Featured Climate change, runaway development worsen Houston floods (Frank Bajak – Seth Borenstein – The Columbus Dispatch, 5/18/2016) “With clay soil and tabletop-flat terrain, Houston has endured flooding for generations. Its 1,700 miles of man-made channels struggle to dispatch storm runoff to the Gulf of Mexico. Now the nation’s fourth-largest city is being overwhelmed with more frequent and more destructive…
Featured Threats to prairie show tension between growth, flood protection (Mike Snyder – Houston Chronicle, 5/16/2016) “Imagine a sponge. Now imagine that you had access to something that would make this sponge – an inherently absorbent object – many times more absorbent. Something that supercharged its capacity to soak up and hold liquid. That’s a fair description of the grass…
Silent and Deadly: Benzene Leaks From Pipelines Have Been Quietly Adding to the Ship Channel Toxic Mix (Dianna Wray – Houston Press, 5/10/2016) “Midway through his presentation, about just-discovered potentially dangerous levels of benzene in their neighborhoods, Jay Olaguer saw the blank looks on the faces in the audience and realized they weren’t getting it. Olaguer, the air-quality science program…