Our trip continued west from Carrizo Springs and west on U.S. With workers toiling from sunrise to sunset, those mobile home parks include entertainment facilities to keep workers close and out of trouble. Rental prices have skyrocketed in the area with some workers renting modest homes for thousands of dollars a month. To meet the demand for housing, some companies have cleared land to build mobile home parks for workers. We drove through rural communities of Catarina and Asherton where the towns have a new lease on life.Ĭompanies that supply machinery and raw materials for the oil and natural gas wells have sprung in a short matter of time. The influx of pipeline and oil field workers has maximized hotel occupancy rates and stretched the real estate market thin.

Many thought the oil and natural gas inside the formation was too expensive to extract until 2008. But a new extraction process known as hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” has unlocked energy deep inside the rock.Īlthough it has never been scientifically proven, environmentalists have blamed fracking for groundwater contamination, earthquakes and other problems. But for the people along Highway 83, the new oil and natural gas boom means jobs and development. The rolling hills were only interrupted by oil and natural gas wells, which provide the only shade among the squat thorn bushes. Those oil and natural gas wells are all extracting energy from the Eagle Ford Formation, a pre-historic sedimentary rock formation. Immigrants and drugs are mostly carried aboard 18-wheelers and cars along Interstate 35, which runs parallel to Highway 83 and heads north to San Antonio and other destinations.

Unlike the vast brush country of deep-South Texas, there are not vast groups of immigrants crossing to bypass Border Patrol checkpoints. Just north of Laredo, Highway 83 is a sun-bleached road where the vegetation turns from mesquite forest to thorny scrub brush. (Sergio Chapa/)īut we were only taking it to Carrizo Springs. The bleak highway between Laredo and Eagle Pass is filled with shrub buses, natural gas well and oil wells.

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