Texas’ most dangerous border leads to New Mexico

[Elderberry]

Houston Chronicle by Jordan Blum 10/3/2019

CARLSBAD, N.M. — Texas’ most dangerous and unchecked border doesn’t lie to the south along the Rio Grande, but rather to the west, where the Permian Basin oil boom is expanding along narrow and deadly roads into rural New Mexico, driving breakneck growth with little oversight and not nearly enough highways, housing, health care and environmental air monitoring.

The Midland-Odessa area in West Texas remains the hub for the prolific oil field with about 350,000 people and some of the fastest economic growth in the country, but even greater change is occurring 150 miles away in this boomtown, where the population has nearly doubled to 75,000 people from 40,000 just a few years ago. Even as lackluster oil prices slow drilling and lower rig counts in Texas by 20 percent over the past year, New Mexico drillers have never been busier, increasing the number of operating rigs in the state by 10 percent to 110.

Outside Carlsbad, worker camps and RV parks surround the overcrowded city. Tourists to the famous Carlsbad Caverns must find lodging many miles away because the Carlsbad hotels are filled with oil workers. Nearly 200 children, most staying in temporary worker housing with single parents, commute each day from the so-called man camps to Carlsbad schools.

The epicenter of this evolving boom is the Permian’s western lobe, known as the Delaware Basin, which stretches from Pecos, Texas to Carlsbad. The cities are connected by U.S. 285, a stretch of mostly two-lane road that has become known in recent years as the “Death Highway” and spurred a new way to wish travelers well: “Stay alive on 285.”

More: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/article/Texas-permian-basin-border-dangerous-to-New-Mexico-14488967.php

[thackney]

But the state also has a $2 billion budget surplus created almost entirely by oil and gas revenues. New Mexico is proposing free college tuition for all New Mexico residents as it counts on more oil money for many years to come. 

Those people need to build some infrastructure instead of committing themselves to future expenses.

[Joe Wooten]

285 in New Mexico is a bad road. I last drove on it over 20 years ago, and it was a piece of crap even then. It rivaled any Illinois road for crappiness.