‘A Disaster Waiting to Happen’: How the Fracking Boom Put an Oil Field in the Guadalupe River Floodplain
Data and R code to reproduce the analysis underlying this Feb. 1, 2026, Inside Climate News article, examining batteries of oil tanks in Texas threatened by flooding in the Guadalupe River Basin.
To identify tank batteries potentially at risk of flooding, we scrutinized Google Maps satellite imagery in the zone where the 500-year flood hazard zone for the Guadalupe River Basin identified by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) intersects with the Eagle Ford Shale, a geological formation that has seen intense oil and gas development since the late 2000s — thanks to a boom in extraction using hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.
The script guadalupe.R contains the code used to generate the 500-year flood hazard layer shown on the interactive map published with the story and to extract FEMA's estimates for the depths of 100- and 500-year floods at the locations of the tank batteries we identified from satellite imagery. (100- and 500-year floods have an estimated 1 percent and 0.2 percent chance of happening in any given year, respectively.) This analysis depended on data downloaded from FEMA's Estimated Base Flood Elevation Viewer.
Many tank batteries are located on oil and gas well pads. So to identify the operators likely responsible for the tank batteries in our data for the purpose of further reporting, we identified the nearest surface well to each tank battery in Railroad Commission of Texas (RRC) data on oil and gas wells by county. We then joined to the RRC's wellbore query data, which contains information on the operators responsible for each well, using the wells' unique American Petroleum Institute (API) identifiers. The code for this process is also documented in the guadalupe.R script.
The data folder includes the data files used. (But note that the GeoTIFFS with depths for 100- and 500-year floods estimated by FEMA are too large to share on GitHub, and so must be extracted from geodatabases for the middle and lower Guadalupe River Basin downloaded from FEMA's Estimated Base Flood Elevation Viewer if you wish to repeat the analysis.)
Email Peter Aldhous for questions about the data analysis/code and Dylan Baddour for questions about identifying tank batteries from satellite imagery on Google Maps.