Having worked for both DS and the Western Co., I can say fracking is both safe and effective. What you will end up with this new bill is higher gas bills, a very bad thing for the poor and elderly. Looks like Dallas is turning into the new Austin.
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Raymond Crawford, Actual Citizen, Fought the City on Fracking -- and Won
When Dallas' drilling rules get tougher, you'll have a professional needlepointer to thank.
OK, pretend you have to bet money on this. Here's the set-up. On one hand, you've got these huge natural gas drilling companies coming down the road with their gigantic rigs, tons of money and very expensive haircuts.
Where are they headed? Oh, no! They're headed to Dallas City Hall, the concrete castle on Marilla Street where no good comes of anything. City Hall might as well have a big sign over the door that says, "We hate not the citizens, nor do we love them. We simply do not acknowledge their grubby little existences."
Something terrible is about to happen, right? Surely the drilling companies are going to get City Hall to let them drill for natural gas inside day-care centers.
Patrick Michels
Raymond Crawford, a guy in the ";soft craft" trade, as he puts it, took a hard line with the drilling industry- and won.
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So here's what I want you to bet on: There's this guy who designs needlepoint patterns for a living. If you don't know what needlepoint is, Google it. No, wait. That's just going to tell you it's "a form of counted thread embroidery." Ask your grandmother instead.
OK, so the needlepoint guy goes to City Hall, the Castle of We-Don't-Even-See-You, to whup up on the drilling companies with all that money and those haircuts. For some reason he thinks it's his job to prevent atrocity.
Ladies and gentlemen, please place your bets. Gas? Needlepoint? Who wins?
That's right: Needlepoint.
Really. The needlepoint guy beat the gas drilling companies at City Hall last week. I am not making this up.
It was only a battle, not the war. Even people on Needlepoint's side offer caution about coming challenges. They know they're still down in the dungeons of the Castle of Bad, nowhere near daylight yet. But they're not dead, and they just won a sword fight.
Last week Raymond Crawford and a posse of citizen insurgents succeeded in persuading the Dallas city council to step back, breathe deeply and take a long, hard look at safety and environmental concerns associated with gas drilling operations within the city limits.
I couldn't believe it. Forget gas. As I sat there in the peanut gallery, it wasn't even the gas thing that struck me. It was the winning. It was the fact that citizen activists came to City Hall and turned the beast. At all. Even once. On any issue. They could have been pushing an ordinance making it illegal for trucks to run over old ladies. I would have been sitting in back, betting on the trucks.
The event was a city council briefing session, not an official meeting, so the council didn't actually vote on anything. But after months of resistance, heel-dragging and general arrogance, a clear majority of the council finally agreed last week that the city needs a special commission on drilling safety. They vowed to create one at the first official opportunity.
Once formed, the commission will recommend changes to the existing city regulations that control drilling in Dallas. The panel—made up of a fairly even mix of citizens, industry reps and officials—will have no teeth. It will only be able to recommend changes to the law—changes the city council will then enact or ignore. But almost anything they come up with will be an improvement over the current regulations, which, as currently written, in paragraph B of section five, subsection six in chapter 27 of the city code, read: "Drill your ass off, whadda we care?"
A day after the briefing session, I called Jim Schermbeck, the go-to guy on clean-air activism in Texas. He runs Downwinders at Risk, a group that has fought dirty cement kilns in North Texas for decades. He's a writer, filmmaker, the guy who testifies, the guru. I wanted to know if I was making too much of Crawford and his group.
"If it hadn't been for what Ray did," Schermbeck said, "none of this would be happening now. I mean none of it. So from that perspective, it is a tremendous vindication of how one person can change history.
Crawford didn't do it alone, Schermbeck pointed out. Several other people played major roles. It was very much a group effort. Crawford will tell you the same thing. But he was the catalyst.
"He built that group," Schermbeck said. "He got people involved. He got us [Downwinders] involved. He did his homework. He went out and organized his community along with other people."
Before drilling came into his life, Crawford says, he wasn't looking to play activist.
"I don't do this for a living, nor did I ever want to. I design needlepoint. I've been doing it since 1996," he says. "I own my own company and sell to the trade and go to trade shows, and 99.9 percent of my customers are women."
A year ago, though, an email popped up on his computer informing him that XTO wanted to drill near his neighborhood in southwest Oak Cliff. He got curious, started Googling and reading, and eventually launched into a year of intensive effort.
He says he and his fellow citizens started out with lots of conviction but not much faith they could really win. But six months ago they attended their first big meeting at City Hall, to ask a city board not to grant a drilling permit to XTO Energy, a partner with Exxon-Mobil.
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16 comments
PEOPLE! Why so afraid of Natural gas exploration? Everything we do pollutes the air with carcinogens everyday. You drive your big SUVS and cars everyday and dont think twice about about the pollution. Im sure there are several of you on this comment board that use natural gas everyday. How the hell do you think you get it? By drilling and fracking. All hypocrites I say....
It's kind of funny to see things like this - the reaction a citizen has when he finally learns that city hall is not some scary haunted house of horrors, but rather that it's a place where you gather with fellow citizens to better everyone's lives.
It makes me wonder - what kind of sick, twisted home environment produces a citizen who hates and fears his own government?
Good going Dallas! Arlington is stuck in the middle just behind Ft Worth, but the corruption is just as evident. The cover up on the Fulson Site story is so think, Cover Girl makeup would be proud. Just last storm ago two drill sites (Dalworthington Gardens / XTO and the Fulson drill site in SE Arlington at Sublett & HWY 360 / Chesapeake) had an emission event during the night of the storm on April 11 in the early am hours when the power went off. The compressors went down and the pipielines pressure supposedly backed up into the drill sites. The Fulson site's auto shut in didn't work and the secondary safty feature kicked it and spewed benzene into our atmosphere and sickened a woman with her windows oped two blocks away. But we are suppose to be grateful the system "worked" and we avoided a blow out. The reward 40 hours later was that council voted to approve six more wells despite citizen requests to table the vote until TCEQ could finish the investigation. Fireball or benzene take your pick...short death or long, latency cancer one? Read more on Facebook's Barnett Shale Breathers Beware/Discussions page.
The war is not over, but it was astounding to see citizens actually get thrown a bone! Many thanks for Raymond, Cherelle, Mr. Shermbeck and several other UNPAID! citizens working to protect our children's health, our environment, and our city's reputation. Cherelle is right, I've seen some city staff outright manipulate the facts and city council do just about anything (including extend and drag out city proclamations to take up most of the morning, change agenda items around, have a closed session, extend that into a lunch) to keep citizen stakeholders from being able to participate in the process of local government. That day, you needed to be there well before 9 and wait until late in the afternoon to get the final word. Try keeping a job, taking care of your small business, or being able to pick up your kids from school around the Council and Staff's anti-citizen stakeholder maneuvers.When it happens every time I have been one of those stakeholders, regarding various issues, it is hard to shake it off as a one time concern or anti-government paranoia.
The lesson here is that when the cause is right and you are willing to work you can affect policy, even in a dirty business like local government. Write the mayor. Write your councilman. There comes a point when clicking "Like" is not enough.
Raymond Crawford is my neighbor and friend and lately, my hero. He makes me want to be one too.
@Jim Schutze: Who are these everyday people in Fort Worth paying for college and house payments and medical plans with their royalties? That's part of the myth, you know. The only people making any money are the very large landowners. And large landowners are not the majority of people who signed away their minerals.
@Estrada3881: So, you are saying there is nothing new or different about any of this? Is that what you are saying? Because it that is what you are saying..you are sadly mistaken.
Please do some reading up on shale gas drilling and what it is doing to people who are experiencing it. We must begin to move "away" from fossil fuels...that does not mean embracing new technologies that produce fossil fuels and in the case of slick water, horizontal hydraulic fracturing in shale formations...also have issues that can create devastation of our water sources, our health (from all the toxins being released from the processing equipment) and destruction of our communities from all the gas gathering (non-odorized) pipelines that must be built to get the gas out of our communities and to markets far away.
Fear is a good thing when it helps avoid danger. This is a very serious issue...based on what you have written you have an agenda that is not so hard to figure out. So, have a nice evening.
Most of Ft Worth proper are town lots, meaning 1/4 acre on average. You aren't getting rich on that immediately. Gas wells can produce for 30-40 years, if you only get a little $50 check monthly it sounds trivial but put it into an account and forget about it and what do you have at the end? I'm neither pro nor con but do the math and tell me that money can't pay for college or whatever, maybe not you but for your offspring possibly? Just something to think about.
@Steve: When someone on a blog tells me they're not "pro" or "con," I know immediately that the rest of what they are saying is "pro." Shale gas drilling has only been conducted since 2002 in the Barnett as I'm sure you know..telling people that these wells will produce for 30 or 40 years is only a very small and deceptive part of the total story.
Refracking over and over and over to drain a lease requires millions of gallons of water that can never, ever be used again. It's contaminated by the fracking chemicals and the naturally occurring chemicals that come back up from deep in the ground. According to Dr. Ingraffea of Cornell, communities will need to be covered in wells to have any chance of draining the gas out of a lease over time.The storage tanks, the compressor stations, the gas gathering pipelines...all of these necessary parts turn a community into an industrial zone very quickly.
With stuff like that going on in a neighborhood, children will be lucky to get out of childhood alive...much less go to college. So, please don't throw around such ludicrous statements that $50 a month will pay for college...without mentioning the rest of the story.
@Steve: Oh, you're Steve. That's right. I know you. You have no last name. You're Steve. I'm not complaining without a solution. It's doubtful you live anywhere near shale gas drilling operations. Clearly, your replies reveal a shale gas industry bias and a LOVE of fossil fuels. A Love Affair is no excuse. Get a grip. And to correct the usual banter from the industry...most of the United States' crude oil does not come from the Middle East. That's such an outdated, but still so often repeated "notion, " Steve.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil...
Nimby issues? You are a wild and crazy guy, that's one thing for sure. The other thing is (now pay attention) ~ unconventional, slick water, shale gas drilling is deadly to our environment in the cities AND in the country. It's deadly to our planet, Janet, I mean Steve. Not in my back yard...and not on my planet.
Very well stated my anonymous friend. I think you're a little over the top on your conclusions, with all due respect. You can draw equal, if not infinitely worse, consequences from continued coal burning, nuclear, and crude drilling. If someone can give me a solution rather than just complaining then I'm eager to hear. I would agree that urban drilling is not ideal and drilling away from population centers is preferable but we did not build our cities with minerals in mind, sometimes they're right underneath. I hears hat you're saying but I'm watching our results in the middle east and tired of running a huge trade deficit, we can solve those issues if we can get over the nimby issues.
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