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n2doc

(47,953 posts)
Mon Jun 30, 2014, 11:11 AM Jun 2014

Boom Meets Bust in Texas: Atop Sea of Oil, Poverty Digs In

GARDENDALE, Tex. — From the window of her tin-roofed trailer, Judy Vargas can glimpse a miraculous world. It is as close as the dust kicked up by the trucks barreling by but seems as distant as Mars.

As you walk out of her front yard — where the chewed-off leg of an animal, probably a feral hog caught by a prowling bobcat, rots outside — a towering natural gas flare peeks over the southerly view. Across the railroad tracks and Interstate 35, a newly reopened railroad interchange stores acres of pipe and receives shipments of sand from Wisconsin to be used in hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Next to the terminal is an expanding natural gas processing plant that lies in the heart of the Eagle Ford, a giant shale oil field that here in La Salle County alone produces more than $15 million worth of oil a day, or about one out of every 55 barrels produced in the United States.


This rural patch of thick mesquite in the brush country south of San Antonio had been known for something else. Five miles from here in Cotulla, Lyndon B. Johnson at the age of 20 saw hardship so searing that it would help inspire his war on poverty.

Now, it is the scene of one of the greatest oil booms the country has ever seen. But poverty endures in makeshift, barely governed communities called colonias, such as the one where Ms. Vargas shares her trailer with an ever-shifting assemblage of relatives.

more

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/us/boom-meets-bust-in-texas-atop-sea-of-oil-poverty-digs-in.html

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Boom Meets Bust in Texas: Atop Sea of Oil, Poverty Digs In (Original Post) n2doc Jun 2014 OP
living the American dream... dhill926 Jun 2014 #1
"Colonia" IDemo Jul 2014 #2

IDemo

(16,926 posts)
2. "Colonia"
Tue Jul 1, 2014, 08:51 AM
Jul 2014

Sounds like a good word to remember for future reference as America proceeds in its march toward the Third World:

Colonias are unregulated settlements that began to emerge with the advent of informal housing. In the United States, colonias are considered semi-rural subdivisions of substandard housing lacking basic physical infrastructure, potable water, sanitary sewage, and adequate roads. Colonias are unincorporated, unregulated, substandard settlements that are burdened by the lack of environmental protection. Colonia communities do not have access to traditional homeownership financing methods and therefore consist of ramshackle housing units built incrementally with found material on expanses of undeveloped land.
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