What We Are Fighting For

Some think the initiative to ban fracking is all about what we are AGAINST. But this is really about what we stand FOR. It is a positive campaign – we stand for the health, safety, and integrity of Denton.

But that’s too abstract. Here’s what really keeps me motivated to keep up the fight: it’s the thought that a year from now a child – someone just like my daughters – will go outside in her neighborhood in our town to ride her bike and she won’t have frack trucks nearby pumping out diesel, silica, and other chemicals. She’ll come inside for dinner breathing clean air with no coughing. She’ll drink clean water not threatened by toxins (neither known nor non-disclosed). She’ll sleep soundly in the night with no interruptions. She’ll grow up healthy and do her own part to make Denton and the world better.

About 30,000 new families are going to move to Denton in the near future. Many of them will end up in situations like we’ve seen at Vintage and S. Bonnie, where the children couldn’t even go outside to trick or treat at Halloween. We’re fighting for a Denton where kids are safe in their own neighborhoods.

Time for a Frack Free Denton

The Denton Drilling Awareness Group is launching a campaign – Frack Free Denton – to ban hydraulic fracturing in the city limits. This campaign is a ray of hope for our community. It promises not only to protect us from a uniquely invasive and toxic industry, but also to provide us with an occasion for a civic conversation about who we are and who we aspire to be. In the spirit of that conversation, let me briefly explain why I will be signing the petition.

 

When it comes to fracking, all of the most powerful players are focused on a narrow set of intended outcomes: profits, economic growth, and energy security. The oil and gas industry seeks to exploit minerals. The Texas Railroad Commission fosters and promotes this development. State and federal lawmakers are increasingly captured by corporate interests.

It is at the local level where most of the broader unintended harms from fracking occur, namely, air and water pollution, property devaluation and damage, and noises and other nuisances. Working within this context, the City of Denton has pursued what we might call the compatibility strategy: it has sought to make the production of minerals compatible with health, safety, welfare, community integrity, and surface property rights.

After years of effort, I have come to realize that the compatibility strategy is a failure. We can either have fracking or a safe, healthy, and vibrant city. We cannot have both. In calling for a ban on hydraulic fracturing, we are choosing our safety over their profits. We are choosing our community over their reckless pursuit of commodities. We are choosing the health of our children over a shortsighted, poisonous, and unsustainable fossil fuel addiction.

This is a choice I have made with a great deal of deliberation. Indeed, for five years the committed citizens of Denton tried to make the compatibility strategy a success. We tried despite a Task Force stacked with oil and gas industry representatives. We tried despite closed-door meetings and behind-the-scenes legalese. We tried even as our ideas for bolstering safety and health – ideas that had been implemented by other cities on the Barnett Shale – were repeatedly denied. And we tried even as we learned that the new rules that did actually pass – including the 1,200 foot setback distance – would not apply to the hundreds of gas well pad sites within City limits grandfathered under older regulations.

But we could no longer stomach the failures of this strategy when three gas wells were drilled, fracked, and flared in one of our neighborhoods – and we saw that this would be the ugly future of Denton under status quo policies. We could no longer simply work through the bureaucratic system – with all its hoops, loopholes, and systematic biases – when people were getting sick and parents had to keep their kids indoors in desperate attempts to protect them from the fumes. We could no longer ignore the fact that most of the people exposed to the harms were not informed and were not receiving any of the financial benefits. And we cannot watch our City grow over the coming years into the heart of the gas patch and let thousands of new Denton families suffer in this way.

As natural gas prices rise in the future, things will only get worse. Unless we act.  Enough is enough. It is time for a frack free Denton.

How Denton Got Fracked

I learned how to use some software over the winter break that let me put together this 34 minute video, titled: "How Denton Got Fracked: The Story of a City on the Shale." Please share it widely - I hope it is helpful for citizens of Denton trying to get caught up on this issue and for citizens of other towns and cities who might learn from our experiences.

 

Meeting for South Lakes Park Neighborhoods

Thanks to the leadership of Rhonda Love, DAG has organized a meeting to discuss the fracking near South Lakes Park. Here is the info:

NEIGHBORHOOD MEETING

Come and learn about the gas drilling which is being conducted by EagleRidge Energy in our area.

Thursday, January 23, 2014    7-8:30PM

Denia Park Recreation Center, Room B

1001 Parvin Street

 

Fracking, the process of removing natural gas from shale, has begun on Acme Brick property near South Lakes Park, residences, schools, public areas, and businesses. This gas extraction process is accompanied by noise and pollution.

 

If you have any concerns, document the dates and times about noise, lights, chemicals, odor, dust, traffic, and any other problems, and call these numbers:                                          

 

Darren Groth, Denton Gas Well Administrator

          940-349-8363

          Darren.Groth@cityofdenton.com

                                               

          Joey Hawkins, City Council Representative for District 4

          940-395-8249

          Joey.Hawkins@cityofdenton.com                                          

 

Some people experience health problems such as headaches, sore throat, nose bleeding, rashes, dizziness, fatigue, respiratory distress, burning eyes, etc. If you do experience health problems, then keep a health log detailing symptoms, date and time of day when experienced, intensity and duration of symptoms.

 

Please call Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) at 1-888-777-3186 and file a complaint. They MUST respond to your call and can do air and water testing. Make a note of the date and time of your call and when they respond.

 

The EagleRidge contact is Mark Grawe, VP and Chief of Operations. 1-214-295-6704

__________________________________________________________________

You can contact other concerned citizens through this email: dentondag@gmail.com

And, for more information on citizens' concerns about gas drilling in Denton, please visit:  http://www.dentondag.org/  

Shale Survival in Denton

There’s been quite a bit of concern about the fracking near Southlakes Park. This is in addition to the fracking at Vintage/S. Bonnie – both by EagleRidge. For those wanting to know where to turn with questions and complaints, let me point you to TX Sharon’s very helpful Shale Survival Tools, which include information on Who to Call When Things Go Wrong. You can also find helpful information at Denton’s Gas Well Inspection Division.

If you are interested in the policy background of the Southlakes wells, you can check out my earlier post about that. You can also learn about how these wells (and the Vintage/S. Bonnie ones) were permitted by the City in a standstill agreement…even though at least three wells permitted seem to violate our ordinance.

I went out to look at these two fracking sites today and here are some pics and videos.

Here you can see them pulling water out of a city fire hydrant. Judging by all the hoses out there, it seemed like they might be using a couple of hydrants. Most likely they take this water to fill a frack pond. EagleRidge regularly uses upwards of six million gallons of water to frack each well. This good, clean water will be forever tainted and dumped 10,000 feet below the surface where it will stay (hopefully) in the Ellenburger formation.

Here are a couple of videos at Southlakes Park. The smell was nauseating and the noise has got neighbors wondering if a train engine is parked nearby.

Here is a pic and video from Vintage. I spoke with the nice security guard at the Vintage pad site about why they had suddenly stopped fracking and put up this workover rig. He said they were not done fracking – something had gone wrong that required them to deviate from plans for a while. He was not at liberty to say anything more about that subject. But he did give me his take on energy policy, saying that you can’t complain about oil and gas development unless you first relinquish your heater, your electricity, and your car.

 

 

Guinea Pigs of the Shale

There was a lot that went wrong leading up to the fracking of the Vintage/S. Bonnie wells. Homes were built too close to the pad sites, something the municipal ordinance still permits. No one in the neighborhood knew drilling was going to happen. The status of the city permits is in disarray. The standstill agreement handed EagleRidge the right to drill even though two of the wells may be illegal. The whole thing is steeped in deep legal ambiguity about vested rights. And now that it is happening, there is no monitoring…neighbors have had to pass the hat to buy a few summa canisters, as City Council has still (a year later!) not lifted a finger on their promise to implement an air and water quality monitoring program.

 

Clearly, we can do better. But how should decisions about fracking be made? The more I think about this, the more I believe these decisions should be guided by the basic principle of informed consent: Those most vulnerable to the potential harms should have the greatest say in decisions about where, whether, and how to frack. Let me explain my idea here.

With any proposed gas drilling and fracking project, there is sure to be some harm involved. But will it just be a temporary nuisance, a minor health problem, a major health problem, or even an explosion? Things are uncertain. How much risk is there and how much is acceptable?

There are more or less reasonable answers to these questions. But there is no right answer to them in the way there are right answers to math questions. There is no expert with the ‘one best solution.’ The right answer depends on what you value, your tolerance for risks, and how you are situated in relation to the costs and benefits. What counts as the right decision depends on your point of view. Thus, the question that matters most is not “what is the right decision?” but “who should make the decision?”  

 

 

Decisions about fracking are analogous to experiments on pharmaceuticals or other research trials involving human subjects. In both cases, the expected gains can only come about by subjecting people to potential harms. In the former case, it is those near the industrial sites. In the latter case, it is the research subjects who take the experimental drug.

There is a distinction in medicine between ‘therapy’ and ‘research.’ The term therapy typically applies to practices that are intended to promote the health and well-being of the patient. Research, by contrast, is an activity designed to test a hypothesis and contribute to generalizable knowledge. When you are a patient of a therapy, the goal is to benefit you. When you are a participant in a research trial (a 'guinea pig'), the goal is to use you to benefit others. Medical researchers have concluded that someone can only be used in this way if they first give their informed consent to the experiment.

Since fracking sites are experimental in an analogous way, then the same condition of informed consent should hold for anyone exposed to potential harms from fracking.

To me, this explains the importance of municipal governments in the politics of fracking.

 State regulatory agencies like the Texas Railroad Commission are mostly concerned about fostering and promoting the development of mineral resources. From the state’s perspective of running a massive and complex technological system, the informed consent of mere amateurs who happen to live in proximity to it is irrelevant. It won’t improve the functioning of the system any more than getting the consent of research subjects will improve the validity of a study’s conclusions. Indeed, in both cases the requirement of informed consent can throw a major wrench in the works. Some of the Nazi experiments (for example, those on hypothermia) were sound science but they involved such pain that they would never have been run if people had the choice to opt out of them. If we really respect autonomy, then some technoscientific projects just won’t happen. The danger of technocracy is that when the experts are in charge they elevate their values of functionality or validity above all other values. Then they make it look like they haven’t made a values decision at all—as if they were ‘neutral.’

Municipal government is a different kind of public sphere. It is oriented not toward system functionality but toward protection of goods like health, safety, beauty, and community integrity that might be sacrificed in the name of functionality. Local government is, in other words, the institutional home of informed consent. It is the voice of those living on the surface and made vulnerable to the harms caused by real-world experiments. This is why municipalities have become the most important flash point in the politics of fracking: they represent a different moral order, one that is rooted in place and community rather than the subterranean and network logic of commodity production.

I think this is why everyone, including many City Councilmembers, is frustrated at the limits imposed on municipal authority by the legal system. But what if we thought outside of that system for just a moment?

Imagine how things could have worked out so differently. EagleRidge wants to frack these three (or four?!) wells. The first thing they do is notify everyone within, say, a half mile radius of the proposed sites. These people form a temporary political entity, call it a deme, empowered with the authority to decide the fate of the proposal. They meet and deliberate about what (if any) conditions would need to be in place to allow the proposed fracking activity. They can adjust the location of the pad site, the distribution of royalty payments, the technical specifications required, etc.

Of course there are important details to work out (would it be majority rules?), but my point is to get us thinking about how fracking could be democratized.

The Frack Man Cometh

Tonight is fracking eve. The morning of Jan. 7th marks the beginning of fracking at the three wells on two pad sites near Vintage and S. Bonnie. Some homes in that neighborhood are within 250 feet, many others are far closer to the sites than our new setback requirement of 1,200 feet. I’ve pasted at the bottom of this post the letter that these Denton residents received from EagleRidge Energy. Here is a shot of them moving in their equipment and supplies.

This is clearly a situation that should not have happened. It should never happen again…but unless something drastic changes it will happen again and again. Residents there have already experienced nuisances and illnesses from the drilling. Many of them have kept their children indoors out of concern about the air quality. Some kids didn’t get to go trick or treating in their own neighborhood. At least one family has already moved out of the neighborhood. And others are concerned about the decreases they are likely to see in their property values.

Now that the fracking is coming, I know of at least two families with newborn babies that are evacuating their homes for the six weeks EagleRidge claims their operations will take.

Sleepless nights. Sick children. Families chased from their own homes. This is what Denton looks like on fracking.

It’s a sad day for that neighborhood. And it’s a sad day for our local democracy…it is a reminder that somehow we failed in our basic task of ordering the parts of our community into fitting relationships.