4 votes

The Permian Basin is booming with oil. But at what cost to West Texans?

1 comment

  1. patience_limited
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    I had to visit Odessa in 2014, just before the last bust. On the night flight from Midland, it was like seeing the suburbs of Hades - thousands of gas flares in every direction, as far as the eye...

    I had to visit Odessa in 2014, just before the last bust.

    On the night flight from Midland, it was like seeing the suburbs of Hades - thousands of gas flares in every direction, as far as the eye could see.

    It's literally the worst place I've ever been in the continental U.S. - shabby, decrepit buildings and roads, foul air and water, but insanely, bizarrely expensive. A budget hotel room was $500/night, a basic burger restaurant at $30/plate, the rental car was $100/day... Basically, everything was triple or higher than the usual prices elsewhere. People talked about renting a single room in a trailer for $1,000/month, as if that was a bargain. I hadn't known of anything like this outside of history books about gold rushes.

    Beyond the article, I was there for a hospital acquisition, and the conditions in the neonatal intensive care unit told an even more devastating story. About a third of the babies had fetal alcohol or neonatal abstinence syndromes, there was an astonishingly high proportion of births (about 10%) that required various levels of intensive care, and the maternal mortality rate was skyhigh even for Texas.

    Humans shouldn't have to live like this.

    3 votes