Let’s start thinking about water!

Influence of an industrial discharge on long-term dynamics of abiotic and biotic resources in Lavaca Bay, Texas

Port Lavaca Bay at Sunrise by Van Sutherland

Just like how the 2023 Fords start showing up in 2022, academic papers for 2023 are already appearing, including this one. The future is now! This paper analyzes a long-term monitoring dataset funded by The Formosa Plastics Corporation as part of an operating permit. Data collection started in 1993 and continues today, although the paper’s analysis does through 2020. Data is collected quarterly at 16 fixed stations spread around Lavaca Bay, offering a nice opportunity to observe changes over time and across the water body.

The data shows sediment became sandier over time and with distance away from the Formosa discharge point. Reference stations and stations near the discharge point had similar hydrographical and biological trends suggesting no impacts from the discharge for those parameters. Unfortunately, 99.9% of the 424,671 measurements of organic contaminants were non-detects due to analysis techniques with detection limits too high to discern potential impacts from contaminants. More sensitive analytical methods would provide more useful data in the future.

Cascading disasters and mental health inequities—Winter Storm Uri, COVID-19, and post-traumatic stress in Texas

Winter storms, pandemics, and stress, oh my! We have certainly been through a lot lately, and sometimes it has felt surreal and, indeed, traumatic. Grineski and co-authors dive deeper into the Texas experience to discern how people respond to cascading disasters. They note that while there’s a lot of research on the health effects of heat (perhaps because it’s getting warmer), there hasn’t been as much research on the health effects of cold despite cold weather killing more people than hot weather worldwide.

Based on a survey of folks in eight Texas cities (Austin, Beaumont, Dallas, El Paso, Houston, Lubbock, McAllen, and San Antonio), they found evidence of high post-traumatic stress in 18% of respondents with greater amounts of stress in Black (6.6 times more than white households), Hispanic (3.5), or other non-white people (4.2). Higher incidents of stress appeared in people with disabilities (4.4 more than people without disabilities), people suffering from the pandemic, and folks who lost their water supply (1.9 times more than people who didn’t lose their supply). The authors refer to Uri as a cascading disaster with the storm itself, the power outage, and the water outage. I thought it was odd that they included El Paso because only about 3,000 people lost power in El Paso during Winter Storm Uri. Of those 3,000, two-thirds got their power back within five minutes (source). So the results may underestimate the trauma from Uri. 

Not a silver bullet—Social perspectives on desalination and water reuse in Texas

Brannstrom and colleagues looked at public perceptions of desalination and water reuse in Texas. Although they expected a mix of support and opposition for the technologies, they found “nuanced and contingent” support for both water management strategies. The “nuance” involved the understanding of economic and political costs, and the “contingent” involved the desire to continue protecting current water sources while pursuing these technologies. There was consensus on addressing environmental concerns for desalination. Still, interviewees said that environmental concerns should “…not [be] used to increase development costs…” [I’m not sure what that means: OK to address environmental impacts as long as it doesn’t increase costs? Or costs shouldn’t be driven up to address environmental issues in the hope of killing the economics of the project?]. The authors also identified two cross-cutting themes from their interactions with stakeholders: (1) a preference for seawater desalination over water reuse (and a lack of environmental concern) and (2) concerns about a viable workforce, this latter theme was unexpected to the authors.