Behind the Barnett Shale

Very good info from Don Young......

Starting Sunday in the Denton Record Chronicle:

"Editor's Note: Behind the Shale, is a five-part series exploring urban gas drilling and one Argyle-area neighborhood's struggle against it."

Denton is a mid-sized university town just north of Fort Worth. (Argyle is a nearby small town.) Gas drilling started in the Denton area about two years before Fort Worth. The DRC has been has been at the forefront in reporting on the many dangers associated with natural gas drilling. They were the first to report on the presence of NORM in drilling wastes. The next four parts of this series should equally as educational.

Click here to read the first part of the five-part series....

Below is an excerpt from the Denton Record Chronicle article...

Jennifer Cole stepped across the parched ground of a North Texas autumn, past her dirt-caked backyard swimming pool, inching closer to a roaring machine. She watched it force its way through the earth, pushing dirt from side to side in waves like an ocean’s tide. Day by day, the bulldozer was remaking the lot behind her home on Britt Drive near Argyle, changing a sloped meadow dotted with oak trees and cattle into a flat and lifeless expanse. She shivered when she thought about what would fill the void.

Since the dirt-moving process began, dust clouds became so thick that her boys couldn’t make sense of them. “Mom, look! A sandstorm,” one said. Her sons didn’t understand why she wouldn’t let them use the pool or play outside after school. She looked down at the pool where a layer of grime clung to the bottom like black frosting, then back to the rolling bulldozer on the other side of the barbed-wire fence.

Cole didn’t know that what was happening behind that fence would consume the next three years of her life. She did know what the bulldozer meant, though. A gas rig was coming. It was Dec. 4, 2005 — a Sunday.

“Sunday,” she said above the roar, “is no day of rest.”