Southwest (AZ NM OK TX)

"Covid-19 ravaged Indigenous tribes in New Mexico. State and federal data reveal how a long legacy of uranium exposure may have made them uniquely vulnerable."

"Fifth Ward and Kashmere Gardens residents have been fighting for years to get hazardous creosote chemicals cleaned up from the ground and groundwater around their homes. But creosote might not have been the only harmful substance that workers used at the rail yard in the neighborhood, and it might not have been the most dangerous."

"PORT ARTHUR, Tex. — On any given day at the Prince Hall apartment complex, the breeze might carry soot and stink of burning tar. Black smoke might billow overhead as excess gas is burned at one of the refineries directly across the road. The fumes make Ariel Watson’s head ache until she can barely think. Jeremy Roy, 9, closes his windows against air that “stinks like farts.”"

"Streets and highways around Dallas remained waterlogged Monday afternoon after flash floods struck the Dallas-Fort Worth area overnight, leaving at least one person dead. Signs of flooding lingered even after the rain mostly cleared from the metroplex."

"Chevron-sponsored Permian Proud is providing community news (and corporate propaganda) in one of Texas' most news-starved regions."

"The future of Texas’ troubled electric grid is being decided in the dark, with zero public input, by a group of people with deep connections to the fossil fuel industry."

"EPA is opening two civil rights investigations of Texas’ environmental agency, exploring whether state regulators failed to properly permit concrete batch plants and discriminated against people who speak limited English."

"On a recent, scorching afternoon in Albuquerque, off-road vehicles cruised up and down a stretch of dry riverbed where normally the Rio Grande flows. The drivers weren’t thrill-seekers, but biologists hoping to save as many endangered fish as they could before the sun turned shrinking pools of water into dust."