Mountain Creek Neighborhood Alliance residents have been attending the Dallas Gas Drilling Task Force's meetings at City Hall from July, 2011 to February, 2012. All 22 meetings and 2 Public Hearings. The Task Force has made their recommendations. And we're not happy with them and you're not going to be happy with them either.
Here is a chart we made for you of the key areas we're not happy with and they MUST be changed.
Task Force
Recommendations that Must be Strengthened:
ISSUE
|
TASK FORCE
|
SOLUTION
|
Too close for comfort
|
Separate
and unequal protections: 1000 feet
from homes, schools, hospitals and places of worship, but less for offices,
shopping centers and restaurants—and gas companies can ask for a “variance”
of just 500 feet for any of these!
|
Dallas should proceed with
caution. The Army Corps of Engineers recommends a setback of 3000 feet for the protection of a
dam. Dallas should use this as a guideline to uniformly protect its residents
where we live, work, worship and play.
|
Secret toxic chemicals
|
Gas companies can keep the full
list of toxic chemicals they use
to frack permanently hidden, calling it their “trade secret.” Not even Dallas police, firefighters and medical
professionals would be given this information.
|
Dallas’ first
responders are on the front lines every day
and will be put at high risk of exposure to these toxic chemicals. Dallas
should demand full disclosure of
all chemicals with no “trade secret” exemptions.
|
Water for drinking, not
for fracking
|
Fracking
uses 1-8 million gallons of water
for each new gas well—and this water is permanently
contaminated with toxic chemicals. Gas companies would be allowed to do
this even during severe droughts, and even use drinking water from Dallas to
drill in other cities.
|
Dallas
should charge
gas companies twice as much for using
our water since it will be contaminated and lost forever, ban the
exporting of our drinking water to other cities for the purpose of
fracking and ban water for fracking as a
part of Dallas’ Stage III drought restrictions.
|
Save our parklands &
floodplains
|
Reverse the current gas drilling
ordinance in order to allow fracking
inside Dallas parklands and floodplains—as
well as all compressor stations, storage tanks and other industrial
equipment.
|
Allowing
industrial development inside our parklands and floodplains is dangerous, risky and costly.
Dallas should keep the existing
prohibition on fracking inside parklands and floodplains, and protect
these with 3000 foot setbacks.
|
Protect the air we breathe
|
Allow fracking operations to continue
contributing as much CO2 as
all the cars on D/FW roads, which would all but eliminate the recently
adopted Dallas climate action plan.
|
Dallas
should require the gas industry to use their own Best Practises so as to not add to the smog producing and poisonous gases in Dallas' air.
|
Effective oversight
|
Continue relying on failed state and federal efforts to police
fracking operations in the D/FW Metroplex, and these outside agencies to
handle problems when they arise.
|
Dallas
should establish its own industry-funded
office of gas drilling oversight.
This office must have enough trained personnel, equipped with the latest
technology, to be able to provide help
to residents 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
|
Citywide Organizing Meeting on Gas Drilling in Dallas
Tuesday, March 27th
7 to 8:30 pm
Center for Community Cooperation
2900 Live Oak
Dallas, TX 75204
Email mcnadallas@yahoo.com with any questions.
My only place of refuge where I can escape the toxic air in Arlington is to hike at the Dallas Nature Preserve on its 600 acres. I am shocked to think that drilling would even be considered in such a place. There are much better ways to stimulate an economy.
ReplyDeleteWhat about all the gathering pipelines that will need to go in everywhere and hook up to the wells and take the shale gas to market...all up and down the gas pipeline highway. Right through your neighborhoods depending on where the pad sites are built.
ReplyDeleteOh, these are non-odorized, by the way. So, if there's a leak, you'll never know. And that could be catastrophic. Did the City of Dallas Task Force address "pipelines" in their recommendations?
Thanks for this synopsis. Dallas is very fortunate to have such an active and engaged community that is paying close attention to all of it.