Disaster Looms on the Guadalupe River Floodplain
An epic flood a generation ago drenched areas around Texas’ Guadalupe River, showing how quickly and dangerously the region could be submerged.
Since then, Texas — with no state floodplain policy — has allowed oil companies to frack this same area, extracting fossil fuels underground in the Eagle Ford Shale. It may be, as one resident describes, “a disaster waiting to happen.”
A new investigation by Inside Climate News found that more than 500 enormous oil tanks now dot the floodplains of the Guadalupe River — tanks that could upend, spill or float away in another devastating flood.
Dylan and Peter explain how they undertook this important investigation and what it would mean if the basin floods again.
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Reporter, Austin
Dylan Baddour covers the energy sector and environmental justice in Texas. Born in Houston, he’s worked the business desk at the Houston Chronicle, covered the U.S.-Mexico border for international outlets and reported for several years from Colombia for media like The Washington Post, BBC News and The Atlantic. He also spent two years investigating armed groups in Latin America for the global security department at Facebook before returning to Texas journalism. Baddour holds bachelor’s degrees in journalism and Latin American studies from the University of Texas at Austin. He has lived in Argentina, Kazakhstan and Colombia and speaks fluent Spanish.
Data Journalist
Peter Aldhous is a science and data reporter based in San Francisco. He got his break in journalism in 1989 as a reporter for Nature in London, fresh from a Ph.D. in animal behavior. Later he worked as European correspondent for Science, news editor for New Scientist and chief news & features editor with Nature, before moving to California in 2005 to become New Scientist’s San Francisco bureau chief. From 2015 to 2022 he worked on the science desk at BuzzFeed News. Peter also teaches investigative and policy reporting, data visualization, and news features writing in the Science Communication Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is a two-time winner in the Global Editors Network Data Journalism Awards. His reporting has also been honored by the Association of British Science Writers, the Association of Health Care Journalists, the Society of Environmental Journalists, and the Royal Statistical Society.