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.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/us/boom-meets-bust-in-texas-atop-sea-of-oil-poverty-digs-in.html
dhill926
(16,234 posts)Jaysus .
Sounds like a good word to remember for future reference as America proceeds in its march toward the Third World: