Public Meeting: Citizens Plead for Safety ...

... Gas Drillers say, "not to worry", current gas drilling ordinance is OK.

A skeptical citizen shows his response to Gas Drillers claims.

Public Meeting

Drilling Down on the Family Farm

Farmer in Pennsylvania shares his story about deciding to allow shale gas drilling on his family's farm in Ellsworth Hill, Pa.

"I thought I was prepared for it.  I had seen this operation before, on other people's land.  I had even been mildly impressed by the military precision of it all, by the way the roughnecks moved wordlessly among the massive water tanks arrayed around a drill pad the size of a high school football stadium, ....".

Piotr Redlinski for the New York Times

It takes as many as 400 truck trips to complete a single well, and that’s not even counting the fuel-guzzling equipment needed to alter the ancient land to carve out the three- to five-acre drill pad itself. Once that’s done, the diesel drill rigs arrive, towering diamond-tipped syringes that work round the clock, often for two weeks at a stretch, to bore down 7,500 feet or so into the Marcellus before making a 90-degree turn to bore another mile and a half laterally. It’s a dirty, noisy, energy-intensive process, and despite the industry’s boast that natural gas burns 30 percent cleaner than oil, in the Marcellus the hunt for it is still fueled almost entirely by diesel.

And that’s not the only resource that’s consumed. It takes millions of gallons of water to break up the shale, and at least 30 percent remains underground forever. The rest of it, along with the slightly radioactive, highly saline and heavy-metal-laden water that has existed alongside the shale for 400 million years, flows up to the surface over the lifetime of the well.

IT’S a perilous process. There is the risk of surface spills — of the fracking fluid or flowback water, or even of diesel, whether held on the site to fuel the process or dumped when a driver fails to navigate the hazards on back roads never meant to handle this kind of traffic. Groundwater has also been fouled by drifting methane that migrated because the drillers, by dint of ignorance or carelessness or just plain bad luck, failed to properly isolate those deposits with cement.

This will never be a perfectly safe operation. No industrial process ever is. There will always be risks of accidents, mechanical failures, human error. That’s every bit as inevitable as the development of the Marcellus itself. There will never be enough regulators to police all the trucks and tanks and rigs that will cover the Marcellus from New York State to the Kentucky state line in the next few decades. In the end, the responsibility for monitoring this, for holding the industry to its promises and responsible for its failures, will fall where it has always fallen — on the shoulders of the people on the ground, the people whose lives will be most directly affected.

Standing there in what used to be our pasture on that light summer night, watching as the machinery of progress blasted the rock a mile beneath my feet, I realized that was what scared me the most. Not that this was inevitable, but that its impact depended so much on me, on whether I had the character to come out from behind the convenient shield of “are you for it or against it” ideology and find the strength, the will and the means to do what I can to make sure this is done in the best way possible.
I still don’t really know the answer. Link

Environmental Poetry

Source: Hubblesite.org

Cause and Effect

Question?  i know the earth produces

natural gas.  What is the purpose

of this gas?  Does this gas help the earth

maintain its buoyancy in the atmosphere?

Does releasing its gas from its natural source

upset mother and she lashes out

with earthquakes and other natural

disasters? Think about the number

of floods, ice caps melting on both ends

of the earth.  Earth quakes on the east

coast and in the south, areas that in my

lifetime  i hadn't heard activity

in these regions. 

i heard about global

warning …. i wonder if the earth is actually

sinking …. after all it's over populated,

over developed and greed extracting all

of the natural ….  minerals from the core

of the planet.  i ask you, do i have a reason

to be concerned?

                                  Fred e Allen

                                Resident of Bella Lagos Neighborhood, 900 feet from a proposed Gas Well.

Dallas Citizens Gas Drilling Ordinance

Review the Citizens Recommendations in the link below:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/68818189/Citizens-Recommendations-for-a-Dallas-Gas-Well-Ordinance

Citizens Oppose Heavy Industry in Neighborhoods

Gas Industry Pushing to Drill in Our Neighborhood Next?

Reprinted from the Dallas Observer

What the Frack: Task Force Isn't Done, But City Moves Closer to Issuing First Drilling Permit

By Leslie Minora Wed., Oct. 12 2011 at 8:32 AM 

North Lake map with Valley Ranch to the East and Irving to the West

 

​ XTO and Trinity East, two of the companies that have paid the city big money and signed leases to drill for gas within the city limits, have agreed to wait 30 months while the city rewrites its gas drilling ordinance. But one company has no such deal with the city: Chief Oil & Gas, which, we discovered at yesterday's meeting of the gas drilling task force, is moving ahead with its longstanding plans to drill on a site owned by Luminant at North Lake, near Coppell but within the Dallas city limits. "Luminant is providing the minerals and the land. Chief is providing the know-how and the drilling," said Dallas Cothrum of Masterplan, the land-use consulting company representing Chief.

In order to drill, companies must obtain site-specific zoning permission from city council -- a specific use permit (SUP) -- as well as a city permit, which is issued according to technical standards, providing that the company submits materials demonstrating that they are in accordance with the city's current drilling ordinance. Meanwhile, the Dallas drilling task force is crafting updated ordinance recommendations, which they will vote on next month before submitting to the city council.

But before it began revising its drilling ordinance, the city approved five SUPs for drilling sites, and Chief is the only one currently moving forward in the permitting process, as documented in the letter below from Masterplan, which ends with the line, "Finally, I cannot remember an occurrence when it took the city so long to issue a permit for an allowed use."

Theresa O'Donnell, the city's director of Sustainable Development and Construction, said her office has requested additional information from Chief. And if the company complies with the current ordinance, she said, the city must grant a permit allowing fracking on the site. Currently, she said during her zoning presentation to the drilling task force yesterday, the application is "substantially complete."

If a permit is issued, there is legally nothing stopping Chief from drilling on the site. "We're perfecting our package and plan to resubmit this week," said Cothrum. Depending on a variety of factors, drilling could begin before the end of the year -- which is what Chief said last year, following the resolution of a host of other controversies involving the property.

"We want to see if there's gas there," Cothrum said. "We wouldn't have gone through the process if we weren't serious about finding out if there's gas at North Lake."

The North Lake location is relatively secluded from residential neighborhoods, O'Donnell told the task force. "We could see the activity," she said, and "watch the process without having any immediately adjacent neighbors that are affected by it."

Potential fracking sites for which the city has granted SUPs will be held to the city's current ordinance rather than being forced to comply with the revisions currently under consideration. "They'd be perfectly within their rights to say no [to complying with a revised ordinance], but we could ask," O'Donnell said, addressing this issue yesterday during her zoning and permitting presentation to the drilling task force. She told Unfair Park that, generally, "You get to play by the set of rules that are in place at the time of your application."

O'Donnell made it clear that Dallas does not have a moratorium on fracking, but reiterated that until now, gas drilling companies that have paid the city millions for leases have voluntarily stalled their applications.

"We've asked them to hold off," she said. "They're just voluntarily keeping their application suspended."

But with Chief's pursuance of a drilling permit, the promise is disintegrating. She told the task force that companies holding those leases "could come in and submit all their documentation for a permit this afternoon if they would like." In other words: Dallas could be fracked.

Citizen Recommendations for a new Gas Drilling Ordinance

Citizens work hard to protect their neighborhoods ....    by Mayor Rawlings

The Dallas City Council was presented with recommendations for the creation of a new Dallas Gas Drilling Ordinance on October 4, 2011.  These recommendations have been compiled after months of research and study coordinated by the following citizen groups:

Mountain Creek Neighborhood Alliance
Dallas Area Residents for Responsible Drilling
Downwinders at Risk
Texas Campaign for the Environment

Other municipalities gas ordinances in the Barnet Shale were studied and used as a guide for the Dallas citizens proposal.

Recommendation highlights:

• A 3000 foot setback based upon public safety (danger to water mains, foundations, bridges, etc), as outlined in the national guidelines of the Corps of Engineers Manual with regards to the Joe Pool Lake Dam infrastructure. 

• Full disclosure of fracking fluid ingredients, with no exceptions,and with samples taken by the city.

• Off-sets for air pollutants of NOx, VOCx and Greenhouse Gases.

•  No wells allowed inside a residential area.  Wells to be restricted to areas zoned for heavy industry.

• Notice of a Gas Well SUP permit application shall be mailed to all residences, schools, churches, day care center, nursing homes and business within a one mile radius of the facility.  

See attached link for copy of Recommendations: 

 http://www.scribd.com/doc/67593580/Citizens-Recommendations-for-a-Dallas-Gas-Well-Ordinance