TX - 500+ Oil Tanks Sit In The Guadalupe River Floodplain; In 1998 Flood, The River Exceeded 7 Miles In Width
More than 500 enormous oil tanks dot the floodplains of the Guadalupe River and its tributaries where they cross one of Texas’ leading oilfields, an Inside Climate News investigation has found, posing risk of an environmental disaster. Longtime residents of these historic ranchlands still remember the last time these plains filled up with water in a biblical inundation in 1998. That was before the fracking boom hit this region and the oil-rich geological formation that lies beneath it, known as the Eagle Ford Shale. Today, a repeat of the historic flood could wreak havoc, locals worry.
“There’s a whole lot of tanks full of oil that are going to float away,” said Sara Dubose, a fifth-generation landowner in Gonzales County with 10 tanks in the floodplain on her family’s ranchlands, each holding up to 21,000 gallons of oil or toxic wastewater. “Spill all over our land and ruin it for 100 years.” Almost 20 feet of water could submerge some of the tanks on the Dubose family’s land in an event similar to 1998, according to an Inside Climate News analysis of data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
Inside Climate News scoured satellite imagery on Google Maps to identify batteries of oil tanks and other oilfield infrastructure near waterways of the Guadalupe River Basin where it crosses the Eagle Ford Shale. We then took the latitude and longitude coordinates of each tank battery and used FEMA’s flood mapping data to extract the agency’s estimates for the depths of its benchmark flood scenarios at these locations. In some areas, the 1998 flood exceeded the worst-case scenario considered by disaster planners. FEMA calls this the “500-year flood,” a hypothetical event the agency estimates has a 0.2 percent chance of happening in any year.
Today, a 500-year flood across this entire area would cover at least 22 tank batteries containing 144 individual oil and wastewater tanks with 10 or more feet of water, ICN’s analysis found. Of those, 12 tanks would sit beneath at least 20 feet of water. FEMA’s estimates for a 500-year flood understate present risk in many locations, research shows, as warming air and oceans continue to fuel an intensification of extreme rainfall. Dubose experienced the 1998 flood, when the Guadalupe River sprang from its banks and filled the shallow valleys here at the edge of the coastal plains. The water almost reached her house, seven miles from the river, where it trapped her for a week, covering Highway 183 in both directions as it drained slowly into San Antonio Bay on the coast. In a warming world with more intense rainfall, a future flood could be even more severe. “One day, it’s going to happen,” Dubose said. “We’ve all been concerned about the oilfield flooding.”
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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/08022026/texas-guadalupe-river-floodplain-fracking-boom/
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