ISSUE
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TASK FORCE
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SOLUTION
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Too close for comfort
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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!
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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.
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Secret toxic chemicals
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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.
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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.
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Water for drinking, not
for fracking
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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.
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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.
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Save our parklands &
floodplains
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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.
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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.
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Protect the air we breathe
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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.
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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.
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Effective oversight
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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.
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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.
|
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| A Gas Drilling Pad |
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| A skeptical citizen shows his response to Gas Drillers claims. |
"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, ....".
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| 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
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| North Lake map with Valley Ranch to the East and Irving to the West |
In
the midst of a severe drought, Chesapeake Energy pumps 4 million
gallons of water from a river for a fracking operation in Fort Worth."Obviously,
that's a pretty heavy draw on an aquifer when we're in the midst of a
drought," says Bob Patterson, UTGCD's general manager. In his water
district, 40 to 50 wells have run dry and many municipalities have
declared stage two or stage three drought conditions, which involve
severe restrictions on residential outdoor water use. But natural gas
drillers can still pump as much water from the district as they want.
Patterson says restrictions targeting drillers in his area would have
to be imposed by state agencies or the Legislature, which "has been
fairly lax." He and many other water managers want Texas Gov. Rick Perry
to place limits on the drillers.
City's Gas Drilling Task Force Received a Public Education at Last Night's Hearing
