Amarillo News Drop

KELI From Inkwell, this is the Amarillo News Drop. I'm Keli, with Hast.

HAST A hazmat call at a state prison in Potter County. An employee opened mail in the mailroom at the William P. Clements Unit on Monday and became sick. Potter County Fire-Rescue and the Amarillo Fire Department Haz-Mat team responded and found traces of Xylazine — an animal tranquilizer — in the room. The patient had minor injuries and was transported by Amarillo Medical Services. This is the second incident of its kind at a Texas prison in months. The mechanism here is straightforward: someone sent the substance through the mail system. The question now is whether this was targeted or part of a wider effort to move drugs into the unit. Watch for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice to release a statement on whether they're investigating links to outside parties or contraband networks feeding the prison.

KELI Potter County also in the news on drought. The Panhandle is in the most severe drought category right now. Potter and Randall counties are in severe and extreme drought conditions, and that's expanded for the second week straight across Texas. The impacts here are real — ranching, water supply, fire risk all move with those numbers.

HAST City council meets today at three p.m. Air quality monitoring in North Heights is on the agenda, along with the 2024-2025 single audit. Livestreamed, so you can watch online if you want to follow the discussion on those items.

KELI Sticking with infrastructure and the long view — Fermi America announced its first binding lease for Project Matador. TensorWave TEX1, a subsidiary of AI cloud provider TensorWave, signed on for a facility with 222 megawatts of power coming online in the second half of 2027. That lease is expected to generate around 6.5 billion dollars over its initial 15-year term. This is the kind of industrial revenue that changes a region's tax base and workforce. The facility will support AMD Instinct GPUs for large-scale AI training. That's the hard infrastructure play the Panhandle has been positioning for.

HAST Heavier next. Randall County jury sentenced a mother to 10 years in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and a 10,000-dollar fine for injury to a child. Mariam Nabil Abdelhamid, 33, was found guilty of injury to a child with intent to cause bodily injury. In March 2025, she brought her two-year-old to daycare with a hand-shaped bruise on his face. She claimed the child fell down stairs. The jury gave her the maximum sentence allowed by law.

KELI At the Capitol, senators are questioning whether Texas should keep the tax exemption for data centers. That's rank-and-file pushback on the incentive structure that's been drawing companies like TensorWave here. The state has offered those breaks for years. If that exemption gets narrowed or removed, it changes the math for future leases like the Fermi one we just covered. That's a structural question the Panhandle needs to track.

HAST One date marker: in 1995, the Russell Hill subway accident in Toronto killed three people and injured 30 due to human error and a safety system design flaw. A reminder that infrastructure failures often have more than one cause.

KELI That's the Amarillo News Drop. Full script and sources at inkwell.wiki/news/amarillo.

KELI Before we close, a word from Inkwell. Gil's Intelligent Version runs on a short set of stated rules it calls Canons — the principles every translation choice has to answer to.

HAST One of them: where the text leaves a question open, keep it open. Read them at inkwell dot wiki, slash giv, slash canon.