The Texas attorney general’s office announced yesterday that it has sued the Texas Highway Patrol Museum, a nonprofit telemarketing organization based in San Antonio that raises millions of dollars in the name of helping state troopers.

I had always been curious about the museum, which is housed in a brick building at St. Mary’s and Alamo streets but attracts few visitors. In October, we examined the museum’s tax records and found that only a fraction of the nearly $12 million in revenue raised by the museum’s telemarketers actually went towards the charitable causes it touted. For every dollar raised, less than a penny was spent on Department of Public Safety troopers and their families.

Attorney General Greg Abbott’s lawsuit reveals new details about what, exactly, donors’ money was spent on. State investigators obtained financial information and credit card statements from the museum, and found employees had paid for cigars, liquor, vacations, meals and “exorbitant” vet bills for an “office cat.” The lawsuit describes an organization with few controls over how money was spent, and an absentee board that seldom asked questions.

Here’s an annotated copy of the lawsuit:

In our last story, I interviewed Scott Henson at the criminal justice blog Grits for Breakfast, who had received a telemarketing call from the museum in August. Scott wasn’t happy that the caller initially claimed to be with the Texas Highway Patrol — as if the caller were really with the Department of Public Safety. “This group is about as much about helping troopers as buzzards are about helping roadkill,” Scott wrote at the time. He called yesterday’s lawsuit “way past time.”

The museum’s assets have been frozen and it’s been closed since Friday. Its lawyer, Kim Brown, called the lawsuit “heavy handed” and said the expenses were justified.

What about the cigars?

Prizes for telemarketers, he said.

Liquor?

Drinks for office parties.

The office cat?

The vet bills for the cat were unavoidable.

The lawsuit lays out more expenses for trips, meals and cars that the state describes as wasteful spending. But Brown said the museum is hardly a fly-by-night organization that defrauds people. The small museum has operated in San Antonio for years, he said, and while it has high overhead costs, it does spend money on charitable causes.

The attorney general is seeking to dissolve the nonprofit museum and its related entities. The next step is a hearing for a temporary injunction that has yet to be scheduled.

Here’s a searchable library of all primary documents we’ve obtained about the museum. If you’ve had any experiences with the museum or its telemarketers, feel free to contact us.

One of the golden rules of writing is show, don’t tell. The same holds true for stories based on public data. Check out this cool interactive map by Nolan Hicks and Yang Wang showing food stamp recipients by Zip code for the whole state of Texas.

The Texas Highway Patrol Museum sits on a prime piece of property near downtown San Antonio, across the street from Rosario’s Café y Cantina. Business is booming at Rosario’s, but not so much at the museum. It usually looks empty every time I drive by or hang out in King William. I’ve been kind of curious what their deal is.

After I wrote about delays and conflicts at the Briscoe Western Art Museum last month, Express-News police reporter Michelle Mondo suggested I take a look at the highway patrol museum. It sounded interesting.

A quick Google search showed that others had asked similar questions about the museum over the years and discovered red flags. Amy Davis, a TV reporter who used to work in San Antonio and now works in Houston, investigated the museum in April 2008 and produced this in-depth report. Davis found that the museum was actually a telemarketing operation, and she interviewed a former employee who said the group spent little money on troopers with the Texas Department of Public Safety. The KSAT Defenders produced a similar report later that year.

More recently, Scott Henson at Grits for Breakfast blogged about a phone call he received from a telemarketer who said he worked for the “Texas Highway Patrol.” Henson asked if he meant DPS — and the caller said yes. It’s a big no-no to falsely claim to be affiliated with a law enforcement agency.

What does DPS, the government agency that employs state troopers, think about the museum? Not much. The agency’s website has a general warning about giving money to telemarketers — but it also has a web page that focuses on the highway patrol museum in San Antonio. DPS criticizes the exhibits, puts “museum” in quotes and warns the public not to give it money.

All this adds up to a good story that people need to know about.

The museum is a nonprofit organization, so its tax records are open to the public. Guidestar offers free access to the three most recent years of tax returns for most nonprofit organizations. The Express-News has an account with Guidestar that gives us access to even more tax returns, which offers a treasure trove of historical information about charities.

Database Editor Kelly Guckian logged into Guidestar and got me copies of everything available for the Texas Highway Patrol Museum and a related entity, the Texas Highway Patrol Association. The two organizations share the same board members, and both were founded by Lane Denton, a former state representative from Waco who was found guilty of stealing money from a different law enforcement charity.

The museum is the telemarketing arm of the partnership. It employed more than 380 people in 2009, most of whom worked at call centers in El Paso, Austin and Houston. The association provides benefits to state troopers.

A brochure states the group gives the “finest benefits possible” to troopers. But looking at a five-year span of tax returns showed that while benefits were indeed paid to troopers and their families, they were only a fraction of the total revenues raked in by the museum’s telemarketers.

I typed all the financial information into a spreadsheet. Here are the numbers:

Donors gave nearly $12 million to the museum, but the association gave only $65,300 to DPS troopers and their families. That’s half a penny for every dollar raised.

Yet when telemarketers call potential donors, they often refer to recently killed troopers by name, pull heart-strings, and lead people to believe that most of their money is actually going to help the people who need it. That happened to the friend of David Slaton, a trooper who died last year in a car accident. The telemarketing call hit her hard.

My story about the museum ran Sunday and many outraged readers responded that they had received telemarketing calls from this organization and others.

What do people with the museum have to say about all this? The employees I spoke with were friendly, and the director of marketing who oversees the telemarketing operation basically described it as a necessary evil. There’s overhead, he said, but without the telemarketing calls, no money would be coming in at all.

But there are more effective ways to help peace officers. Slaton’s friend told me she was impressed by the 100 Club of Houston, which does not raise money through telemarketers. It relies on membership donations, and according to its tax returns, it gave about $1 million in survivor benefits last year.

Rick Hartley, executive director of the 100 Club, said the group has no plans whatsoever to try telemarketing.

It’s not worth the blow to their credibility.

Trouble at the Alamo: How it fell under state oversight on Dipity.

Reading Scott Huddleston’s latest update about the turmoil at the Alamo, I wondered how many people remember the roots of the problem and why the state of Texas got involved in the first place. I doubt casual readers know Scott deserves some of the credit for the changes — or the blame, depending on how you view the Alamo’s caretakers, the Daughters of the Republic of Texas.

Huddleston

Scott got involved when a tipster told him that some members of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas questioned the group’s leadership, and were forming their own splinter group to raise money for the Alamo.

“I wanted the story to be more than ‘she said, she said,’” Scott told me. He began obtaining copies of contracts, emails, letters — anything that would shed light on what was going on at the Alamo. He found examples of questionable spending and a lack of focus. “Their biggest challenge was an inability to raise money for capital improvements,” Scott said.

“I felt like I needed to be shaking the bushes just to keep up with them,” Scott said.

After his first story about the rift was published, he filed an open records request with the state of Texas to find out how the Daughters were spending funds raised from license plates with Alamo themes. It turned out the Alamo only received a portion of the funds for upkeep.

As more members of the Daughters publicly criticized the group’s leadership, some were expelled for speaking with the media, which led to more follow-up stories.

Scott wrote at least 60 articles in the past two years that mentioned the Alamo and its troubled caretaker. Most stories were about the turmoil within the organization and its track record at the Alamo. For long, seemingly never-ending sagas like this, newspapers really need to devise a way to help readers see the whole picture.

Google’s Living Stories project tried to address this problem. It’s no longer supported but it inspired ProPublica to generate a similar design that gives readers a timeline and easy access to past posts about the topic they’re interested in.

Dipity is also cool — I made this timeline compiling most of Scott’s stories.

It’d be great if newspapers came up with something like Living Stories. Sometimes a story is bigger than a single article. We ought to figure out a way to systematically tell that story in a compelling way.

Bracken Bat Cave, home to the largest concentration of mammals on the planet with 20 million Mexican free-tail bats, is opening up to the general public for a brief period.

This is awesome.

A few years ago, Jen and I saw the surreal exodus at dusk. So many bats fly out of the cave to feed, they create their own vortex.

Express-News Photographer Billy Calzada shot a very cool video of the bats in action. Check out the time-lapse photos.

MacCormack

Known as “Johnny Mac” in the newsroom, John MacCormack is a talented, colorful reporter. He likes telling a good yarn, both in person and on the front pages of the San Antonio Express-News. One time I heard him on the phone telling a source: “What are you going to give me so I don’t write the usual blather?”

His trademark wit was on display when he gave this speech explaining how he figured out that missing atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair was not dining on bonbons in New Zealand, as police theorized, but had actually been brutally murdered.

Last year, MacCormack and Express-News Photographer Jerry Lara spent months documenting the toll of violence from the Mexican drug war, and how life on the Texas border has dramatically changed for the worse. The result was a compelling series of articles and photos called Mexico in Crisis. MacCormack won an award for his work this month from the Inter American Press Association.

Given MacCormack’s gift of gab and skill at reporting, I thought it’d be entertaining and educational to do a Q&A with him, and learn how he and Jerry worked on the stories.

I was right.

Q: How did the series come about?

A: Well, it’s sort of a self-serving answer. But back in the middle of last summer, the lords were casting about for big ideas, big projects. And I told –

The lords being the editors.

Yeah, the editors. The editors were casting about for big stories, big ideas. And I said to [Express-News Projects Editor David] Sheppard, ‘As far as I’m concerned, the biggest story in Texas is what’s going on on the border in Mexico as well as how it’s affecting the changes on the Texas border.’ And he said, ‘That sounds right to me.’ The real push was when [Executive Editor Bob] Rivard was 100 percent behind it. If you’ve got the top dog behind you, you’re going to do things and things will happen.

The project didn’t really start out as a project per se. It gained momentum. The first thing Jerry Lara and I did was, we went to Juárez for the grito, which is the celebration of Mexican Independence. It was such a powerful story because the mayor of Juárez had to give it to an empty plaza. The whole city was bunkered down. And while we were there, some poor journalist for El Diaro was shot, whom we had just talked to. There was tremendously compelling material there.

Jerry Lara was the photographer who was with you the whole time.

Were there some dicey situations you had to deal with?

Well, the thing about working in Mexico right now on the border is you have no way to calculate the risk. I mean, we were in Juárez three times, we were in Monterrey, we were in Nuevo Laredo, we were in Matamoros, and we were in Progreso. And in every place people were being killed. But we had no way to calculate risk. So we just tried to be careful but not timid. And I had no idea whether I faced any danger at any point. But I know we were in many, many dangerous areas. On one occasion, we were in a bad neighborhood in Monterrey. And (Jerry) just said, ‘Look, I don’t like the looks of this. Let’s get out of here.’ And we left. We didn’t like squeal out or anything, we just got out of the neighborhood. Later we talked to the reporters for El Norte, and they said, ‘Man, we don’t go there. That’s a bad neighborhood.’ So Jerry was the guy with the antenna, the guy who could basically sense whether or not we were in danger. I’m bolder than he is, mostly because I’m more clueless.

What happened to the journalists you mentioned who got shot?

Well, we were in Juárez and we went to the plaza right by the cathedral. This was in September of last year. And we were just shooting color basically. We didn’t have anything specific in mind. And we ran into two photographers from El Diario. And they were young guys. Real young. And we could see they were photographers because they had the gafetes, which are the things you hang on your neck, and they had the cameras. So we all yucked it up and shook hands. You know, colleagues.

And then two hours later, we responded to a shooting at the mall. And those two guys had been shot up driving through the mall parking lot. One was killed and one got three bullets in him. And to this day I have no idea why they were attacked. We later learned that the plaza was a really dicey area because there’s a lot of street-level drug sales there. The local press had been warned to stay away from there. Long and short, the guy was killed and we had just talked to him two hours earlier. So it’s a very dangerous place but there’s no way to really calculate the risk.

What was your goal with the series of stories?

The second goal was, I was looking at this drug warfare in Mexico. And hundreds of people were dying. And I thought to myself, how could you not want to go chronicle this, write about it? Because it’s the most improbable, most violent, and most inexplicable thing going on in the world right now, in my opinion. We owed it to the Mexicans who live on the border. We owed it to our readers to go write about the drug violence. So there were kind of two themes: The border life is over as we knew it, and northern Mexico is collapsing into complete anarchy.

You also write about how the severity and nuances of the violence in Mexico varies from city to city. It’s different in Monterrey compared to Juárez, for example.

Yeah. In Juárez, for example, the press can function. The press still has somewhat autonomy. In Matamoros, the press is totally under the heel of the gangsters. They don’t dare write anything. In Monterrey, it’s 90 percent free. So if you use the press as an indicator, it’s very different in all three areas.

When we went to Monterrey, it was a big, bustling, modern, rich place. There was some violence but essentially normal life went on every day. When we went to Juárez, it wasn’t a ghost town, but tens of thousands if not more people have left. All the commerce was down, businesses had burned, closed. The place was like a shadow of what it had been. I didn’t spend much time in Matamoros. It’s probably the least stable place of all. It was like in a coma, you know? Every place is different. We’re not experts on this, we just kind of took snapshots.

Well, you told readers what you saw. Going back to the example of the grito, it was a pretty good example of how reporters can show, don’t tell. The scene and details tell the story.

Yeah, they can have all the generals they want on the balcony and they look good on TV. But when you’re standing with the mayor on the balcony, you’re looking out onto emptiness, you know? There’s soldiers, there’s cops, there’s blue and red lights, but there’s nobody down there. It’s like they’re holding it in a city that’s been evacuated, you know?

It tells the story right there.

It was a great photograph.

You mentioned the media, and you wrote how difficult it is for journalists down there to navigate what’s acceptable coverage and what’s not.

And it varies city by city.

How much of that did you know going in and what surprised you?

But what shocked me, what really made a big impression on me, is how in every place, the journalists are trying to work right up to the line of getting killed. In Juárez, they are much more aggressive, but there are certain things they can’t do. So they write right up to the line. In Matamoros, for example, they can do virtually nothing. But this one guy, he’s an editor at a big paper, he and I had this long talk. And he said, ‘You know, it’s absolutely controlled by the narcos. They tell you what to publish, what not to publish. We’re totally under their thumb.’

And I said, ‘Well, why are you talking to me?’ He said something to the effect of, ‘I want to preserve the little bit of the journalist that’s still in me.’ So I was just impressed by how in every circumstance, they worked right up to the point where their lives were in danger. And because it’s a fuzzy line, they never really knew. And so you could cross the line unknowingly, and you get killed.

They don’t feel sorry for themselves. I was scolded after I wrote that long piece about journalism in Mexico by an editor down there. He said, ‘Man, you forgot to tell all we are doing. You made it sound like we’re all up a tree with guns pointed at us. But every day we navigate this and we figure out what we can publish.’ He said, ‘You really forgot to say what we are doing, because you spent so much time saying what we can’t do.’

How do these media blackouts affect the Mexican public?

It’s a tool of the criminal element to assert control over society. If the press is completely intimidated, and the public has to rely on Twitter and not very mainstream sources for information, it furthers the societal breakdown. I mean, if you can wake up in the morning and read the paper and it tells you what happened yesterday, even if there are bombs dropping, you fell like you still more or less have a sense of reality.

But if you wake up in the morning, and you know there was giant shoot out in the plaza, but the story’s about some guy who got pulled over because he hit a horse, you’re entering a realm that’s unreal. It makes you feel more vulnerable. It’s a furtherance of societal breakdown.

Essentially, the (northern) third of Mexico is out of control of the government. I mean, they send the Army in, they send the Navy in, there’s shoot ‘em ups, they kill narcos. But this part of Mexico is operating beyond the control of the federal or the state governments. When you have a city like Monterrey, which is the equivalent of Dallas — it’s a huge city, it’s prosperous. But in the last couple months the violence has gotten worse there. And it’s simply because the criminal elements are so powerful that the state and federal governments and municipal governments, they can’t defeat them.

It’s impossible for an American to grasp this. It’s like the Russian gangs are running Long Island. Or the street gangs are running L.A. Or they don’t yield to the civil authorities. We have no concept of this. We live in a society where law and order is the rule. Systems work. There’s a justice system. They have none of that. The impunity level in Mexico is in the upper 90 percent. You shoot someone and kill ‘em, the chance of getting arrested and convicted is about as remote as getting hit by Hailey’s Comet. There’s total impunity. It’s really a nationwide crisis. And I don’t think most of us in the U.S. grasp this. I don’t think most Americans grasp how bad it is.

What’s the way out? What’s the solution?

The U.S. is, of course, a big part of the problem. There’s 20 or 25 billion dollars flowing into Mexico annually to pay for the illegal drugs here. That’s where the cartels get their strength. It’s a multi-national problem.

How much time did you spend on the series?

Basically four months. In four months, we went to seven or eight places.

It was very, very rewarding. It’s a rare thing to get commitment for travel and space and also the kind of green light to follow your own nose. It’s a wonderful thing if you’re a journalist. Without being a suck up, if I didn’t have the editors, I wouldn’t have been able to do it.

Yeah, there’s a lot of expense involved in that.

Yeah. But it wasn’t even so much the expense. So we went to Juárez two or three times. We went to Monterrey. There’s not really a lot of money involved. The commitment is for the space in the paper. We had a lot of double trucks. I think my stories got cut a little bit. But when push came to shove, we always got the space. That was because the boss was behind it.

And it was readable and the pictures were really compelling. That probably helped.

It was a two-man show throughout. you can’t go to Mexico by yourself and do this kind of work. You better go with someone who you trust and knows the lay of the land.

When you sat down to write this, what was going through your mind? You’re down there in another country but you’re writing for people in the United States.

Well, I have a lot of respect for my readers. It was written one (story) after the other. For seven or eight stories. You’d go on a trip, spend a week or four days or five days somewhere. You come back. And then you’ve already done a lot of phone reporting. And then you turn that one around. You write it in two or three days. And then you get on the plane again. It was like covering — not a breaking story — but an evolving story. You go from one place to the other. It was fast-paced.

I don’t get writer’s cramp or anything like that or stage fright. So it was really, really fun. There were like two phases of it that were fun. The reporting phase was really fun. Because you’re in a strange place. You gotta come back with the goods. You don’t know what you’re doing. You fly to Monterrey, you have a few sources, but you really don’t know what you’re going to do. So you’re thinking on your feet the whole time.

To get back to what I’m trying to say, there are two phases. There’s the reporting phase where you really don’t know what you’re going to get. And there’s a certain amount of tension because you’re looking and you’re searching and you’re working long hours. And you’re looking for the story that’s out there somewhere.

And then you get back and then you start looking again for the story that you have in all your notes. And that’s a very tense, exciting thing to try to find the story. Because you know you have tons of great information. And then there’s that process that only writers can grasp where you’re sitting down with a mess of information. Your brain’s full. Your notebooks are full. And you got ten times more than you know you can use. But you have to come up with a very clear and compelling and truthful story. And that’s an experience and an adventure in itself.

And it’s satisfying when that picture starts to emerge.

Oh, yeah. It’s totally rewarding. It’s a lot of fun.

Well, great job, man, thanks so much.

Well, thank you. Good luck getting this down to something you can use.

Retaining wall collapse and landslide in San Antonio on Dipity.

After a towering retaining wall collapsed and threatened scores of homes last year in the San Antonio neighborhood of Rivermist, an obvious question arose: How safe were the untold number of other residential retaining walls in the city?

Under city code, walls in San Antonio over four feet tall were supposed to go through a permitting process. But until Rivermist, that permitting process rarely happened in new subdivisions — despite the widespread use of large walls to sculpt hillsides in the rapidly growing Texas Hill Country.

In other words, no one at the city could vouch for the safety of other retaining walls, many of which are 20 feet high or taller.

After the collapse at Rivermist, the city announced that all tall residential walls built in the last three years had to be verified as safe by an engineer and permitted. So far, most walls have passed muster.

But one subdivision with 14 retaining walls is still having problems.

It’s called the Heights of Crownridge, located on the far North Side by the Crownridge Canyon Natural Area. Jen found out about it after a concerned resident emailed her photos of a long vertical crack in a huge wall in the middle of the subdivision.

Jennifer and I had written a bunch of stories about the problems with retaining walls in San Antonio. After Jen got the tip, we drove to Crownridge over the weekend with baby Sophie sleeping in the car. The subdivision was unfinished — streets were completed but only a handful of homes had been built. There were no lawns. Just sun-baked dirt and rock.

And there are a lot of tall retaining walls. The one the tipster alerted Jen to is huge:

And sure enough, there was a long, very noticeable crack on the northern section. This is part of the crack:

Jen sent an open records request to the city for more information about what was going on at the Heights of Crownridge. A couple weeks ago we sat down in an office of the city’s Planning and Development Services Department to read a stack of letters and engineering plans related to all the retaining walls in the unfinished subdivision.

No engineering plans had yet been received for the big wall we checked out. (I later interviewed Scott Rozier, the owner of Rosch Co., which built the wall with the crack. He stood by his work.)

But there were problems with other walls. Going through the documents, Jen and I had a case of deja vu. It turned out some of the same people involved with the wall at Rivermist also designed and built a wall that later cracked at the Heights of Crownridge.

Engineer Russell Leavens designed the Rivermist wall, and it was built by Gravity Walls Ltd. They also designed and built a different wall at Crownridge that suffered from a large crack and was deemed unsafe. This wall was on the southeast corner of the subdivision, which we hadn’t known about. Engineer Tim Theis determined that the wall had not been built according to plans.

At Rivermist, city officials had also claimed that Gravity Walls Ltd. did not build the wall according to engineering plans.

Theis mentioned problems with the particular type of retaining wall used in both subdivisions. Gravity walls rely on their sheer mass to remain stable. But once they’re built, it’s difficult for inspectors to make sure the walls were constructed right. That problem was noted at Rivermist and also at Crownridge.

As we reviewed the documents, a city engineer who was handling the case came by the office. It turned out construction had been on hold at some lots for months as the concerns about the retaining walls were being sorted out.

The pile of documents included maps showing the location of each retaining wall and who built it. Coupled with the info we learned from other documents and interviews, the maps helped me build this interactive feature that showed readers what was going on in the subdivision:

View Retaining wall problems at the Heights of Crownridge in a larger map

We could have cranked this story out faster if Jen hadn’t made the open records request. But the documents gave us details that we might not have otherwise known, such as the connection to Gravity Walls Ltd. Plus, we can post the paper trail online for readers to check out for themselves.

It simply pays to dig up pertinent records … even if it slows you down.

When Jen visited New York to write about San Antonio’s ties to High Line park, she called me and wondered if it’d be a good idea to make a time lapse-video of a walk through the mile-long urban park.

Abso-freakin-lutely.

Time-lapse videos are full of awesome sauce. Most I’ve seen involve the placement of a camera in a stationary location. But another cool method is taking the camera with you and snapping a photo every few seconds. It creates a cool first-person view of a journey or event.

I’ve tried this technique a few times after seeing this video of a trip from Denver to Singapore by David DAngelo. I thought it was a cool way to show what the whirlwind journey was like:

This video by Express-News photographer Billy Calzada is about the difficulties kayakers face when they navigate a redeveloped stretch of the San Antonio River. About a minute into the video, Billy effectively used first-person time-lapse photography to show the hassle of being forced to take a kayak out of the river and walking about a mile to the next accessible location:

Jennifer Hiller

Most types of video editing software allow you to import a series of still images. When Jen got back I copied the photos to our hard drive at home and fired up Sony Vegas.

In Vegas you can import photos two ways. One is to go to “Options,” click on “Preferences,” then “Editing.” There you can adjust the sittings for the length of still images when you add them to your project. You can also have the images overlap slightly for a smoother look using cross fades.

For Jen’s project, the photos were at 3 frames per second:

Another options is going to “Project,” then “Import Media.” Check the box “Open still image sequence,” then select the photos you want to import. Vegas will merge all those photos into a single file for your project:

The finished product gives people a taste of it’s like to walk the High Line in a way that a traditional news article can’t do very well. These kinds of videos aren’t just trendy — they help journalists tell better stories.

Local weather watchers have been dutifully documenting San Antonio’s temperature, precipitation, and other climate data for 140 years. If you’re curious how this year’s drought compares to past dry spells, meteorologist Robert Blaha with the National Weather Service has done you a huge favor.

Blaha helped dig up old climate records and published monthly rainfall totals for San Antonio going back to 1871. I stumbled across this interesting piece of the city’s weather history while helping out with a story about the drought, and I made this interactive chart based on the data. (There are a few gaps in the rainfall totals in the 1800s, so the chart starts at a nice round number — the year 1900.)

“We were able to find the records,” Blaha told me. “In the 1800s, they hand wrote (the climate data) in ink. It was in a paperback book. When I came here in 1975, they were in notebook format. In 2050, they’ll be in the format of that day.”

Blaha said the rainfall gauge in San Antonio has changed locations over the years. In the early days it was at a co-op station and then moved to Fort Sam Houston. In 1891 it moved to a downtown office building. Somewhere along the line it was at Stinson Field. In the 1940s it moved to the San Antonio International Airport and stayed there ever since.

All that work helps us compare this year’s drought to past dry spells. This year, we’ve received 5.6 inches of rain so far in San Antonio. That’s about half the total precipitation for the lowest year on record since 1900, when it rained 10 inches in 1917.

In 2010 it looks like we got quite a bit of rain –37.4 inches. But click on the monthly figures for 2010 and 2011. The data show that September 2010 was our last significant taste of rain.

In the nine months since then, we’ve barely gotten anything.