When it rains here, West Texans brace for the worst. With nowhere to go, water collects across sidewalks, roads and highways — the flat, desert landscape becomes a wetland in the blink of an eye.

Local officials in Ector County, which includes Odessa, said the region’s drainage system is out of date. But paying for upgrades will be a tremendous challenge.

Population, housing and commercial development have spiked, and the infrastructure has not kept up. Its drainage system, installed in the 1970s, is not equipped to handle the growth, county officials said.

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Near the back corner of the local library’s parking lot, largely out of view from the main road, the South Carolina Department of Public Health opened a pop-up clinic in early November, offering free measles vaccines to adults and children.

Spartanburg County, in South Carolina’s Upstate region, has been fighting a measles outbreak since early October, with more than 50 cases identified. Health officials have encouraged people who are unvaccinated to get a shot by visiting its mobile vaccine clinic at any of its several stops throughout the county.

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The farmers and ranchers who descended on City Hall in Jacksonville, Texas, had been told to “leave their pitchforks at the door.” While everyone ultimately arrived unarmed, the attendees of the June 19 board meeting of the Neches & Trinity Valleys Groundwater Conservation District were ready for a fight.

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For most of this year, Texas Tribune reporters have aggressively reported on the state’s water supply crisis. As part of our special report, Running Out, we created a chatbot that we trained to answer your questions based on our reporting.

Y’all asked a lot of questions! And in some instances, the bot could not answer those questions. Technology! Can’t live with it, can’t live without it. Those queries were sent to us. We read each one and began to see some themes.

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President Donald Trump and officials in his administration say National Guard troops are needed in “War ravaged” Portland, Oregon, to protect a local Immigration and Customs Enforcement office that he described as being under siege.

But a ProPublica review found a wide gap between the reality on the ground and the characterizations by the president and the Department of Homeland Security, which said ICE facilities like Portland’s were under “coordinated assault by violent groups.”

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As President Trump approaches the one year mark in office, apprehensions at the southern border have dropped significantly. States along the southern border, including Texas, Arizona and California have seen significant reductions.

In 2025 so far, Customs and Border Protection has reported 443,671 land border encounters compared to more than two million encounters each year in 2022, 2023 and 2024.

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The city of Clyde sits about two hours west of Fort Worth on the plains of north Texas. It gets its water from a lake by the same name a few miles away. Starting in 2022, scorching weather caused its levels to drop further and further. Within a year, officials had declared a water conservation emergency and, on August 1 of last year, they raised the warning level again. That meant residents rationing their spigot use even more tightly, especially lawn irrigation. The restrictions weren’t, however, the worst news that day: The city also missed two debt payments.

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For years, Western leaders have debated the creation of a regional energy market: a coordinated grid to pool solar power in Arizona, wind in Wyoming, hydro in Washington and battery storage in California.

The shared resources would meet the demands of 11 different states, bolstering utilities’ local power plants with surplus energy from across the region.

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Mexico failed to deliver millions of gallons of water to South Texas farmers, in defiance of a 1944 treaty. Now, members of Texas’ congressional delegation are calling on the Trump administration to make Mexico’s failure a part of upcoming trade negotiations — including new sanctions if necessary.

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In recent years, hundreds of thousands of Californians have purchased home insurance from a state-managed “last resort” insurance pool that has grown rapidly as private insurance companies have fled the market.

Now, in the wake of the devastating Los Angeles wildfires earlier this year, the Fair Access to Insurance Requirements (FAIR) Plan is seeking approval from the state for an average 36% rate hike, which would further squeeze homeowners who have no other options for coverage.

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Major oil companies are drilling in East Texas again, but not for oil. This time, they’re after lithium for batteries and other rare elements.

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In this part of Texas, residents stock up on bottled water in between boil notices.  It’s part of life in a place where water pipes are old, corroded and falling apart. 

In the High Plains, near Lubbock, farmers worry that their groundwater wells will run dry.  

In North Texas, local elected leaders and business tycoons frantically search for new sources of water to meet the demand of a surging population.  

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The Trump administration has been given another week to make its case to withhold more than $33 million in counter-terrorism funds for New York City’s transit system. 

U.S. District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan has extended a temporary restraining order blocking the Department of Homeland Security from clawing back the grant funding approved by Congress for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority until at least Oct. 22, as the case plays out in court. Kaplan’s previous order was set to expire on Wednesday.

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Lawmakers in at least 16 states this year introduced bills to regulate the use of automated license plate readers responsible for collecting large amounts of data on drivers across the country.

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