Frank E Asked Me About My New Chesapeake Energy Neighbor

I am almost 100% certain that I have mentioned, at least once, that Chesapeake Energy is drilling another Gas Well in my neighborhood. I believe I blogged a few pictures, as well.

Just a second, I'll find the blogging in question.

Found it, from July 24, 2011, titled Chesapeake Energy Wants To Poke Another Hole In My Neighborhood.

This morning Frank E made a blog comment regarding my neighborhood Chesapeake operation...

Frank E has left a new comment on your post "The Confederacy Of Dunces Wants To Know Why The Yard Waterers Of Tarrant County Are Wasting Water That Could Go To Gas Well Fracking ":

Hey Durango, have you been made aware of the sneaky plan by CHK and the city to turn that former Walmart land right near your abode into another heavy industrial drilling site? Yep, it's the one right across the street from the Chinese buffet and Albertson's.....and right next to a large apartment complex, full of people and children which the city's Ordinance classifies as a public-use and thus requires a minimum setback distance of 600 feet. But CHK and its servants the public officials seem to think that people who rent are third-class citizens, deserving little to no protection or input to such a hazardous plan. Maybe, the people in this city is like the proverbial frog-in-the-slow boiling pot of water when it comes to this crazy gas drilling+fracking+pipelining+profiteering enterprise...of the backs, and lungs, of regular people.

Yes, Frank E., I have been aware of this Chesapeake sneakiness. I walked over to the sneakiness this morning to take some new pictures. The picture at the top is a sign announcing in rather convoluted English that "A Gas Well Permit within 600 feet of a Protected Use by Protected Use Waiver to drill for gas has been requested by Chesapeake Operating, Inc."

Now, here is where it gets a little weird. At the top is the Chesapeake sign from today. The sign on the left is what Chesapeake had installed on the site on July 24. On the July 24 sign it says "A Gas Well Permit to drill for gas within 600 feet of a Protected Use has been requested by Chesapeake Operating, Inc. A public hearing is scheduled at City Council Chambers - 1000 Throckmorton Street, Fort Worth, TX on August 6."

Okay, why does today's sign repeat that a waiver has been requested? The project seems to be well underway. I know a resident of the nearby apartment complex was gathering signatures on a petition objecting to this close by drilling operation. Did that petition get presented at the public hearing?

Let's look at some pictures I took this morning of this close to the public Chesapeake Energy gas drilling operation...

Above I am standing at the northeast corner of the Super Bowl Buffet that Frank E references. Albertsons is to my left. Across the street is the Chesapeake Operating Inc. Operation.

Above I am still standing on the Super Bowl Buffet parking lot, looking north across Boca Raton Boulevard at the Chesapeake Energy Operation. At the north end of the drill pad site you see a building. That building is the offices for a big self storage complex. Someone lives, full-time in that office. Thus living well inside the supposed minimum 600 foot setback.

Above I am looking northwest from the north side of Boca Raton, up against Chesapeake's chain link fence that surrounds their operation. This picture gives you a good idea of how close these apartments are to this operation. The last time Chesapeake drilled near these apartments, on the west side, it was so disturbing to the peace and quiet that some residents moved.

I don't understand why the setback rules are so easily ignored, particularly when you are talking about a setback from a densely populated location.

Like I've already said, if, as the sign indicates, a "Protected Use Waiver Has Been Requested", with no mention made of the waiver having been granted, then why is this gas well operation well underway?

It is all very perplexing. And thank you, Frank E, for asking me about it.

Something Might Be Happening Soon Under Fort Worth's Ederville Park

There is a very very little park, called Ederville Park, across the street from Fort Worth's Handley Post Office. In all the years that I have been going to the Handley Post Office I do not recollect ever seeing anyone using this park.

There may be one picnic table, but Ederville Park appears to me to be a small, open, treeless grassy field.

When I left the P.O. I saw a sign that caught my eye, so though it's not my usual route away from the P.O., I drove by to read the sign.

It says...

PUBLIC NOTICE

The subsurface of this park is being considered for non-recreational use to allow off site drilling and extraction of natural gas from underneath this park. There will be no drilling units located on the park and the surface of the park will not change.

There are a lot of houses near Ederville Park. And the aforementioned Post Office. A church is across the street from the Post Office. On the north end of Ederville Park there is an Enterprise Car Rental outlet.

So, is this off site drilling only taking natural gas that sits under this little park? How does that work? One of those slant drilling operations that ends up under Ederville Park? I've seen no signs in the area of people objecting to drilling or being pressured to sign over drilling rights, like I see in other areas where the drillers are poking holes in the ground.

I wonder where the off site drilling site is?

Fort Worth Gas Price, Rats & Zorro's Buffet

Earlier today I blogged about obesity. And then a few hours after that I found myself talked into going to the biggest buffet in Texas. That being Zorro's Buffet.

I've blogged about Zorro's Buffet before. Sadly, for Zorro's Buffet, their official website is badly designed, so my blog shows up before their website when someone Googles "zorros buffet fort worth."

The Race Way gas station next to Zorro's had gas at $2.64. There was no line. You can get the stuff in the $2.60 range all over this zone now.

A large percentage of the Zorro's Buffet customers today were obese. One sat near me. Obese people can really eat a lot of food.

Today was Mexican food day at Zorro's. Which included chile rellenos, which is my favorite Mexican food. I had 5 rellenos. They were good. I always judge the quality of a Mexican restaurant by the quality of their rellenos. Zorro's was not quite as good as Esperanza's, but like I said, I had 5 of them.

Two guys sitting behind me, judging from overhearing their conversation, were exterminators. They were having their best extermination year ever. Getting rid of rats.

And now the weird part. One of them said the rats were on the move due to all the gas drilling disturbing their habitat. So, the rats move into people's homes and garages.

Now, as much as I find much to be disturbed about regarding all the urban gas drilling, I find it hard to believe that it has caused a mass exodus of rats.

I've not seen any rats in my neighborhood and I've got a gas operation going on right across the street.

Natural Gas Drilling Polluting Water

Incoming info from Don Young pointing me to an interesting article in the Christian Science Monitor regarding the damage being done to the nation's water supply by the hydraulic fracturing process that is used to release natural gas from stubborn hard shale.

The area around Fort Worth has been the practice ground for this new drilling procedure for about 5 years. It is now spreading all over the country.

Read the whole article here.

Below is a scary excerpt about what happened to one Texas family....

The nation’s shale-gas guinea pigs reside in 15 counties around Fort Worth, where shale-gas extraction using hydraulic fracturing has been validated in recent years. The results have brought wealth to some, but infuriated others.

Charlotte Harris and her husband signed a mineral lease last year. But she’s upset now. She sharply recalls a day last November when her drinking-water well died and a new gas well 100 yards from her Grandview, Texas, home was born.

She washed dishes that morning as usual, she says in an phone interview. But after a shower, her skin itched terribly and she realized the water had a sulfurous odor. Later that day, without warning, her toilet erupted. Water shot out of it “like Niagara Falls.”

About that time, she learned, powerful pump trucks at the nearby well site were sending pulses of water mixed with sand and chemicals thousands of feet down into solid shale to fracture it to increase the flow of gas. She and her husband now believe some of that fluid escaped under pressure much nearer the surface.

After the Harrises complained, the drilling company had the water tested but found no problem. Harris’s next-door neighbor, John Sayers, had a lab test his well water. The lab found toluene, a chemical used in explosives, paint stripper – and often in drilling fluids.

Almost a year later, the Harris family well water, once clear and sweet, is murky and foul-smelling. Ms. Harris’s husband, Stevan, trucks in about 1,500 gallons twice a week, at 15 cents a gallon.

“We’re not using that [well] water for anything at all,” Mr. Sayers says. “I was told not to drink, wash, or anything. Not even water my grass with it.”

The Sad Desperate Chesapeake Energy Gas Drilling Business

Fort Worth's responsible, high quality newspaper, FW Weekly, has a feature called On Second Thought where a reader can opine about any subject and if it is deemed reader worthy, FW Weekly prints it. This week's On Second Thought was some very good thinking about all the holes being drilled in the ground all over Fort Worth and surrounding towns.

This week's issue also has a very appalling article about the attempt to force creationism to be taught in Texas schools.

Below is this week's On Second Thought...

The Price of Cake
The only good urban gas well is one that doesn’t get drilled.

By GRAYSON HARPER

There’s something a bit sad and desperate about this gas drilling business. With utility bills mounting, the economy shuddering, and college costs rising so high that it seems only rich families can afford them, little wonder that so many in Fort Worth couldn’t wait to sign on the dotted line when the gas companies were waving the money around.

But now the reality is setting in: homes threatened with eminent domain, dangerous high-pressure gas lines about to be laid beneath our feet, thousands of gas wells — roughly seven pad sites per MAPSCO page — planned for our fair city.

A lot of folks who signed have been running to the city council crying, “Shocked, shocked!” as if they couldn’t have imagined beforehand the ruthless nature of the folks to whom they sold out.
I wonder what they were thinking when they embraced the gas companies in the first place. Of course Chesapeake and the others misled everyone. With so much money at stake, it’s hard to imagine them acting like Boy Scouts.

Of course they manipulate the truth. They withhold crucial information, such as how crazy it is to bury high-pressure pipelines carrying odorless wet gas near homes and schools. Even during a prolonged drought, they forget to mention the amount of clean water — millions of gallons — they will destroy. And they certainly don’t talk about the catastrophic explosions from blown high-pressure pipes and animals dropping dead after drinking water poisoned by failed injection wells.

And how about those injection wells? You think the gas boys are going to share with us the number of such wells in Texas where highly toxic production water is pumped deep underground? Of course not. The answer is more than 30,000, the most of any state in the union, but to say that would be to admit that, thanks to them and their cohorts in the oil sector, our fine state is now one big toxic dump. We have one injection well operating right here in the city limits. Chesapeake would like to drill up to 15 more in and around the city. One thing is certain: An awful lot of wastewater is going somewhere — maybe to a neighborhood near you!

Some of the folks who are complaining are hedging their bets. They’re all for getting out the minerals, “Just don’t come in my yard, not on my street, not if it means my house getting eminent-domained.” As an old friend of mine likes to say, “Everyone wants to go to heaven, they just don’t want to die.”

Will the citizen group known as CREDO — Coalition for a Reformed Drilling Ordinance — be able to change anything for the better? I hope so, but it seems to me the fix is in. Everyone is bought already, from the Texas Legislature to the Railroad Commission that oversees the drilling. Everyone on the Fort Worth City Council (with the noteworthy exception of Joel Burns) has taken contributions from the gas companies. Mayor Mike Moncrief gets royalty checks from Chesapeake, XTO, and others while routinely voting for new permits for them to drill. As the mayor himself said in a recent meeting, “Money talks, everything else walks.” He should know.

The record is clear and was well known before the first person signed away minerals — the duplicity of the industry, the catastrophic accidents, the lack of oversight, the brutal impact on public health and the environment, including air, water, plants, and wildlife. The fact is, you can’t get a “reformed drilling ordinance” because there’s no such thing as “reformed” or responsible gas drilling.

The only right thing to do would be to go back to square one: Pray over it. Ask the “Great Spirit,” or whoever’s in charge hereabouts, for forgiveness. Then regroup and start fighting on the basis that it’s simply dead wrong — unsafe, immoral, insane — to be drilling for gas within the city limits, because our immediate environment will likely end up polluted beyond recognition and our groundwater destroyed, all for the enrichment of a few who — after thoroughly trashing the joint — will move on.

Unless we fight the whole thing, those who worry about lowered property values, noise pollution, explosions, fires, and all kinds of health effects might want to move elsewhere.

This may turn out to be one of those cases where you can’t have your cake and eat it, too.

Grayson Harper is a Fort Worth-based writer and artist.

Jerry Horton Gives Up Fight Against Cheseapeake Energy

I was shocked, shocked I tell you, to learn this morning that Jerry Horton has given up her fight against Chesapeake Energy. On the same day Jerry Horton was scheduled to be in court for a condemnation hearing she reached a settlement with the people threatening her with eminent domain abuse in order to run a natural gas pipeline under her front yard.

A few of Jerry Horton's neighbors continue to fight against settling. Jerry Horton will get $15,500 for signing over the right of way. Chesapeake, well, actually a division of Chesapeake Energy that does the pipeline laying, called Texas Midstream Gas Services, has contracted with Jerry Horton to put the pipeline at least 20 feet below the surface, with no vents or any other surface protrusions. And will replace any of Jerry Horton's trees that die within 6 months.

It is very rare for a gas line to be installed under houses. The gas line will affect the property value. It must be disclosed to any potential buyer. Having a gas line under heavy pressure underneath your home is not seen by most people as a good thing.

There are currently more than 1,100 gas wells drilled or planned to be drilled within Fort Worth. These wells require a growing web of pipelines throughout the city. Nothing like this has ever been done in an urban zone before.

Jerry Horton felt she did not have the resources to fight Chesapeake. She could not afford the legal fees. I would think that in all of Fort Worth, or Tarrant County, or Texas, there would be at least one good lawyer with a conscience who would take on a case like Jerry Horton's, pro bono. For the public good.