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community weblog
Texas Water Violations, Mapped - Public Data, Finally Usable
The Texas Water Quality Visualization/Map maps water quality reports for all the water systems in Texas. View violations by category: oil & gas, radioactive, agricultural, heavy metals, disinfection byproducts. "The state makes this data available but publishes it as 225,000 individual Word documents behind a search form. I scraped the data, converted it to structured data, geocoded each system, and put it all on a map." A beautiful and terrifying project created by gregr. [via mefi projects]
posted by kristi on Jun 05, 2026 at 12:30 PM
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"Oh, silly me, I didn't see the Violations toggle, I bet the map will look better if I switch--OH MY GOD."
posted by mittens at 12:40 PM
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Oil and gas violations surprisingly low.
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 12:54 PM
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Right -- you'd think the oil/gas stuff (BTEX, et al) would be higher, but note this is for treated water, so if it's showing up the water sources they're pulling from must be terrifyingly contaminated.
posted by gregr at 1:55 PM
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Sounds like something that will be outlawed soon.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 2:07 PM
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Another interesting resource for water information in Texas is waterdatafortexas.org. Because my family used to own some farmland in the panhandle, I found the groundwater section interesting. As far back as the 1980s irrigation wells had to be drilled deeper and deeper (which in turn required bigger pumps); looking at this test well near the Pantex plant you see a linear increase in how deep the water is going back as far as they have data for. All of the wells in that area show a similar pattern. This is worth paying attention to because they are at the southern end of the Ogallala Aquifer, which is a major source of irrigation water for farms in the Great Plains.
posted by TedW at 2:19 PM
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Great work here. Is this data from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), the Railroad Commission of Texas (RRC), or both? If I recall, the RRC has primary regulatory responsibility for water quality in oil/gas fields.
posted by jognito at 2:40 PM
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Mostly the data here is TCEQ, with some geocoding from other sources. And yeah the RRC largely controls the oilfield 'produced water' (fun fact for every barrel of oil extracted there's ~4 barrels of water produced), but last year the Texas legislature shifted control of the regulation of where you can spread produced water to TCEQ from the RRC. We're currently in a comment period about the rules for the spreading of that water, which because Texas, the draft rules look like "do whatever you want wherever you want". My analysis on the situation.
posted by gregr at 3:28 PM
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FutureHeist is a fine name.
posted by doctornemo at 3:41 PM
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nice project. gov not properly making information accessible should be a big crime. we pay for it.
posted by j_curiouser at 4:55 PM
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It looks like gregr's link should go to here, at a guess?
One of my favorite institutions had a similarly, but somewhat less, obnoxious system for getting some of their public data. For all its shortcomings, AI makes it more or less trivial to get around this kind of obfuscation now.
posted by SunSnork at 5:29 PM
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SunSnork -- appreciate it -- that's right.
posted by gregr at 5:48 PM
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Excellent work. Doing Texas Air viokations would take a while, yeah?
posted by eustatic at 8:47 PM
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America's Biggest Oil Field Is Turning Into a Pressure Cooker - "Drillers' injection of wastewater is creating mayhem across the Permian Basin, raising concern about the future of fossil-fuel production there."
also btw, speaking of ogallala...
posted by kliuless at 1:26 AM
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eustatic -- scrapers built, for air quality violations, no pretty map yet, but there's raw data available.
posted by gregr at 3:35 AM
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Lots of heavy metal violations. Arsenic!
posted by caviar2d2 at 4:59 AM
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Back when I was about 22, I spent a summer working as a roustabout in the Texas panhandle.
The horrible shit we did. biggest one was when the wells needed to be cleared of paraffin. Essentially wax that would build up in the wells. So they would bring in a truck, to blast hot water into the well.
So we would dig a hole nearby, through the cleach, (not easy to dig through), (might actually be Caliche), and then the stuff from the well would go into the hole we had dug. And then we would just, cover it up...
I probably should have suggested this was a terrible idea, but no one involved would have cared.
posted by Windopaene at 12:30 PM
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eustatic -- scrapers built,
posted by gregr
amazing! will be spreading the word
posted by eustatic at 5:54 PM
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No, no violations in the Waters of Texas? Like Trinity bay or the Gulf of Mexico off Bolivar and High Island?
for work, i am generally aware of the RRC violations database, which tells you, sometimes, whether a well is leaking, if the (likely contracted) inspector does the inspection at the right time. If a well in Trinity Bay is leaking, it's in violation of Texans' rights to not have your severable oil being misplaced by the leasee--the oil company.
from this map, it seems that leaking oil into Trinity Bay is mineral rights problem, but not necessarily a TCEQ clean water act problem --even though the Clean Water Act envisions that spilling oil by accident into the waters of Texas as a clear instance of violation.
The major issue may be what we run into in Louisiana --does TCEQ even own a boat? LDEQ does not. No boat, no field report = no violation! Government magic.
Oil on water is also generally a violation of the federal Oil Spill Pollution Act; but if RRC is the only agency listing the violation, it's kind of a "tree falling in the woods" problem. RRC has no duty i am aware of to report to the feds. Am I wrong?
We know from RRC that the oil spilled from the well, and that's a violation of Texas' right to wise use of severable resources. or something. mineral code, not water code.
We assume the oil went into the water, because gravity continues to operate. but there's no TCEQ to witness it; i guess that's what i'm seeing on this map, the violations I know about, some of which were reported to the US Coast Guard under OPA, are not in this TCEQ data.
After that, it's descretionary whether TCEQ would issue fines for oil spilled into Trinity Bay, so ha. TCEQ will not issue fines if they never know about the oil spilled to water, and you can't just make them read the RRC database and inspection reports if they don't want to, and maybe RRC doesn't share inspections with TCEQ. I know if I were a TCEQ lawyer, i might also probably decline a case that had no TCEQ field report.
We know from USCG that the companies report (sometimes) oil spills into Trinity Bay to the National Response Center; it seems that these reports don't align with the times and dates that RRC inspectors find oil leak violatons at the wellheads.
Skytruth.org in West Virginia lists NRC reports with lat and long on their monitor site. Thank you, West Virginia. it would be interesting to cross reference Skytruth's maps of Texas oil spills to this TCEQ data--I know it's not zero, as this map is showing.
I could submit that into the comment record, i suppose.
Are these data limited to fixed facilities operating under a specific TCEQ permit? do you know if oil operators are under some kind of general permit in Texas?
NRC is supposed to be a mutual notification of all relevant fed and state agencies, so i am at a real loss, there. USCG explicitly has a system that hands off the report to TCEQ and EPA, and then....?? I guess USCG doesn't have to share their field reports to TCEQ, so if that is the case, TCEQ is likely to discretionarily ignore it
Of course, you can always call the news, and pray they take your story --if you are a fisher who can donate your time and fuel budget to KHOU
NOAA does operate the MPSRs --Marine Pollution Surveillance Reports--via satellites, but i never see Trinity Bay or Bolivar light up on the Gulf of Mexico ERMA.
I think Louisiana takes up all the space on the Gulf ERMA, so it may be California or New York NOAA offices detecting and reporting oil sheens in Trinity Bay, and reporting Texas oil spills to their regional ERMAs, instead of the Gulf one. I have seen that before--the California NOAA offices do a lot of overflow work on Louisiana oil sheens, but they post them to the Pacifiic ERMA, and not the Gulf one.
posted by eustatic at 6:57 PM
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