Skip to main content

This Texas Community Has Waited Decades for Running Water. Could Hydro-Panels Help? [insideclimatenews.org]

 

Olga Thomas and other residents of Hueco Tanks rely on a private company to haul water to their neighborhood. Now she can count on her hydro panels for drinking water. Credit: Omar Ornelas/El Paso Times

By Martha Pskowski, Inside Climate News, June 5, 2023

Olga Thomas has a story about every plant in her garden. The creosote that her mother would brew into a medicinal tea. The ocotillo planted from seed that now towers over her. The prickly pear cactus that blooms yellow each spring.

Thomas, 72, began her garden in the late 1990s when she moved to a “colonia” 30 miles from downtown El Paso called Hueco Tanks. She raised her five children on this patch of land in the Chihuahuan Desert, transforming the rugged two-acre plot into a home.

“It’s my little sanctuary, my oasis out here,” she said.

Hueco Tanks is among the dozens of colonias—unincorporated communities mostly in border counties—in Texas where low-income, Latino residents still are not connected to municipal water. But now, Thomas has a source of safe drinking water at home for the first time.

[Please click here to read more.]

Add Comment

Comments (0)

Post
Copyright © 2023, PACEsConnection. All rights reserved.
×
×
×
×
Link copied to your clipboard.
×