Texas could experience more than a week of record heat
(NEW YORK) — Texas has been baking in record heat since the weekend, and Wednesday will be no exception. Another day of record highs is possible.
Houston was one of the cities in Texas that hit the hottest day of the year on Tuesday, reaching 102 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the National Weather Service.
Several Texas cities either tied or broke heat records on Tuesday. Del Rio hit 108 degrees; 104 degrees in Borger; 102 degrees in Amarillo and Corpus Christi; and 98 degrees in Galveston.
More record highs are forecast Wednesday in Abilene at 109 degrees and San Antonio at 106 degrees.
Heat indexes around San Antonio could peak near 114 degrees, with a stray storm possible in the afternoon during the hottest part of the day, ABC News San Antonio affiliate KSAT reported.
Gusty winds and lightning are possible, but most of the region will remain dry, KSAT reported.
Parts of Texas will continue seeing some of the hottest weather of the year Thursday through the end of the week, forecasts show.
Record high temperatures are also forecast for Roswell, New Mexico, at 105 degrees, on Wednesday.
Texas is not alone in extreme heat. Heat Alerts have been issued for Florida, Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico, where some areas could see a heat index as high as 116 degrees.
(MOSCOW, Idaho) — The suspect in the murder of four University of Idaho students, Bryan Kohberger, returned to court Thursday as the judge weighs whether to change the venue for his trial.
Kohberger’s lawyers hope to move the trial to a different county, arguing the local jury pool in Latah County, which encompasses the college town of Moscow, was tainted by pretrial publicity.
Defense lawyers surveyed Latah County residents and said their results found that the “pressure to convict” Kohberger was shown to be “so severe” the venue couldn’t possibly be impartial.
The defense said one respondent answered they would “burn the courthouse down” if he were not convicted. The same survey, according to the defense, found “much less emotional” responses from people living closer to Boise, where Kohberger’s lawyers suggested the trial be moved.
“The traumatized town of Moscow is understandably filled with deeply held prejudgment opinions of guilt,” defense attorney Elisa Massoth said in a filing this month.
The prosecution has said the case has national and international interest, and that the case has been covered plenty in Boise, so a change of venue would not solve any problem.
Prosecutors argued in a filing this month that the defense “failed to establish that a fair and impartial trial cannot be held in Latah County.”
Victim Kaylee Goncalves’ family wants the trial to stay in Latah County.
To Kaylee Goncalves’ mom, Kristi Goncalves, all Latah County citizens are victims.
She recalled seeing a huge crowd of people, some crying, at the University of Idaho’s healing garden, which opened to the public last week.
The local residents “deserve to have a hand in part of the healing and part of the justice,” she told ABC News Thursday.
“Anybody can find 12 people that can go into that courtroom without their mind made up. It’s America,” added Kaylee Goncalves’ dad, Steve Goncalves.
Moscow Mayor Art Bettge said in a statement last week that, if the case stayed in Latah County, “I firmly believe people would be able to set aside any personal feelings they have … set aside any information they may have read or heard … and make a determination of guilty or not guilty based on the evidence presented in the courtroom and deliberate according to the instructions provided to them.”
The trial is scheduled to start on June 2, 2025, and run until Aug. 29, 2025. Judge John Judge said in June that if the venue changes, the trial date would still hold.
Kohberger is accused of stabbing four University of Idaho students to death in an off-campus house in the early hours of Nov. 13, 2022. Ethan Chapin, 20; Madison Mogen, 21; Xana Kernodle, 20, and Goncalves, 21, were all brutally murdered during the break-in.
Kohberger, who was a criminology Ph.D. student at nearby Washington State University at the time of the crime, is charged with four counts of first-degree murder and one count of burglary.
A not guilty plea was entered on Kohberger’s behalf. If convicted, he could face the death penalty.
ABC News’ Sasha Pezenik and Julie Scott contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — When Jill Antares Hunkler purchased land in Belmont County, Ohio, in 2007, she never envisioned her home would be surrounded by 78 oil and gas fracking wells a decade later, she said.
“I wanted to build my home where I had roots,” Hunkler, a seventh-generation Ohio Valley resident, told ABC News. “It was a place where I could live a more traditional, natural life.”
Hunkler’s three-acre property at the headwaters of the Captina Creek Watershed was one of hundreds in the area that she said became a magnet for fracking.
Her property sits on the Utica and Marcellus Shales in the Appalachian Basin, geologic formations known to hold large reserves of oil and natural gas.
As of April 2024, the Marcellus Shale contained about 120 million barrels of oil, while the Utica Shale contained 2.3 million barrels, according to the United States Geological Survey.
There are 1,625 fracking wells in Belmont Country this year, which marks a 25% increase from 2023, according to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR), which oversees unitization orders in the state.
Hunkler said when oil and gas representatives called “landmen” came knocking on her door, calling her home and sending repeated notices, she learned of the state’s unitization laws. The fate of her land was largely out of her hands, she said.
“To be perfectly honest, it makes me cry even now,” Hunkler said.
What is unitization?
Unitization is the consolidation of multiple land parcels into a single operational unit for fracking, according to ODNR.
Instead of drilling multiple wells on separate properties, which can be inefficient, unitization combines adjacent properties over a pool to allow for a more coordinated approach to extracting oil or gas.
Because it’s multiple properties, most neighbors in the area must apply to lease their land, according to state law.
In Ohio, 65% of property owners in a project area must sign an application to lease their property for drilling before going forward, according to ODNR.
This leaves a population of dissenting or “non-participatory” landowners forced into fracking in the area, even if it’s not on their property.
Unitization has been legal in Ohio since 1965, however, the last decade has seen unitization orders surge to meet fracking demands.
The ODNR enacted 112 unitization orders in 2022 and nearly 100 in 2023, according to ODNR records.
Before 2021, which saw 73 unitization orders, ODNR enacted less than 50 orders per year between 2012 and 2020, according to records.
Negotiating a lease
Proponents believe fracking brings jobs back to the region, which historically relied on coal and steel manufacturing, and gives residents the opportunity to make passive income by leasing land.
“Natural gas production has been tremendously profitable for Ohio,” state Sen. George Lang and two researchers said in a 2023 press release posted on the Ohio Senate website. “The shale revolution has been the greatest driver of the state’s economic progress since the late 1990s. Ohio now ranks sixth among states in natural gas production, exporting to our neighbors and the world.”
Ohio law states landowners must make “just and reasonable” compensation for leasing sites, which can vary based on location, under state law.
In 2024, some local drillers reported paying landowners an average of $500 per acre, but lease bonus payments in southeast Ohio can range from $3,000–$6,000 per acre, according to McCleery Law Firm, which provides consultation and legal services to landowners considering entering, or impacted by, a leasing agreement.
“It is also an area where landowners are chronically exploited,” the firm says in their “Landowner’s Guide.”
“This is because landmen usually offer significantly less per acre if they suspect you lack knowledge of the market. Without knowledge of fair market value, an increase of two thousand dollars per acre might seem advantageous, when in reality, the starting offer was simply egregiously low,” the firm claims.
Property owners also receive royalties on the gas produced, which typically begins at 12.5%, according to ODNR.
Echoing Hunkler’s story, a study published this month in Nature Energy reviewed detailed records of landmen’s dealings with 37 property owners in Ohio to investigate how they may be disadvantaged in lease negotiations.
The records spanned from January 2014 and April 2021, which saw a boom of fracking increases in the state, according to the study.
Researchers found that companies used persistent and personal strategies to overcome landowner reluctance, such as repeated in-person visits, calls and in some cases, contacting their family members and neighbors.
The study cited a log of contact between a landman and a property owner in Noble County, Ohio.
“When their calls go unanswered, they send letters. When those are returned with ‘REFUSED’ handwritten across them, landmen drive to her house. When she refuses to answer the door, they speak to her neighbours and family members,” according to the study.
When property owners refused all requests, the study found widespread use of compulsory unitization.
“In roughly 40% of the wells drilled in Ohio, compulsory unitization applications were used because voluntary consent from landowners was not obtained,” according to the study.
The Ohio Department of Natural Resources did not comment on claims against oil and gas agents to ABC News.
Changed way of life
“People that don’t live in southeast Ohio have no concept of what it’s like,” Randi Pokladnik, a lifelong resident of the Ohio River Valley and retired research chemist, told ABC News about fracking in the area.
“It sounds like a jet engine in the middle of the night and you can smell the emissions. It’s a constant barrage of sand trucks and fracking trucks with brine in them,” Pokladnik said.
She unaffectionately calls the nightly traffic the “brine truck parade.”
Pokladnik and her husband own property in Tappan, Ohio, and despite denying leasing requests from oil and gas representatives for over a decade, in February, Pokladnik’s property was “force pooled” to participate without their consent.
“It made me sick to my stomach when I first got the notice in the mail that they were going to be doing this,” Pokladnik said.
“This is like the ultimate slap in the face for somebody who’s an environmentalist,” she added.
Environmental and health effects
In 2017, the Environmental Protection Agency found scientific evidence that fracking can potentially impact drinking water resources under some circumstances.
Chemicals used for fracking may travel through cracks in the rock into an underground drinking water source and contamination could also occur if a well is improperly installed, if chemicals are spilled from trucks or tanks or if flowback is not effectively contained, according to the agency.
The Yale School of Public Health found that fracking has led to heightened concerns about its impact on the environment and human health due to wastewater and greenhouse gas emissions.
In response to health and environmental concerns, Rob Brundrett, president of the Ohio Oil & Gas Association said companies work to ensure the safety of the properties they work on and the record stands for itself.
Speaking about conventional fracking wells Brundrett told Energy News Network, “The fact that there have been only three major incidents since 2018 is a testament to the industry’s rigorous safety standards and practices.”
“Considering that only .004% of Ohio oil and gas operations have had a major reportable incident during that timeframe, I would put our industry’s safety numbers against any other manual industry in Ohio,” he added.
The incidents include a gas leak, crude oil spill and a combustor fire, according to the outlet.
ODNR says it has addressed water well complaints since 1983 and none of the investigations revealed groundwater quality problems due to fracking, the department said in a fracking fact sheet.
However, Pokladnik believes that the effects of fracking in the Ohio River Valley are not in a bubble and should be considered by everyone.
“There’s not a dome over these well pads and everything that we do here is eventually going to cause more climate change,” Pokladnik said.
“So even though you’re not living here and you won’t have to worry about drinking contaminated water or breathing these emissions directly, it is affecting your life,” she added.
(HILO, Hawaii) — Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano, one of the most active in the world, is erupting again, prompting a volcano watch alert in surrounding areas, according to officials.
The eruption is occurring within a remote area of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, according to the U.S. Geological Survey’s (USGS) Hawaiian Volcano Observatory.
Lava began flowing from a new fissure vent that opened from east to west within the volcano’s Nāpau Crater early Tuesday morning, the USGS said.
Several lava fountains about 32 feet high and pools of lava on the floor of the crater were observed by helicopters flying over the eruption Tuesday morning.
A separate fissure west of the Nāpau Crater began emitting lava on Monday, stopping after a few hours and then resuming activity later that evening, according to the USGS, which also noted that the eruption was preceded by a sequence of below-ground earthquakes.
About 17 earthquakes were detected beneath the Kilauea summit region between Monday and Tuesday. The earthquakes occurred at depths between .6 and 1.9 miles below the ground surface, the USGS said.
The USGS issued a volcano watch – known as a code orange – which means that an eruption is either likely or occurring but with no, or minor, ash.
There is no immediate threat to life or infrastructure, but residents nearby may experience volcanic gas emissions related to the eruption, the USGS said.
Yet hazards remain around the Kilauea caldera from the instability of the Halemaʻumaʻu crater wall, the USGS said. Ground cracking and rockfalls can be enhanced by earthquakes.
Volcanic smog, known as vog, presents airborne health hazards to people and livestock and has the potential to damage agricultural crops and other plants, according to the USGS.
The USGS further warned that additional ground cracking and outbreaks of lava around the active and inactive fissures in Kilauea are also possible.
Another potential hazard is Pele’s hair, a volcanic glass formation produced from cooled lava that’s stretched into thin strands. The USGS warns that winds could carry lighter particles from the strands downwind. Contact with the particles can cause skin and eye irritation, according to the USGS.
Eruptions at Kilauea have been destructive in the past. In 2018, more than 600 properties were destroyed by heavy lava flow that stretched from the Kilauea summit to the ocean.
Unusual eruptions that were described as being similar to a “stomp-rocket toy,” a children’s toy that involves launching a rocket into the air after stomping on the release mechanism, contributed to the severity of the lava flow and could potentially impact future eruptions, according to a paper published earlier this year in Nature Geosciences.
The area surrounding the rim of Kilauea’s Halemaʻumaʻu crater has been closed to the public since 2008 due to the hazards.
ABC News’ Bonnie Mclean contributed to this report.