Gas Task Force Actions Will Affect Mountain Creek

A Gas Drilling Pad

CITIZEN ACTION ALERT  

Help us defend the protections for schools and parks in Dallas from gas drilling we've already won against an industry assault this pastTuesday.  

Please send one e-mail to the 11 member Dallas Gas Drilling Task Force TODAY that simply says:  

"Don't roll back buffer zones for parks or schools." 

  

(Dallas ) - If gas industry representatives get their way during the final Gas Drilling Task Force meeting next Tuesday, fracking will be allowed much closer to homes and schools, and even inside Dallas parks, a reversal of previous positions.    

What's ironic is that the President of the Dallas Parks and Recreation, Joan Walne, may facilitate these efforts.

Walne has been voting with industry throughout the course of the Task Force meetings, participating in votes this week that removed protections already agreed to for flood plain drilling. In the past, she's had no problem with the idea of sacrificing city parks to drilling rigs. She's expected to be a key vote next Tuesday.

"As it turns out, putting Joan Walne in charge of protecting Dallas public parks from the gas industry on this Task Force was like putting John Dillinger in charge of protecting the city's bank account," said Downwinders at Risk Director Jim Schermbeck.

Besides allowing rigs and giant compressors in parks, the Task Force is also expected to be asked by industry representatives to " revisit" the current recommendation requiring a 1000 foot setback from all homes, schools and churches and hospitals. They want it rolled back to between 500 and 700 feet, similar to restrictions in Fort Worth. 

"After already agreeing to inadequate 1000-foot buffer zones weeks ago for these "protected uses," industry now wants to go back and have another try at significantly cutting those distances," warned Zac Trahan of the Texas Campaign for the Environment. "They want to put a well pad as close as 500 feet from a school or hospital or home. A well pad could mean as many as 24 wells, a battery of storage tanks, and a large compressor that generates thousands of tons of air pollution a year. That's unacceptable to us, and we think, most Dallas residents."

Walne, as well as Texas Business for Clean Air Director Margaret Keliher, and Dallas attorney John McCall are expected to be key votes on the setbacks issue. Keliher had led the effort to disregard the current ordinance and allow drilling in Dallas floodplains, while McCall is supporting rigs as close as 300 feet to commercial pieces of property like office building, restaurant or other place of business.

Both Schermbeck and Trahan urged Dallas residents to e-mail the Task Force member and express their concern at the upcoming votes. "With only 11 members, and previous protections hanging on lots of 6-5 votes, an absence or change of heart has large ramifications," said Schermbeck. "We need Dallas residents to wake up and realize their fate is hanging on only a couple of votes from people they didn't elect."

E-mail Addresses of Dallas Gas Drilling Task Force Members:

joniwalne@aol.com  

loisgfinkelman@sbcglobal.net 
john@attorneymccall.com 
RAlvarez@edf.org
biegler@southcrossenergy.com 
cherelle.blazer@gmail.com
bbullock@mail.cox.smu.edu 
margaret@margaretkeliher.com 
pshaw@woodshawlaw.com 
David.Sterling@unthsc.edu 
twelch@bhlaw.net   

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.

Trinity River Water Being Taken For Gas Wells

Watch a story by Channel 11 on the last night's news.

Trinity River Water Being Taken For Gas Wells