Land shifts
Lawmakers should monitor Texas quakes.
The Texas Almanac tells us that the largest earthquake in Texas history occurred way back in 1931 near the tiny town of Valentine in far West Texas. The total felt area exceeded more than 400,000 square miles.
The only known death from a Texas earthquake occurred in 1923, when a temblor with an epicenter near El Paso caused an adobe house to collapse across the Rio Grande in Juarez.
Those tidbits of Texas history suggest that quakes have been rare in the Lone Star State — until recently, when a drastic increase in Texas and other energy-producing states happened to coincide with oil and gas fracking operations that pump billions of barrels of water deep into faults underground.
Texas Railroad Commissioner Ryan Sitton — an adherent of the Scott Pruitt school of science denial — calls connections between fracking operation and earthquakes “a bunch of suppositions, barely even hypotheses.” As the founder of a Pasadena-based energy consultancy, the commissioner ought to know better, and probably does, but what he knows best is that incontrovertible scientific proof tying oil and gas operations to the increased number of earthquakes — as most studies to date have found — would force him and his oil and gas-friendly fellow commissioners to curtail certain activities in the industry.
As Chronicle business reporters David Hunn and Lydia De Pillis noted recently, companies would have to adapt, at a cost of untold millions of dollars, given the fact that humble adobe houses aren’t the only structures unable to withstand earthquakes. Airports, highways, hospital and schools also are vulnerable.
Could that unpleasant possibility be the reason neither the Railroad Commission nor the Texas Legislature seems all that enthusiastic about an earthquake-monitoring program sponsored by the University of Texas? The project, under the auspices of the university’s Bureau of Economic Geology, includes placing 55 additional seismometers around the state, triple the number we have now.
The Legislature appropriated $4.5 million for the effort last session, with the oil and gas industry contributing another $1.2 million, but lawmakers provided funding only for this year. UT has asked the Legislature for $3.4 million for the next two years to continue research, but the money has not been included in the Senate’s budget.
Strangely enough, with fracking operations down during the past year due to decreased oil and gas prices, we’ve also experienced fewer earthquakes. A commissioner with his head in the sand is probably sensitive to that fact, but Sitton is still not persuaded there’s a connection. Who knows, the UT study might prove that he’s right. Whether it’s pure coincidence or man-made meddling with Mother Nature, he and his colleagues shouldn’t be afraid of the findings.