KTBB News, Weather, Talk

LUBBOCK (AP) — The power started to come back on Thursday at the Texas Tech University campus in Lubbock several hours after an explosion inside a maintenance hole set off fires and power outages, leading school officials to issue evacuation orders for several buildings and cancel classes for the rest of the week, university police said.

The explosion happened Wednesday evening at the Engineering Key section of campus, which was evacuated. Students were advised Thursday to avoid the area until further notice.

“I heard an explosion and then saw a smoke ring, almost like a cartoon or something,” doctoral degree student Robert Gauthreaux III told KCBD-TV. “It traveled about 200 feet in the air.”

Gauthreaux said he went inside the architecture building, which lost power. He said he and others tried to help someone who was trapped inside an elevator.

Power was being shut down to the entire campus while repairs were underway, said Caitlynn Jeffries, a spokesperson for the university’s police department. She asked that all public and unofficial personnel avoid campus.

“You can go ahead and go home for spring break. We are closing school down for the next couple days,” Jeffries said at a news media briefing.

Firefighters responded to campus about 7 p.m. for a possible gas leak, Lubbock Fire Rescue Capt. Jon Tunnell said at the briefing. They found “multiple manhole covers with active fire and smoke issuing from them,” he said.

No injuries were reported, Tunnell said.

An alert from the university sent to the campus community before the news conference had described the explosion as occurring at a substation.

Videos circulating on social media and TV stations showed a heavy presence of firefighters on campus and fire and smoke coming out of at least one maintenance hole cover.

It wasn’t clear what might have caused the explosion.

There are more than 40,000 students at Texas Tech, and the school sits on 1,800 acres (728 hectares) in West Texas.

HOUSTON (AP) – Immigrants kept the largest urban counties in the U.S. growing last year.

Core counties in the Houston, Miami and Phoenix metropolitan areas grew more than any others in the country primarily because of people moving in from outside the United States, according to population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau released Thursday.

Without the international migration, Harris County, Texas, Miami-Dade County, Florida, and Maricopa County, Arizona, would have had nobody moving there last year. That’s because more people already living in the country moved out of than into those counties. Miami-Dade County would have lost population without the immigrants, since the number of births outpacing deaths wasn’t enough to overcome the tens of thousands of residents who moved out.

Immigration in 2024 drove the overall U.S. population growth to its fastest rate in 23 years as the nation surpassed 340 million residents. The Census Bureau changed how it counted immigrants last year by including more people who were admitted to the U.S. for humanitarian, and often temporary, reasons.

“A substantial excess of births over deaths has long been the primary driver of U.S. population growth, but as this surplus dwindled in the last four years immigration provided the bulk of the nation’s population increase,” Kenneth Johnson, a senior demographer at the University of New Hampshire, said in an email.
Domestic vs. international migrants

The 2024 estimates reflect a continued dissonance this decade between where current U.S. residents and immigrants choose to live. Immigrants last year moved to the urban cores of metro areas, while those already living in the country preferred counties in the far suburban reaches of metro areas.

The most popular counties for international migrants last year were Miami-Dade and Harris counties, followed by Los Angeles County and Cook County, Illinois, which is home to Chicago.

The most popular counties for domestic residents last year were Montgomery County, Texas, north of Houston; Pinal County, Arizona, southwest of Phoenix; and Pasco County, Florida, northeast of Tampa. Also at the top ranks were Polk County, Florida, located between Orlando and Tampa, and Collin County, Texas, in the far northern suburbs of metro Dallas.
New York is on the rebound

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the U.S. in 2020, the New York metro area and others with some of the densest populations in the U.S. lost tens of thousands of residents to relocation.

But the region has been on the rebound since the pandemic subsided. The New York metro area — the largest in the U.S. with 19.9 million people — added more people than any other metropolitan area in the country last year. As 147,000 residents moved out, nearly 288,000 immigrants moved in, including tens of thousands who arrived on buses provided by the state of Texas. San Francisco and Washington, D.C., are other metro areas that have gained population through international migration, after initially losing them during the pandemic.

The New York metro area also had the nation’s largest natural growth last year, with nearly 214,000 births outpacing 141,000 deaths.

South Florida last year jumped two spots over metro Washington and metro Atlanta to become the sixth most populous metropolitan area in the United States. Metropolitan Charlotte, North Carolina, bypassed metro Baltimore for the 21st spot. Among counties, Tarrant County, Texas, home to Fort Worth, leapfrogged over San Bernardino County in South California as the nation’s 15th most populous county.

Deaths outpace births
in two-thirds of U.S. counties

Nearly two-thirds of the United States’ 3,144 counties grew last year. At the same, deaths outpaced births in two-thirds of U.S. counties, reflecting the reliance on immigration for growth throughout the United States in the years since the start of the pandemic. Nationwide, last year’s natural growth was less than half the average gain of 1.2 million people that the country experienced in the five years before the pandemic, Johnson said.

“These recent levels of natural decrease are unprecedented,” Johnson said.

HOUSTON – The Houston Chronicle reports Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick took to X Tuesday evening to tout the first-ever “Texas Strip” served with “Gulf of America shrimp,” a move which one New York steakhouse owner said he’ll be taking the state to court over. Patrick’s Texas-themed dinner, which cost $99, came after he announced plans to introduce a resolution in the Texas Senate to officially rename the popular steak cut after the Lone Star State. Rebranding the New York strip as the “Texas” strip, he said, would help the state’s cattle ranchers market their beef across the nation. While Patrick said Texas’ cattle industry “sure liked the idea,” Todd Shapiro, owner of the War Room Tavern in Albany, New York, said he will file a lawsuit in the coming weeks over the proposed name change.

“We have a big beef with your lieutenant governor,” Shapiro said. “They’re trying to take away something that’s part of our heritage. People grew up having a New York strip. People all over the country, they eat a New York strip. It’s part of the New York culture.” According to the Little Cattle Company, a Texas-based beef supplier, the New York strip got its name in the late 19th century after it was added to the menu at Delmonico’s, an upscale New York City restaurant that still exists today. Bob’s Steak and Chop House, where Patrick said he was served the “Texas” strip, still refers to it as the New York strip on its website. Bob’s also doesn’t source its beef from Texas, which is the largest produce of beef of any U.S. state, according to a 2022 report from the United States Department of Agriculture. Beef served at its locations, which range from Texas to Arizona, is purchased through “the Chicago-based Stock Yards Meat Packing Company,” according to the website for Bob’s Steak and Chop House. But Patrick said Texas should benefit from the cut’s branding, not “liberal” New York. “Liberal New York shouldn’t get the credit for our hard-working ranchers,” Patrick said in a late February post on X. “We promote the Texas brand on everything made or grown in Texas because it benefits our economy and jobs.”

HOUSTON – The Houston Chronicle reports that in early February, the Texas Farm Bureau defended President Donald Trump as he moved to enact tariffs on foreign goods coming into the United States, saying they trusted him to “protect the interests of farm and ranch families.” But now, after more rounds of tariffs and counter tariffs by nations including China, Canada and the European Union have started to hit demand for U.S. agriculture goods overseas, Texas Farm Bureau President Russell Boening acknowledged his members are growing anxious. “We understand that’s his negotiating tool, but at the same time tariffs can be hard on agriculture,” he said. “If you’re in a good spot you can withstand this, but you worry about the producer who has only been in this five or ten years and doesn’t have a lot of equity built up. Those are the operations that could be in trouble.”

Texas farmers, already struggling from drought and low commodity prices, are on the front line of a growing trade war between the United States and its longtime trading partners. And as a key Trump constituency, their discomfort is likely to be of particular concern to a White House that has already gone back and forth over enacting tariffs. Cotton, a staple for farmers in West Texas, hit its lowest price in four years earlier this month after China announced a 15% retaliatory tariff on a number of U.S. agricultural goods. China, the largest buyer of grain sorghum in the world, has also virtually stopped buying the crop from Texas farms, Boening said. And it’s looking increasingly likely that Mexico, a major buyer of U.S. rice, a big crop in East Texas, will be turning to farms in South America if Trump goes ahead on his threat to impose a 25% tariff on goods from Mexico and Canada on April 2, S&P Global Intelligence, a research firm, reported earlier this month. Lobbyists for the farm bureau have been reaching out to the administration and members of Congress from Texas to warn them of the immediate risks posed to farmers by a trade war.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump openly challenged U.S. allies on Wednesday by increasing tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports to 25% as he vowed to take back wealth “stolen” by other countries, drawing quick retaliation from Europe and Canada.

The Republican president’s use of tariffs to extract concessions from other nations points toward a possibly destructive trade war and a stark change in America’s approach to global leadership. It also has destabilized the stock market and stoked anxiety about an economic downturn.

“The United States of America is going to take back a lot of what was stolen from it by other countries and, frankly, by incompetent U.S. leadership,” Trump told reporters on Wednesday. “We’re going to take back our wealth, and we’re going to take back a lot of the companies that left.”

Trump removed all exemptions from his 2018 tariffs on the metals, in addition to increasing the tariffs on aluminum from 10%. His moves, based off a February directive, are part of a broader effort to disrupt and transform global commerce.

He has separate tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China, with plans to also tax imports from the European Union, Brazil and South Korea by charging “reciprocal” rates starting on April 2.

The EU announced its own countermeasures on Wednesday. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said that as the United States was “applying tariffs worth 28 billion dollars, we are responding with countermeasures worth 26 billion euros,” or about $28 billion. Those measures, which cover not just steel and aluminum products but also textiles, home appliances and agricultural goods, are due to take effect on April 1.

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer responded by saying that the EU was punishing America instead of fixing what he viewed as excess capacity in steel and aluminum production.

“The EU’s punitive action completely disregards the national security imperatives of the United States – and indeed international security – and is yet another indicator that the EU’s trade and economic policies are out of step with reality,” he said in a statement.

Meeting on Wednesday with Ireland’s Taoiseach Micheál Martin, Trump said “of course” he wants to respond to EU’s retaliations and “of course” Ireland is taking advantage of the United States.

“The EU was set up in order to take advantage of the United States,” Trump said.

Last year, the United States ran a $87 billion trade imbalance with Ireland. That’s partially because of the tax structure created by Trump’s 2017 overhaul, which incentivized U.S. pharmaceutical companies to record their sales abroad, Brad Setser, a senior fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations, said on X.

Canada sees itself as locked in a trade war because of White House claims about fentanyl smuggling and that its natural resources and factories subtract from the U.S. economy instead of supporting it.

“This is going to be a day to day fight. This is now the second round of unjustified tariffs leveled against Canada,” said Mélanie Joly, Canada’s foreign affairs minister. “The latest excuse is national security despite the fact that Canada’s steel and aluminum adds to America’s security. All the while there is a threat of further and broader tariffs on April 2 still looming. The excuse for those tariffs shifts every day.”

Canada is the largest foreign supplier of steel and aluminum to the United States and plans to impose retaliatory tariffs of Canadian $29.8 billion ($20.7 billion) starting Thursday in response to the U.S. taxes on the metals.

Canada’s new tariffs would be on steel and aluminum products, as well as U.S. goods including computers, sports equipment and water heaters worth $14.2 billion Canadian ($9.9 billion). That’s in addition to the 25% counter tariffs on $30 billion Canadian (US$20.8 billion) of imports from the U.S. that were put in place on March 4 in response to other Trump import taxes that he’s partially delayed by a month.

Trump told CEOs in the Business Roundtable a day earlier that the tariffs were causing companies to invest in U.S. factories. The 7.5% drop in the S&P 500 stock index over the past month on fears of deteriorating growth appears unlikely to dissuade him, as Trump argued that higher tariff rates would be more effective at bringing back factories.

“The higher it goes, the more likely it is they’re going to build,” Trump told the group. “The biggest win is if they move into our country and produce jobs. That’s a bigger win than the tariffs themselves, but the tariffs are going to be throwing off a lot of money to this country.”

Trump on Tuesday had threatened to put tariffs of 50% on steel and aluminum from Canada, but he chose to stay with the 25% rate after the province of Ontario suspended plans to put a surcharge on electricity sold to Michigan, Minnesota and New York.

Democratic lawmakers dismissed Trump’s claims that his tariffs are about national security and drug smuggling, saying they’re actually about generating revenues to help cover the cost of his planned income tax cuts for the wealthy.

“Donald Trump knows his policies could wreck the economy, but he’s doing it anyway,” said Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York. “Why are they doing all these crazy things that Americans don’t like? One reason, and one reason alone: tax breaks for billionaires, the north star of the Republican party’s goals.

In many ways, the president is addressing what he perceives as unfinished business from his first term. Trump meaningfully increased tariffs, but the revenues collected by the federal government were too small to significantly increase overall inflationary pressures.

Outside forecasts by the Budget Lab at Yale University, Tax Policy Center and others suggest that U.S. families would have the costs of the taxes passed onto them in the form of higher prices.

With Wednesday’s tariffs on steel and aluminum, Trump is seeking to remedy his original 2018 import taxes that were eroded by exemptions.

After Canada and Mexico agreed to his demand for a revamped North American trade deal in 2020, they avoided the import taxes on the metals. Other U.S. trading partners had import quotas supplant the tariffs. And the first Trump administration also allowed U.S. companies to request exemptions from the tariffs if, for instance, they couldn’t find the steel they needed from domestic producers.

While Trump’s tariffs could help steel and aluminum plants in the United States, they could raise prices for the manufacturers that use the metals as raw materials.

Moreover, economists have found, the gains to the steel and aluminum industries were more than offset by the cost they imposed on “downstream’’ manufacturers that use their products.

At these downstream companies, production fell by nearly $3.5 billion because of the tariffs in 2021, a loss that exceeded the $2.3 billion uptick in production that year by aluminum producers and steelmakers, the U.S. International Trade Commission found in 2023.

Trump sees the tariffs as leading to more domestic factories, and the White House has noted that Volvo, Volkswagen and Honda are all exploring an increase to their U.S. footprint. But the prospect of higher prices, fewer sales and lower profits might cause some companies to refrain from investing in new facilities.

“If you’re an executive in the boardroom, are you really going to tell your board it’s the time to expand that assembly line?” said John Murphy, senior vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The top steel exporters to the U.S. are Canada, Mexico, Brazil, South Korea and Japan, with exports from Taiwan and Vietnam growing at a fast pace, according to the International Trade Administration. Imports from China, the world’s largest steel producer, account for only a small fraction of what the U.S. buys.

ODESSA — Abandoned oil wells have become an expensive and growing environmental threat in Texas, costing taxpayers tens of millions of dollars to remediate. Leaders of the oil and gas industry, state regulators and lawmakers, and policy experts agree there is a problem.

But they don’t agree on the specifics of how to solve it.

And an early attempt by a Republican lawmaker hit a major roadblock Wednesday when a Texas Senate panel told him to rethink his approach to solving the problem.

State Sen. Mayes Middleton of Galveston introduced a bill that sets deadlines to plug the more than 150,000 inactive wells in Texas during the next 15 years. It also gives regulators more authority over oil and gas companies to enforce plugging requirements and directs them to submit annual reports.

During the hearing, industry leaders said they could comply with Middleton’s proposal — at great costs — but suggested additional flexibility. Meanwhile, environmental policy experts and activists said the proposed timeline to plug wells was too lenient.

Members of the Senate Committee on Natural Resources were skeptical of both sides of the debate. And they repeatedly questioned whether new deadlines to plug wells would hurt smaller oil and gas operators. Middelton defended his bill.

He told the committee his proposal considered the financial strains it could put on smaller operators.

“But at the end of the day, we’ve got way too many inactive wells. What are we going to do about that?” he said.

The committee was not convinced by Middleton’s assurances.

“There are certainly concerns you heard from (the oil and gas) industry and members of the committee,” said state Sen. Brian Birdwell, R-Granbury, who chairs the committee. “So I would entertain that you…continue to develop the situation, see what you might put in front of us in the coming weeks that is something we can move forward with.”

Inactive wells do not produce oil or natural gas. They are considered “orphaned” when they have no clear owner or if the company in charge of them is bankrupt. In an annual report detailing its oil field cleanup efforts, the Texas Railroad Commission estimated roughly 8,300, or 5% of all inactive wells, are orphaned. In 2024, the Railroad Commission plugged a little more than a thousand of them, costing taxpayers $34 million.

The commission is the state agency tasked with regulating the oil and gas industry and has been charged with overseeing the blowouts.

Orphaned wells have become a conduit for water previously used for fracking, typically stored in deep underground rock formations, to burst onto the surface. Left ignored, these wells threaten groundwater resources and public health. The brine that leaks or shoots uncontrolled flows of water upward contains a colorless, odorless, incredibly toxic gas known as Hydrogen Sulfide or H2S. Water has blown through at least eight wells since October 2024, according to ranchers in the West Texas region.

Last fall, the commission, in a letter, said it could no longer keep up with the growing cost of plugging them. It asked lawmakers for an additional $100 million just to keep up — about 44% of its entire two-year budget.

Under existing law, oil and gas companies can request what the commission calls an extension to lengthen a well’s inactive status indefinitely, which means they won’t have to plug it. Operators can obtain extensions for individual wells or a blanket renewal for every inactive well in their portfolio.

Middleton’s bill would change that. Oil and gas companies would be required to plug wells that have been inactive for at least 15 years.

The legislation also allows the commission to grant exceptions so long as the operators that request one submit a plan to plug the well. The commission can evaluate different factors, including the number of the operator’s inactive wells, how long they’ve been inactive, and a plan to plug them before deciding. Called compliance plans, operators have until 2040 to fulfill it. The commission can also consider risks to public safety and the environment when evaluating wells that just turned 15. This is not the case under the law now.

Industry leaders representing operators statewide mostly assured lawmakers their members could comply. But it would hurt their bottom line.

Karr Ingham, an economist and president of the Texas Alliance of Energy Producers, said any bill setting limits would lead to damaging expenses. He said 20-25% of an operator’s inventory can consist of inactive wells.

“We want to make sure that this bill is as workable…for our folks as it could be,” he said.

Michael Lozano, who leads government affairs and communications for the Permian Basin Petroleum Association, said lawmakers should consider giving operators more time to prepare. Finding companies to plug the wells, he said, could be a challenge for them.

Environmental policy experts and landowners said the legislature should give operators shorter time frames to plug inactive and dried-up wells before they become problematic.

Virginia Palacios, executive director of Commission Shift Action, a nonprofit group that lobbies at the Capitol for stronger oil and gas industry policies, told The Texas Tribune she was excited a bill had been proposed, adding it needed stronger language. An ideal deadline would give operators 10 years to plug their inactive wells.

“It’s sort of like a soft touch on an industry that has been running a Wild West strategy on inactive walls for a long time,” she said.

Schuyler Wight, a West Texas rancher whose land is dotted with wells, some of which are leaking, did not support the bill. It is common in West Texas for oil and gas producers to operate on privately owned ranches. Wight said the Railroad Commission should make plans to plug wells public and alert the landowner when an operator conducts testing and if they are following through with plugging.

Todd Staples, president of the Texas Oil and Gas Association, an industry trade group, applauded the bill, saying the group supports it. In an emailed statement, he said $55 million in fees paid by operators are given annually to state-managed plugging programs.

He said he does not support shorter time frames to plug the wells because operators need a “phase-in” period to comply with the law.

At the hearing on Wednesday, he appeared confident that operators could bear the brunt of any costs imposed by Middleton’s bill.

“It’s a duty to landowners, it’s a duty to the legislature, and it’s a duty to the industry,” Staples said. “Once these wells have reached beyond that point, they are plugged,” Staples said.

Article originally published by The Texas Tribune. To read the originally published article, click here.