Southwest (AZ NM OK TX)

"Turn on the faucet. Fill a glass with water. Drink it. Acts so commonplace you perform them without thinking twice. Flora Barraza cannot. Neither can José Garcia, nor the cooks at Los Pasteles Bakery No. 2, nor the elderly at the Epoca de Oro Adult Day Care. Along the Texas-Mexico border, nearly 90,000 people are believed to still live without running water. An untold number more — likely tens of thousands, but no one is sure — often have running water of such poor quality that they cannot know what poisons or diseases it might carry."

"Oklahoma's state scientists have suspected for years that oil and gas operations in the state were causing a swarm of earthquakes, but in public they rejected such a connection."

"BAKER, Nev. – Black sand gurgled like a mud volcano from the bottom of Clay Springs, pushed aside by crystalline water rising to the desert's surface."

"In the five years before a massive leak of toxic gas killed four workers at DuPont's La Porte property, four plant managers had come and gone."

"CARLSBAD, N.M. — On Feb. 5, 2014, a truck hauling salt caught fire deep in the maze of tunnels of the federal government’s only underground nuclear waste dump. Thick, black smoke forced an evacuation of workers as it billowed to the surface through exit shafts."

"The number of imperiled wolves found only in the American Southwest climbed to 109 in 2014, marking the fourth consecutive year that the population of Mexican gray wolves has risen by at least 10 percent, federal wildlife managers said Friday."

"HOUSTON -- It was DuPont's third deadly U.S. accident in five years and the deadliest of them all. On November 15th, a chemical leak in LaPorte took the lives of four workers, including two brothers."