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IMPERIAL, Texas—Many residents of this small town drive long distances to buy bottled water instead of opening up the tap.

Pecos County Fresh Water, a county-operated utility, provides drinking water for 800 people in Imperial and the surrounding area. The utility routinely violates safe drinking water standards set by the Environmental Protection Agency for “combined radium” and “gross alpha,” two metrics of radioactivity in water. The culprit is naturally occurring radioactive material in the aquifer.

Imperial is one of many rural communities in Texas where deposits of radioactive materials dissolve into the groundwater. But small communities often struggle to pay for costly treatment technology or alternative water sources that could fix the problem. During 2025, 29 public water systems that serve more than 22,000 people in Texas violated maximum levels of radionuclides. That’s down slightly from 2018, when a report by the non-profit Environmental Working Group found that 38 Texas utilities exceeded legal limits for radionuclides.

“It needs to be fixed,” said Pecos County Commissioner Nathan Reeves, who represents Imperial. “It’s a problem that should have been dealt with a long time ago.”

Reeves said the county has been rejected for several grants to address the problem, but recently obtained some funding. Pecos County is evaluating alternatives including blending with another water source or drilling a new well. In the meantime, residents rely on purchasing drinking water 30 miles away in Fort Stockton. 

“[Radiation] is especially an issue for these smaller systems that only have a limited number of wells they can rely on,” said Tasha Stoiber, an environmental chemist and senior scientist at the Environmental Working Group. “It’s a huge inequity and disparity of who is being exposed more.”

“This Is Not an Emergency”

In August 2025, Pecos County Fresh Water once again notified its customers that the utility had exceeded the EPA’s maximum level for radionuclides in drinking water.

“This is not an emergency,” the notice pinned in the Imperial post office and mailed to water customers declared, explaining that some radioactive minerals in water emit alpha radiation. “Some people who drink water containing alpha emitters in excess of the [Maximum Contaminant Limit] over many years may have an increased risk of getting cancer.”

To comply with the Safe Drinking Water Act, utilities that violate drinking water standards must inform their customers with standard language. While Texas officials say Imperial’s water does not pose an immediate health risk, many Imperial residents have stopped drinking it and buy bottled water for drinking and cooking. 

Claudia Pinedo serves burritos and tacos at Panchita’s Mexican Restaurant in Imperial. Much of her business comes from oilfield workers who drive through Imperial on their way to work.

The working class town, where many residents are Latino and speak Spanish at home, is a crossroads of the Permian Basin, about 50 miles south of Odessa. Irrigation from the nearby Pecos River once drew farmers to Imperial. Now the oil and gas industry is the economic engine in town.

Pinedo said she only uses bottled water at home and at the restaurant. She drives to Fort Stockton to fill 5-gallon jugs with fresh water, at $1.75 apiece. The additional expense of buying bottled water for the restaurant and her household with three children adds up.

Pinedo said her children grew up drinking bottled water and many other residents avoid the tap water in town.

“If customers have health concerns, they may want to talk to a health care professional to get more information about [how] the water quality may affect them,” TCEQ spokesperson Richard Richter told Inside Climate News.

Richter said that the EPA sets maximum limits based on a person drinking about a half gallon of water daily for 70 years. He said the limits are designed to protect susceptible groups including children and the elderly.

Imperial and surrounding Pecos County face more than their fair share of environmental challenges. Aging and plugged oil and gas wells have leaked on several ranches in the area. Less than five miles from Imperial, an abandoned well has leaked toxic water for years and formed a hazardous body of water known as Lake Boehmer.

The area’s abundant natural gas and large ranch properties have drawn data center developers. Ten miles as the crow flies from Imperial, Pacifico Energy has obtained permits to build a massive gas power plant, known as GW Ranch, to supply data centers. Amazon recently acquired the site to build a data center, as reported by the organization Cleanview.

Pacifico Energy’s website says it will not require “major external water sources” for the development. Large industrial facilities like GW Ranch could install treatment systems to remove contaminants that are common in area aquifers. Pacifico Energy did not respond to requests for comment. Cleanview reported that Amazon plans to use brackish water at the site.

But for small communities, those treatment costs can be prohibitive. Reeves, the county commissioner, explained that Fort Stockton, the county’s largest city with 8,000 residents, has a reverse osmosis treatment system. 

But, for places like Imperial, he said, “In these small towns, there’s no money and no help to throw at it.”

Violations Pile Up in Texas Communities

Radionuclides in drinking water typically come from naturally occurring radioactive material that dissolves into aquifers. In Texas, this problem is most acute in the Hickory Aquifer in Central Texas, the Ogallala Aquifer in North Texas and the Gulf Coast Aquifer. In Pecos County, the excess radium levels are from the Cenozoic Pecos aquifer. 

In 1976, the EPA added radionuclides to its drinking water standards. Water is sampled quarterly and compliance is measured by the annual average of the samples. The maximum contaminant level (MCL) for combined radium, which is the sum of Radium-226 and Radium-228, two naturally occurring isotopes of the element radium, is 5 picocuries per liter (pCi/L). For gross alpha radiation, excluding radon and uranium, the MCL is 15 pCi/L.

According to quarterly water testing data provided by TCEQ, Pecos County Fresh Water has violated the combined radium limits 19 times since Jan. 2020. On five occasions, testing found the combined radium levels below the legal limit. The highest combined radium reading since 2020 was 6.53 pCi/L in Oct. 2021. Gross alpha radiation concentrations have been in violation of the maximum level less frequently. 

Stoiber, of the Environmental Working Group, said that people who are pregnant or immunocompromised can be at increased risk when exposed to radioactivity. She added that people can be exposed not just from drinking the water but also when bathing or showering.

Sheldon Landsberger, a professor of nuclear and radiation engineering at the University of Texas, Austin, said that cancer risk from radionuclides in drinking water depends on the amount of water an individual drinks and the concentration of radionuclides in the water. 

While the water in Imperial is slightly above EPA limits, other utilities in Texas have water with far higher levels of radionuclides. The Millersview-Doole water utility, which serves nearly 4,000 residents of Concho County that relies on the Hickory Aquifer, reported combined radium levels of 64 pCi/L in 2025, almost 13 times the EPA limit.

Other counties where water utilities recorded excess radionuclides in 2025 include Lubbock, Midland, Burnet and Parker.

After years of violations, the city of Brady, population 5,000, celebrated bringing its drinking water into compliance with EPA radionuclide standards this April. The city obtained $31.4 million in funding from the Texas Water Development Board (TWDB) for a treatment plant and other infrastructure. After years of violations, the city is now providing safe drinking water to its residents.

Landsberger emphasized that technologies to remove radionuclides are complex and costly.

“It’s not a simple thing to get rid of radium or any other type of toxic element or chemical that is already water soluble,” he said. “You need some very sophisticated chemical engineering processes to get rid of it.”

The Texas Water Infrastructure Coordination Committee centralizes information about funding for water utilities. TWDB’s Drinking Water Revolving Fund loan program prioritizes projects that address compliance with drinking water standards. A TWDB spokesperson said Pecos County Fresh Water has not applied for funding.

Groundwater will play a bigger role in Texas’ water supply in the years to come, as access to surface water dwindles. Communities such as Corpus Christi that are seeking new groundwater supplies may contend with excess radionuclides in the state’s aquifers. A test well drilled last year as a potential alternative water source for Corpus Christi has several times the EPA limit of gross alpha radiation, according to KRISTV.

TCEQ has come under scrutiny for its past enforcement of radionuclide levels in drinking water. A 2011 investigation by KHOU in Houston found that TCEQ for years had subtracted the margin of error, or counting error, in radium water testing results, despite EPA guidance against this practice. This resulted in fewer water utilities being found in violation of federal standards.

The TCEQ spokesperson said that the agency currently uses the EPA’s Safe Drinking Water Information System to calculate compliance. He said the system “only utilizes the reported value when determining compliance, neither adding nor subtracting the counting error.”

The agency did not respond to questions about when it changed its methods for calculating compliance.

Local Official Seeks Solutions

Nathan Reeves, the Pecos County commissioner, remembers being taken aback the first time he received a notification letter about the radionuclides.

“Who would want to eat and drink with that water when you’ve gotten a letter like that?” he asked.

The problem has dragged on for years. TCEQ violation notices require the utility to submit a plan of how to get back in compliance. Reeves said that in the past, the county would submit a plan but significant progress was never made. Since becoming county commissioner four years ago, he has sought funding for a solution.

The county has contracted with a groundwater hydrologist to explore alternative water options for the utility and continues to seek grant funding.

“The main deal is to get better water, where we don’t have to send these letters,” he said. “The citizens deserve better.”

The post Permian Basin Community Seeks Fix for Radium in Its Drinking Water appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Since August 1, 2016—50 years to the day after the UT Tower shooting—it’s been legal to carry concealed firearms into most public university spaces in Texas, including classrooms. 

When the law went into effect despite opposition from students, administrators, and faculty, University of Texas at Austin students reacted by brandishing dildos in a performance-art-style, nonviolent protest that earned national media attention. After the idea spread in a half-joking social media post, student protesters wore T-shirts, held signs and banners, and strapped dildos donated by local shops to their backpacks, all to mock masculine gun culture and the Texas laws that regulate sex toys more heavily than firearms on campus. 

“Texas has decided it is not at all obnoxious or illegal to allow deadly concealed weapons on campus. But walking around with a dildo could land you in trouble,” protest organizer Jessica Jin said at the time. “We’re protesting absurdity with absurdity.” The viral protest was one of the largest gun-control rallies the state had yet seen.

Today, “campus carry” is still in effect, and the obscenity statute regulating sex toys is technically on the books, too, despite a U.S. district judge calling it “facially unconstitutional” and “unenforceable” in 2008. Since then, the Legislature has doubled down, and in February, a federal appeals court ruled that Texas can enforce its latest obscenity law, which targets drag shows and prohibits “sexually oriented performance,” including the exhibition of sex toys and “accessories or prosthetics that exaggerate male or female sexual characteristics.” Meanwhile, researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that, while policies allowing guns on campus don’t reduce mass shootings, gun access “substantially increases” the risk of suicide among young adults.

Dildos were a means to an end in the gun-control-focused “Cocks Not Glocks” protest, but they were, and remain, a complex protest symbol.

August 2016 (Sandy Carson/ZUMA Wire/Alamy Live News)

Some of the Cocks Not Glocks protest’s most intentionally provocative imagery was also its most Texas-specific. The protesters inverted the Battle of Gonzales slogan, “Come and Take It” (already reused by the Tea Party and a Texas gun activist group), to read, “Take It and Come,” and designed a modified version of the famous cannon and star flag, replacing the cannon with a dildo.

Despite the protest’s specificity to Texas, international interest in unraveling the layers of the sophisticated joke at the core of Cocks Not Glocks continues. In a 2024 academic article, Lotta Kähkönen, a scholar based in Finland, used a close reading of online backlash to the protest and interviews conducted at the University of Texas by a Finnish team in the spring semesters of 2018 and 2019 to trace the ways reactions to the dildos were steeped in the objects’ cultural valences, “driving discussions about obscenity, feminism, phallic symbols and sexuality.” Kähkönen points out that “In the United States, themes of protectionism and opposition to ‘immoral’ sexual behavior and pornography have been highlighted in the right-wing agenda after 1977, when strategists discovered that they had a mass appeal.” 

In opposition, dildos as protest symbols were (and are) associated with “sex positivity.” Bringing a sex-positive symbol to oppose gun violence, the student activists of Cocks Not Glocks revived the spirit of the “Make Love not War” movement of the 1960s, which linked sex positivism to nonviolence. “Love-ins” against the Vietnam War and political violence occurred on UT’s campus in 1968. 

The playfully subversive atmosphere of the Cocks Not Glocks protest meant the students could not be dismissed as angry feminists. Yet they did receive sexist backlash and other criticism. The protest organizers also confronted historical associations that complicated the use of this imagery. After an image of a large black dildo displayed at the protest went viral, the protest organizers apologized for unintentionally perpetuating a racist caricature of Black bodies and painted the dildo burnt orange, UT’s school color. 

Engaging in frequent interviews with media outlets, student organizers largely managed to navigate their chosen symbol’s complexity. Framing campus carry as a law that would chill free speech, they argued that if a classroom disagreement could potentially escalate into a firefight, it was unlikely anyone would feel safe enough to challenge a fellow student to a debate. Through this framing, the protesters situated themselves as more comfortable with free speech and the exchange of ideas than the uptight Legislature. The associations they tapped—connecting freedom of speech and sex positivity—go back to at least 1873, when Comstock laws criminalized mailing material related to contraception and family planning by labeling it obscene.

In recent months, dildos have again emerged as a protest prop, this time in opposition to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In one demonstration, protesters stuck dildos into the chain-link fence surrounding the Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis. In another incident, a member of the “Dildo Distribution Delegation” threw a dildo at ICE agents outside the Minneapolis Graduate Hotel in an effort to “psychologically dismantle” the federal law enforcement agency. These dildo-based protests, unpegged from a critique of obscenity laws, are part of a recurring thread in protests against ICE’s disruptive presence in American cities, critiquing MAGA machismo. 

The shock factor of hundreds of dildos made the Cocks Not Glocks protest memorable, and the conversation that it launched at UT continued beyond the demonstration. UT anthropology professor Craig Campbell added a dildo in the color “gunmetal gray” to a department exhibition case in the UT Student Activity Center, where it was on view for two years. The protest event opened a door for a teachable moment about phallic symbols through an anthropological lens. Campus Carry, a book published by Harvard University Press in 2020, edited by UT professors Matt Valentine and Patricia Somers, includes reflection pieces from students, alumni, and faculty to illustrate the complexity and controversy of the campus-carry policy that sparked the protest. Ellen Spiro & PJ Raval created an award-winning 25-minute documentary about the protests titled Come and Take It. “Gun Free UT” posters continue to appear in campus windows.

Today, however, free speech on Texas public university campuses faces a chill that makes the environment far less hospitable to both student and faculty speech. Student-led demonstrations against the bombing of Gaza were met with forceful arrests by Texas state troopers in 2024. UT students who attempted to schedule a meeting with Provost William Inboden in November 2025, and staged a brief sit-in when the request was denied, were given suspensions. The UT Board of Regents directed faculty to limit classroom discussion of controversial subjects, in a policy that PEN America’s Campus Free Speech Program Director Kristen Shahverdian says “will harpoon any chance students have of a valuable college education at the University of Texas.” 

Administrators are cracking down especially hard on evocations of sexuality. The University of Texas System, Texas A&M, and other universities blocked drag shows in their zealous efforts to comply with a January 2025 executive order. Under a new policy, Texas A&M faculty have been forced to cancel or modify courses that touch on topics related to gender and sexuality, which has already resulted in the baffling removal of Plato readings related to gender from a philosophy course. UT-Austin announced it will consolidate the department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies; American Studies; African and African Diaspora Studies; and Mexican American and Latino Studies into a single Social and Cultural Analysis department. Faculty are calling the step a culture-war move to destabilize departments. 

“There is zero trust in our administration to be fair or reasonable,” said Campbell. “It feels like we’re sitting on a powder keg.”

The recent series of policies and actions contrasts starkly with the official response to the Cocks Not Glocks protest, during which UT-Austin administrators said the students appeared to be engaging in protected political speech and did not attempt to intervene.

In 2026, student demands for gun control take a different form. On March 3, students gathered on UT’s South Mall to mourn the victims of the recent mass shooting on Austin’s Sixth Street. At the event, members of Students Demand Action called for common-sense gun laws, as the attendees held candles and flowers. 

The post ‘Cocks Not Glocks’ at 10 appeared first on The Texas Observer.