Hello and welcome back to Drilled. I'm Amy Westervelt. This week, we're thrilled to be republishing

a series on our site from The Xylem about a small town in Texas that happens to be the country's

top oil export hub. It wasn't always that way. About 10 years ago, residents bought houses next to a naval base.

Maybe not ideal, but they could get a house near the ocean in an affluent, sleepy community.

Then the naval base shut down. The export terminals took over, and this predominantly white,

conservative, affluent town became a fence line community.

Alex Ipp, who reported and wrote the series, is here to tell us more.

Hi. Hi, my name is Alex Ip.

I'm the founder, publisher, and editor of the ZIvo.

I would love to hear, Alex, how you first stumbled across this town because it has so many standout weird little facts about it.

And I'm like, how have I never heard of this place?

Yes.

So I have to thank the Society for Environmental Journalists, which I am a member, and also the Institute for Journalism

and National Resources. They organized a post-conference tour in SCJ 2022, which was in Houston

at the time, and I was invited to participate in this trip along with a number of other

journalists to go down to South Texas, to the Texas

coastal bend, which is where Corpus Christi is, and also to surrounding towns and villages.

So we wanted to understand what are some environmental challenges facing this part of the country

where there's a lot of oil and gas activity.

So this little town that we're talking about is Ingo Side on the Bay in Texas.

This town has around 614 people as of the last census.

And it is a reasonably wealthy town in South Texas. It has the second highest

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