Originally Posted: November 17, 2016
A white Chevy Suburban with “Railroad Commission of Texas” emblazoned on its side rolled north on Interstate 35. Behind the wheel sat Milton Rister, the commission’s director.
Trim and balding, Rister was a veteran political operator who had held influential positions within the Texas Republican Party for decades. He could smell political disaster from miles away – and this one reeked. As he neared the town of Azle, northwest of Dallas, Rister said to himself: Please let there be only 50 people there.
For weeks, telephones at commission headquarters in Austin had been ringing about earthquakes hitting Azle, which had never felt a quake before. Suddenly, ground was shaking under hayfields and homes, rattling windows, knocking pictures off shelves, and sending frightened children into their parents’ beds at night. One woman said her hens had quit laying eggs.
With more than 20 tremors in two months, locals wanted to know: were oil and gas operations causing this? What was the state’s energy regulator, the inaptly named Railroad Commission, going to do about it?
As the Suburban pulled in front of Azle High School, Rister surveyed the scene with dread. He had arrived an hour early for a public meeting on the quakes, but cars already filled the parking lot. A line of news trucks pointed their satellite dishes skyward.
Not good, Rister thought. His agency had no answers for the nearly 900 people packing the auditorium.
Their tone was angry. “I have citizens with cracks in their walls, they have foundation cracks,” said the mayor of Reno, a nearby hamlet. “City Hall itself has cracks in the floor in the council chambers.”
What, Mayor Lynda Stokes wanted to know, was she supposed to tell people?
After an hour and a half of hostile questions, the sole railroad commissioner present disappeared down a back hallway. In damage-control mode, Rister stood before reporters.
“Obviously these folks have experienced traumatic events, and we recognize that,” Rister, then 62, said in his mild Central Texas accent. “We’re going to go back and take what we learned tonight from these people, work with the experts that are doing studies, and see if we can come up with the next step.”
In the end, that’s not what happened. READ MORE