The Texas attorney general finally filed suit last year. Still, some residents in Toyah say the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality was “negligent” and want to know what took so long.
This story was reported and produced in collaboration with Mitch Borden, a reporter at Marfa Public Radio.
By Martha Pskowski, Inside Climate News, March 15, 2023
TOYAH, Texas—It all began simply enough: A boil water notice was issued. A state inspection followed. A list of violations arrived. It’s a well-known pattern in small Texas towns that struggle to maintain their water systems.
But there was nothing simple about Toyah’s water woes, which were years in the making and remain unresolved. A boil water notice issued in June 2018 is still in effect. In the shadow of the country’s most prosperous oil and gas fields, the residents of Toyah, many low-income and Hispanic, have gone nearly five years without safe drinking water.
Elida “Angel” Machuca, a former city council member and mother of two, has made it her mission to expose Toyah’s water crisis. She holds the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) responsible for allowing the town to stall and remain out of compliance with hundreds of drinking water violations it filed against Toyah over the past five years.
It wasn’t until Sept. 30, 2022, that at TCEQ’s request, the Texas Attorney General brought a civil suit against Toyah to place the public water utility in a receivership.
After years of agitating, Machuca is finally seeing results. But residents still have no clear answer of when the water will be safe to drink.
A cascade of mistakes and mismanagement has left this small West Texas town without safe drinking water, Inside Climate News and Marfa Public Radio found in reporting that included over a dozen interviews and a review of hundreds of pages of public records.
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