How the North Dakota fracking boom shook a family

[xchrom]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/dec/04/north-dakota-fracking-boom-family?intcmp=122


Traffic generated by an oil boom lines the main street in Watford City, North Dakota. Photograph: Bloomberg via Getty Images

In 1979, Brenda and Richard Jorgenson built a split level home in the midst of a large ranch outside the tiny town of White Earth, North Dakota. Richard's family is from the area – his grandfather started homesteading on the plains in 1915 – and the couple's affinity for the area runs deep. They love the land they live on: the epic sky and seemingly endless grasses of the prairie, the White Earth River meandering through a tree-lined valley. For most of their lives the landscape of the region has been dominated by agriculture – wheat, alfalfa, oats, canola, flax, and corn. The Jorgensons always figured they would leave the property to their three children to pursue the same good life they have enjoyed.

Then the oil wells arrived. They began appearing in 2006, and within just a few years dominated the area landscape. Today at least 25 oil wells stand within two miles of the Jorgensons' home, each with a pump, several storage tanks, and a tall flare burning the methane that comes out of the ground along with the petroleum.

Like most people in North Dakota, the Jorgensons only own the surface rights to their property, not the subsurface mineral rights. So there was nothing they could do when, in May 2010, a Dallas-based oil company, Petro-Hunt, installed a well pad on the Jorgensons' farm, next to a beloved grove of Russian olive trees. First, heavy machinery brought in to build the well pad and dig a pit for drilling wastes took out some trees. Then the new hydrology created by the pad drained water away from the olives, while others became exposed to the well's toxic fracking fluid. Some 80 trees were dead by the summer of 2011.

[liberal N proud]

1. Drill baby drill

This is what the oil companies and those who support drilling will do to the rest of the land here and everywhere.

[Nihil]

2. Hope and Change ...

Notable by their absence.