desk to the floor.
Fortunately for Dubose, no torrent got here downriver. For Kerrville, within the Hill Nation, it was the worst flood since 1987. However all of the heavy rain fell upstream of a significant dam and reservoir, the place water ranges had been low sufficient to soak up it. So the Eagle Ford Shale was spared, for now.
“What occurred in Kerrville, if that occurs right here, that’s a very unhealthy scenario,” Dubose stated. “We’ve informed the oilfield, that is going to flood sometime.”
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