Southwest (AZ NM OK TX)

"ATHENS, TX -- Investigators spent all day Sunday sifting through the remains of an Athens Fertilizer Storage Facility that burned down Thursday. The fire broke out just before 6 o'clock Thursday night at the East Texas Ag Supply Storage building on Larkin Street. Fire officials said they always investigate this type of incident as suspicious. Investigators said they still don't know what caused the fire, but said they won't stop until they've found all of the answers."

"Cindy Dixon was unloading bales of hay into a metal shed on a blustery afternoon in mid-March, when the landscape around her Navajo Reservation homestead was as brown and bleak as the open-pit coal mine a few miles to the west and well within earshot."

"In the heart of Texas' mineral-rich Eagle Ford Shale, freshwater isn't the only precious resource for both oil companies and local communities. Brackish groundwater aquifers are also becoming increasingly valuable — as potential drinking water supplies, and also as locations for disposing wastewater from drilling and hydraulic fracturing."

"An Oklahoma House of Representatives committee voted to reject a new set of state science standards for schools this week, a move that, according to the Oklahoma Science Teachers Association, is 'unprecedented.'"

"Last week was Wildfire Awareness Week in California, a time when firefighters and forest managers travel up and down the state talking about fire risk and public safety. Usually that would mean wildfire conditions were just picking up, with higher temperatures drying out fuels nurtured by winter rain and snowpack."

"A warning from U.S. scientists that Oklahoma may be hit by a major earthquake has caused a run on insurance policies for tremors in the heartland state, adding to the woes of residents already in the firing line of devastating tornadoes."

"The city of Wichita Falls, Texas, may soon become one of the first in the country where half of the drinking water comes directly from wastewater."