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HARRIS COUNTY – After two officers he had worked with during a 20-year stint in the U.S. Marine Corps took their own lives, Dustin Schellenger researched what mental health resources were available to his friends, both of whom were local first responders when they died.

“The answer was— a whole lot of nothing,” said Schellenger, who lives in the Dallas area and directs the Texas Law Enforcement Peer Network, a state-funded program offering anonymous support to police officers across Texas.

That network came out of a growing understanding that Texas’ police officers, jailers and first responders face significant psychological pressure and minimal emotional support.

In a span of six weeks this year, four current and former Harris County Sheriff’s Office deputies died by suicide. The string of tragedies made national news and highlighted a problem Schellenger and other law enforcement veterans know deep in their bones: officers need help — even if they don’t ask for it.

Law enforcement officers are 54% more likely to die from suicide than people in other professions, according to a 2021 analysis published in the National Library of Medicine. And Texas led the country in the number of law enforcement officer suicides in 2022.

While state lawmakers attempted to address the issue by funding the Texas Law Enforcement Peer Network in 2021 and requiring officers to complete training on mental health, critical gaps remain.

Texas is among a handful of states that fund a peer-support program and requires law enforcement officers to complete a wellness course to maintain their license. But those programs are insufficient to mitigate officers’ stress because they don’t target workplace culture or proactively check in on officers who are exposed to violence every day, said Reuben Ramirez, the former assistant police chief for the Dallas Police Department and author of a book about how to create healthier cultures in first responder agencies.

“It’s an audacious request to ask these men and women to come forward if they’re struggling,” Ramirez said. “There’s 150 years worth of empirical data that says that if you come forward … that might not work out in your favor.”

Some law enforcement agencies, including the Harris County Sheriff’s Office, have created internal wellness units. Peer support specialists check in on officers after they deal with certain critical incidents and try to emphasize to officers that it’s OK to sometimes not be OK — an effort to chip away at decades of stigma against mental health.

But even those programs have funding shortages and coverage gaps. At HCSO, retired officers are one demographic that is top of mind for Dr. Thomas McNeese, who runs the agency’s Behavioral Health Division that was launched in 2020.

Retired officers are not typically checked on even though they are particularly vulnerable to mental health issues. They suddenly “lose their identity, their social connections, all these different things,” McNeese said, and they are suddenly confronted with an excess of time to process years of accumulated trauma.

Of the four Harris County officers who committed suicide recently, three were retired deputies: Long Nguyen died on Feb. 6, Maria Vasquez on March 16 and William Bozeman on March 19. HCSO Deputy Christina Kohler, who worked in the courts division, died on March 13. All four killed themselves in the same manner, according to the Harris County medical examiner.

The four suicides were not connected, McNeese said. The officers had worked in different divisions and may not have even known one another.

Their deaths occurred as the number of suicides among Texas law enforcement officers had been dropping since 2022’s high of at least 19, based on data collected by the nonprofit Blue HELP. But those statistics are incomplete, since law enforcement agencies are not required to collect data on suicides. Even an FBI database that tracks officer suicides is based only on data submitted voluntarily by agencies.

And suicides are not the only marker of mental health problems. Across the state, police departments, jails and the state prisons face a critical staffing shortage fueled by low retention rates.

“The main reason most jails can’t staff their buildings is because of the conditions they work in,” said Johnny Jaquess, president of the Texas Jail Association. “There’s an incredible amount of stress. We see humanity at its worst.”

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice has asked the Texas Legislature for $37.5 million for staff retention initiatives, including funding for employees to access mental health professionals to work through the aftermath of critical incidents such as inmate assaults in the agency’s roughly 100 state prisons. Since 2022, six TDCJ employees have committed suicide, according to data provided by the agency.

Lawmakers are also considering House Bill 2103, which would expand a mental health leave policy for jailers and correctional officers. Currently, the policy only applies to peace officers and tele-communicators.

Being mentally stable is important in any line of work, but it’s mandatory for law enforcement officers. The Texas Commission on Law Enforcement, which sets rules for peace officer and jailer training, requires that officers complete a psychological evaluation before they can obtain their license.

Officers have been unlikely to ask for support out of fear of retaliation, whether through a demotion to desk duty or a revocation of their license, several law enforcement officers said.

“I come from the tough guy mentality,” Schellenger said. “That tough guy mentality is part of the reason my friends didn’t survive.”

In Harris County, McNeese says his team has made progress tackling this fear by proactively offering support to officers after they deal with critical incidents, including child abuse cases or homicides.

“Initially, an officer may not have made eye contact because they didn’t want to act like they knew us,” McNeese said. “Now, they come up and say ‘hey, Doc, they’ve really helped me.’ That wouldn’t have happened years ago.”

Under state law, officers’ participation in peer support cannot serve as the basis for revocation, suspension or denial of a license.

The Texas Law Enforcement Peer Network allows officers to find anonymous support from officers outside their own agency. Officers can download a free, secure app and then connect via phone or text with a peer hundreds of miles away in another region of Texas. About 900 trained peer support officers are currently active, according to Schellenger, who has been the director of the program since its inception.

The average response time is less than 5 minutes. Officers also can get connected to clinicians who have been screened for cultural competency and understand the particular stresses facing law enforcement officers.

“We want to make sure that when the cop has the courage to ask for help they can get the help they need,” Schellenger said.

About 2,400 officers in Texas have downloaded the app since December 2024, according to a report to the Legislature. That number has increased to about 4,000 since then, Schellenger said, but is still a small fraction of Texas’ 82,000 licensed peace officers and 24,500 jailers.

“We will bend over backwards to help, but a lot of times our message isn’t reaching,” Schellenger said, adding that he often meets officers who have never heard of the program.

The initiative was created with a $2.5 million legislative appropriation. A representative from TCOLE, which operates the program through a contract with the University of North Texas at Dallas, said funding to expand or increase marketing of the program hasn’t been requested from the Legislature.

Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas, is carrying a bill that would require TCOLE to also run a peer support program for telecommunicators, who are not supported through the app. Schellenger said he backs the proposed legislation and also would like to see a similar expansion to retired officers — though he likely would need more money to operate them.

In the Collin County Sheriff’s Office, an internal peer support program was launched after a law enforcement officer died from COVID-19 a few years ago, said Tami McCullough, who runs the program. It operates similarly to the statewide program, offering peer-to-peer conversations and steering those who need more help to psychologists or other mental help hotlines.

McCullough said she needs more money to offer in-depth training to officers who volunteer as peer support officers. Those peers are tasked with helping jailers as young as 18 years old deal with the emotional aftermath of inmate violence, mental illness and self-harm.

“We have to take care of our peer support officers, as well,” McCullough said. “They are going through their own stress on top of taking on this monumental task of taking on other people’s stress.”

Faced with other challenges, such as a shortage of bed space for the state’s growing jail population, “the county isn’t going to fund us,” McCullough said. “So we just kind of limp along and do what we can do.”

In 2023, Gov. Greg Abbott signed House Bill 3858, which required the Health and Human Services Commission to establish and administer a grant program to help law enforcement agencies create a peace officer wellness program. Lawmakers did not fund the program, however, and nothing came of it.

The budget for the upcoming biennium includes a $3 million allocation for a peace officer wellness program that would be housed within the governor’s office. Law enforcement officers are hopeful it will get Abbott’s approval. Abbott did not respond to an inquiry about whether he supports the program.

That funding also could help large agencies like HCSO reach more officers. Currently, wellness checks are targeted to officers who deal with “critical incidents.” But routine visits can be equally traumatic, said Ramirez, the former Dallas assistant police chief.

“The most difficult part of our jobs is not bullets, it’s not the bad guys,” Ramirez said. “It’s the proximity we stand to other people’s grief, other people’s tragedies, other people’s sadness.”

After several Dallas police officers were arrested on drunken driving or public intoxication charges between 2021 and 2022, Ramirez was tasked with assessing the state of wellness in the department. What he found was not good, he said. Officers did not trust peer support, and proactive checks on officers’ mental health were absent.

“The most difficult part is the sound of screaming mothers at homicide scenes, the contorted bodies at car crashes and seeing what metal glass and asphalt can do to a human body,” Ramirez said he learned through his assessment. “We don’t have anything in place to support our men and women when they go to fatalities or to suicides or car crashes — those are titled routine calls.”

Ramirez helped launch a wellness unit in Dallas County and retired in December. Since then, he has helped other agencies of varying sizes implement a similar program he has named Checkpoints. The program seeks to flip the script on officer wellness, proactively calling officers after routine calls instead of waiting for them to ask for help.

He said he hopes to see Texas law enforcement agencies lead the country on making that proactive model the norm.

“We should just assume that the cumulative effect of exposure to [trauma] will have a negative consequence if not mitigated,” he said. “Our men and women deserve a preventative strategy.”

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

EL PASO — The wind swept through El Paso one day in March, lifting a fine layer of dust that settled onto windshields, clothes and skin. The air was thick with haze from a dust storm. This border city, perched on the edge of the Chihuahuan Desert, receives on average less than 9 inches of rain each year.

Water in the city of 679,000 people is a challenge.

Inside El Paso’s Kay Bailey Hutchison Desalination Plant, Hector Sepúlveda, the plant’s superintendent, walks through rows of towering steel tubes as a loud hum vibrates through the air. This machinery is essential to providing thousands in the city with clean water.

“This is a desert community,” Sepúlveda said. “So the water utilities have to always think ahead and be very resourceful and very smart and find resources to take the water that we do have here and provide for a desert community.”

Sepúlveda says the city’s dry climate, compounded by dwindling ground and surface water supplies and climate change has made innovation essential. A key piece of that strategy is desalination — the process of removing salt and other minerals from seawater or salty groundwater so people can drink it.

When it opened in 2007, El Paso’s desalination plant was the largest inland desalination facility in the world. It was built through a partnership between El Paso Water and Fort Bliss, one of the nation’s largest military bases, when water shortages threatened the base’s operations. Today, at max capacity the plant can supply up to 27.5 million gallons per day — helping stretch the city’s supply by making use of the region’s abundance of brackish groundwater, salty groundwater with salinity levels higher than freshwater, but lower than seawater.

The city wants to expand the plant’s capacity to 33.5 million gallons per day by 2028. El Pasoans used about 105 million gallons per day last year.

As Texas faces twin pressures of population growth and prolonged drought, lawmakers are looking to desalination as a way forward. The Texas Legislature took a major step in 2023, creating the New Water Supply for Texas Fund, to support desalination projects — including both brackish and seawater. This legislative session, lawmakers are pushing to accelerate that effort with a bill by state Sen. Charles Perry, a Lubbock Republican, that could dedicate millions for new water projects, including desalination. Senate Bill 7 cleared the upper chamber earlier this month and is now awaiting a House committee’s consideration.

“We’ve developed all the cheap water, and all the low-hanging fruit has been obtained. There is no more of it, and it’s depleting what’s left. We’re going into the second phase of water development through brackish marine, brackish produced water and brackish aquifers,” Perry said on the Senate floor before his colleagues gave the legislation unanimous approval.

Sixty municipal water desalination facilities are already online, according to the Texas Water Development Board, the state agency that helps manage and finance water supply projects. Of those, 43 desalinate brackish groundwater. El Paso’s is the largest.

As of December 2024, the agency had designated 31 brackish groundwater sites as production zones, meaning they have moderate to high availability of brackish groundwater to treat. The board’s 2022 state water plan proposes implementing an additional 37 brackish groundwater desalination projects in South Texas cities like McAllen, Mission, San Benito; and West Texas towns like Abilene and Midland.

The plan states that if all recommended strategies are used, groundwater desalination could make up about 2.1% of the state’s projected water needs by producing 157,000 acre-feet per year by 2070 — enough to support 942,000 Texans for one year.

Still, desalination isn’t without tradeoffs. The technology takes a lot of energy, and construction costs can be steep. There are also several factors to consider that affect the final price tag: How deep the water lies, how salty it is, how far it needs to travel, and how to dispose of the leftover salty waste.

The water board estimates treating brackish groundwater can run anywhere from $357 to $782 per acre-foot, while seawater desalination ranges from $800 to $1,400. Lawmakers say water funding at a state-level is critical to help communities shoulder the upfront costs of these alternative water supplies.

Sepúlveda, who has spent more than 30 years with El Paso Water, says the process at the desalination plant begins with brackish groundwater drawn from 15 wells near the El Paso International Airport. The salty water is transported to the plant where it is first filtered through strainers to remove sand particles. Then it is transported through cartridge filters. This process is similar to how household water filters work, but far more efficient.

The cartridge filters trap fine sediments smaller than a strand of hair, further filtering the water before it reaches the heart of the system: reverse osmosis, often referred to as RO membranes.

Sepúlveda, who wears a blue construction hat and highlighter yellow vest, stands amid a room full of long rows of stacked steel tubes, or RO membrane units. Here, brackish groundwater gets turned into fresh, drinkable water. It’s pumped through these tubes — each with 72 vessels — at extremely high pressure, leaving behind salt and bacteria.

“We’re separating the undesirable stuff from the potable water,” he said, as he opened a faucet and sipped the water. “At the end you end up with safe drinking water. The process is just amazing.”

Once cleaned, the water is divided between El Paso Water customers and Fort Bliss. Sepúlveda said they will soon expand the plant to produce 33.5 million gallons per day by adding a sixth row of RO membranes.

The brine, or concentrated salty water left over from the process, is pumped 22 miles to deep well injection sites. The desal plant can separate up to 3 million gallons of brine a day. At the site, the concentrate is sent 3,500 feet underground into a fractured rock formation.

While brackish groundwater desalination has proven to be a viable solution for inland communities like El Paso, environmentalists are raising concerns about the potential consequences of scaling up the water strategy.

Seawater desalination is gaining attention as Gulf Coast cities like Corpus Christi start developing their own seawater desalination facility.

For seawater desalination, Shane Walker, professor and director of a water research center at Texas Tech University, says the main concern is removing the excess salt. While most of the salinity comes from dissolved minerals that aren’t harmful, Walker says, high concentrations — think of over-salted French fries — can harm marine life and disrupt coastal ecosystems.

Seawater is much saltier than brackish water and salt levels vary widely depending on the source.

In seawater desalination, the brine byproduct — which can be twice as salty as seawater — is often discharged back into the ocean. If not properly managed, this can increase salinity in bays and estuaries, threatening species like oysters, crabs and shrimp that are critical to local fisheries and ecosystems.

Myron Hess, an environmental consultant for the nonprofit National Wildlife Federation, said that when plants take in water it could potentially suck in marine creatures with the ocean water.

“As you’re diverting particularly massive amounts of water, you can be pulling in lots of organisms,” Hess said.

For inland facilities like the Kay Bailey Hutchison plant, the environmental concerns are different. They don’t kill marine life, but disposal is still a concern.

In El Paso, Art Ruiz, chief plant manager for El Paso Water and the former superintendent of the utility’s desalination plant, calls this disposal “chemistry salts” and says that disposal is handled through deep well injection into an isolated part of the aquifer. Ruiz said El Paso is blessed with a geological formation that has a natural fault that prevents the concentrate from migrating and contaminating the freshwater supply. In regions where this is not feasible, evaporation ponds are used, but they require large amounts of land and careful management to prevent environmental hazards.

“Deep well injection is a common method used for larger desalination facilities, but the geology has to be right,” Walker said. “You have to ensure that the injection site is isolated and won’t contaminate freshwater aquifers.”

Another concern raised by water experts is how Texas manages brackish groundwater and whether the state is doing enough to protect nearby freshwater sources. Senate Bill 2658 proposes to exempt certain brackish groundwater wells located within state-designated production zones from needing a permit. Experts say the move would bypass a permitting process in the state’s water code that was specifically designed to safeguard freshwater aquifers.

The central worry is that brackish and fresh groundwater are often hydrologically connected. While brackish groundwater can be an important part of the state’s water portfolio, Vanessa Puig-Williams, a water expert with the Environmental Defense Fund, says there’s a real risk that pumping brackish water could unintentionally start drawing in and depleting nearby fresh water if oversight is not required from local groundwater conservation districts.

Experts also caution that the production zones identified by the water board weren’t designed to guide site-specific decisions, such as how much a well can safely pump or whether it could affect nearby freshwater supplies.

Hess, consulting for the National Wildlife Federation, authored a paper on the impacts of desalination, including the price tag. Constructing a facility is costly, as is the energy it takes to run it. El Paso’s desalination facility cost $98.3 million, including the production and injection wells construction, $26 million of which it received in federal funding.

The technology to clean the water is energy intensive. Desalinating water in El Paso costs about $500 per acre-foot of water — 46% more than treating surface water from a river. Seawater facilities require even more energy, which adds to the costs in producing or cleaning the water. TWDB estimates those range from $800 to $1,400 per acre-foot.

Texas has no operating seawater desalination plants for municipal use, but the state’s environmental agency, Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, has authorized permits for two marine desalination facilities and has four pending applications for seawater desalination facilities, three in Corpus Christi and one in Port Isabel.

“The first seawater plant in Texas is going to be expensive,” Walker said. “The first time somebody does something, it’s going to cost way more than the other ones that come along behind it, because we’re having to figure out all the processes and procedures to do it the first time.”

Back at the Kay Bailey Hutchison plant in El Paso, Sepúlveda, the plant’s superintendent, walks into a lab opened to students and professors from the University of Texas at El Paso, New Mexico State University, and Rice University to test new technologies to help refine the desalination processes or extend the lifespan of RO membranes.

Sepúlveda said water utility employees have learned a lot since 2007 when the plant first opened. RO membranes, used to clean the salty water, cost anywhere from $600 to $800. El Paso uses 360 RO membranes to run its plant. To extend the life from five to 12 years, utility employees figured out a system by checking salinity levels before extracting from a certain well.

“When we first bring water in from the brackish wells, we know how salty each well is, so we try to bring in the wells that are less salty to not put the membranes under such stress,” he said. “It almost doubled the life of the membrane.”

He added that this technique is also helping plant operators reduce energy consumption. Plant operators have adjusted salinity levels by blending the brackish groundwater with less salty water, which helps prevent pipe corrosion and clogging.

Their pipes are also now winterized. After the 2011 freeze, El Paso upgraded insulation and installed heat tape to protect equipment.

As Texas moves forward with more desalination projects, Sepúlveda said the lessons from El Paso will be critical as more plants go online.

“You always have to be forward-thinking. Always have to be innovative,” he said, as the machines buzzed in the background. “You always have to be on top of the latest technological improvements to be able to extract water from whatever scant resources you have.”

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

AUSTIN (ABC) – Multiple people were injured on Sunday when a two-story house collapsed in Austin, Texas, and at least 23 other homes were damaged after witnesses reported hearing a huge explosion, authorities said.

The two-story house collapsed in northwest Austin around 11:23 a.m. local time, according to the Austin Fire Department.

“When Austin Fire Department crews arrived on scene they found a two-story home that looked like it had suffered an explosion, which was leveled to the ground,” Division Chief Wayne Parrish of the Austin Fire Department said at a news conference Sunday afternoon. “A second house, a neighboring house, had also suffered severe collapse damage.”

Parrish said firefighters also found a vehicle on fire outside the house that was completely flattened

“They extinguished the car fire and there was also some smaller spot fires occurring in the debris,” Parish said.

Firefighters extricated one critically injured person and another seriously injured person from the home that was leveled by the explosion, said Capt. Shannon Koesterer, spokesperson for Austin-Travis County EMS. Koesterer said a second critically injured person was extricated from the home next door, which partially collapsed in the explosion.

Koesterer said another adult patient was treated at the scene for minor injures and that two firefighters, including one who was hospitalized, suffered minor injuries while working at the scene.

“As far as we know, we have accounted for everybody that was in all of the residences,” Parrish said.