Scott Snyder's stock pond is dry. So every day he drives a 6,500-gallon tanker across a mesa outside Montrose, Colorado, eight trips to a neighbor's reservoir and back, nine hours, keeping eight hundred cow-calf pairs alive through the worst snowpack on record. The federal program for drought-related water hauling pays eleven cents a gallon. Diesel runs $4.79. The Snyders are third-generation ranchers, and the arithmetic of whether their century-old operation survives lives in the gap between those two numbers.

Scott Snyder's stock pond is dry. So every day he drives a 6,500-gallon tanker across a mesa outside Montrose, Colorado, eight trips to a neighbor's reservoir and back, nine hours, keeping eight hundred cow-calf pairs alive through the worst snowpack on record. The federal program for drought-related water hauling pays eleven cents a gallon. Diesel runs $4.79. The Snyders are third-generation ranchers, and the arithmetic of whether their century-old operation survives lives in the gap between those two numbers.

Cheryl Henderson takes the trash to the curb and climbs the stairs back to her Third Ward apartment in hundred-degree heat. She has asthma and COPD. At the top she grabs water, sits before a fan, waits for the dizziness to break. "It feels like my lungs are closing up on me and I'm choking," she told the Houston Press.

Her apartment: 520 square feet, built 1938. One window unit held together with tape; the other's compressor is dead. She runs fans and blackout curtains all day, pays $200 a month in electricity from disability. Wakes in sweat, takes cold showers, and when it gets bad enough she sits in the stairwell hoping for a draft. Houston's AC ordinance is months from enforcement. A neighbor stops by to make sure she's still breathing.

Nobody calls any of this work. It is.

What Henderson runs every day

• 1 window AC held together with electrical tape
• 1 landlord-provided AC, compressor dead
• 4 portable fans, 2 ceiling fans
• 1 borrowed box fan from Northeast Action Collective
• Blackout curtains drawn all day

What it costs

• Electric: $199.98/month (disability income)
• Rent: $813 (mostly subsidized)
• Food: Houston Food Bank

What the apartment reaches: ~90°F at peak sun, by her estimate

Who else: Roughly 20,000 Houstonians lack adequate cooling, per Houston Press reporting