When a spate of wildfires tore across the Texas Panhandle in February and scorched 20,000 acres of Craig Cowden’s ranch near Skellytown, he decided he had had enough. Cowden took on a second unofficial job: looking for possible fire hazards on his family land, including checking on the electric lines that power oil and gas equipment.
Unlike the utility companies that run power lines across a region under state oversight, oil and gas companies typically string their own power lines from utility poles to their work sites.
Texas relies on the operators to maintain those lines. Not all of them do. And the state agencies that regulate the energy industry and the power industry said they’re powerless to regulate power lines in the oil patch.
Cowden, 38, spots problems such as a pump jack with faulty wiring or a power line lying on dead grass. He’s filed complaints with the Railroad Commission of Texas, which oversees oil and gas operations. The agency inspected some of the issues he reported, Cowden said. That m