Jessica Smartt Gullion - Fracking the Neighborhood: Reluctant Activists and Natural Gas Drilling

Jessica Smartt Gullion

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

2015 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gullion, Jessica Smartt, 1972- Fracking the neighborhood : reluctant activists and natural gas drilling / Jessica Smartt Gullion.

pages cm.(Urban and industrial environments)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-262-02976-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1.Gas wellsHydraulic fracturingEnvironmental aspectsUnited States.2.Urban pollutionUnited States.3.Environmentalism.4.Urban ecology (Sociology)I.Title

TD195.G3G8642015

622.3381dc23

2015011499

I think this is going to be one of the biggest environmental disasters in our history.

natural gas drilling activist

Personally, I think that all environmental issues are human issues really.

natural gas drilling activist

The ground trembles beneath my bare feet. Truck after truck rumbles up my street, hauling crack/frack fluid (water, chemicals) to the natural gas drilling site at the end of my block.

Injecting their fluid into the earth.

Penetrating, cracking her open.

She rumbles.

Weve had three earthquakes in so many days. A man in a gray suit comes on TV. He says the earthquakes arent related to the drilling. (Never mind we never had quakes here before).

I live in the middle of the Barnett Shale, in a suburban town not far from Dallas. Tucked in my neighborhood are natural gas pads. Pipelines crisscross behind our fences. There are more than three hundred sites in town.

Air alert! Its a Red Day. The children cannot play outside; the air is dangerous to breathe. They ask to go swimmingMama, its summer, its hot out. No, I tell them, lets go after dinner when there is shade. I dont tell them breathing outside is deadly (I dont want to frighten them).

The drill towers about a hundred feet above our homes. They call it a Christmas Tree, but theres nothing festive about it.

Jenny, the woman across the street, found a lump in her breast. She has Stage Three Breast Cancer. Jenny is 29.

Elizabeth lives two houses down. Her daughter has leukemia and has no hair. The PTA had a fund raiser to help them pay for chemo. Then Charlies daughter was diagnosed. And then Toris son.

Our spare change wont go that far.

So many of our neighbors have cancer that the school district started a support group. It meets at our elementary school.

The Texas Department of State Health Services says we are a statistical anomaly, not a cancer cluster.

Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.

Some of our neighbors tried to organize against the gas companies. We dont care that they drill here, we said, but we want them to be safe about it. There is An Activist who comes to our meetings with a dummy dressed in overalls and a gas mask. She calls him Ben Zene, because benzene is always at the gas sites and she doesnt want anyone to forget. You learn all about these chemicals and how they cause cancer when these things come into your neighborhood. Its like being Erin Brockovich.

We protested at the site. We wore paper gas masks and put paper gas masks on our children. We had signsGet the Frack Out of Our Town! and Fracking Pollutes! and Our Children Cant Breathe! We tied the signs to the fence. The next day we found our signs vandalized with drawings of genitalia.

Pussy, one said.

Youre next.

We watch the commercials, a man in pressed jeans, cowboy boots. Hes someone famous. He stands in a lush pasture, show horses graze in the background. He tells us natural gas will bring jobs and that it is a greener alternative. The camera zooms in on the top of a drill. Someone has attached an American Flag, it flutters in the breeze. Natural gas will free us from dependence on foreign oil, the nice-looking man says. We will finally be free.

My cousin berates me for being unpatriotic when I complain. Give me a break, he says, where do you think electricity comes from? He throws up his hands in disgust.

I feel small.

I just want them to do it safely, I whisper.

I dont want my kids to get cancer.

Theres this blogger I read. She lives just a few miles from my house, in a neighboring town. She started seeing weird stuff in her yard, what looked like bubbling frack fluid, in her yard. Shes on well water and she had her water tested. It was contaminated with all sorts of chemicals.

She tried to light her water on fire, like they do in that documentary, Gasland. She video-taped it and put it on her blog. She filled the basin and tried to light it. The water didnt catch fire, but after shed held the flame to the water, she swished her hand around in it. When she pulled her hand out, there was a film hanging from it, it looked just like Saran Wrap.

Thats petrochemicals. If you can make plastic with flame, you have petrochemicals in your water.

The blogger tried to sell her house, but after the wells went in her property value dropped by seventy-five percent. No one will buy these houses. We are trapped.

I call the city: We cant help you.

I call the health department: We cant help you.

I call the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality: We cant help you.

I call the Railroad Commission: We cant help you.

I call the Environmental Protection Agency: We cant help you.

I call my Senator: We cant help you.

I am surrounded by a lack of competent guardians.

I put down the phone.

Grass fires burn along the freeway. Fields of corn crumble to dust. My flowerbed withers and browns. We are under Stage Four Drought Rationing. We cannot water the lawns.

Meanwhile five million gallons of water are diverted to crack/frack the well up the block. Five million gallons lost, contaminated with chemicals and radiation. Any water that flows back up to the surface will be hauled back out by those trucks to an empty well and injected thousands of feet below ground, lost to our generation and generations to come.

The ground trembles beneath my bare feet. Truck after truck rumbles up my street, hauling crack/frack fluid (water, chemicals) to the natural gas drilling site at the end of my block.

I wipe my nose with the back of my hand. It is bleeding again.

by Jessica Smartt Gullion; first published as Toxic Neighborhood, Qualitative Inquiry 19, no. 7 (2013): 491492

A project of this scope does not happen in isolation, and I am appreciative of all those who helped and supported me through this journey.

The research on which the book is based would not have happened without the support of environmental activists in the Barnett Shale. Thank you to all of the activists and other participants in this story. Your willingness to stand up for the community and your continued fight for health and well-being is an inspiration.

I would like to thank Kathy Jack for her assistance and insights, and for her constant encouragement. Thanks also to Rosemary Candelario for help with the book proposal, and to Tom Guffey and Dian Werhane-Jordan for assistance with transcription. Much appreciation also for Dona Perkins and Jessica Williams help in the final stages. Gabrielle Calvocoressis listserv support group The Year I Wrote the Book was a lifesaver, and helped me to crank out more words when I thought I had none left.

Thank you to both Claire Sahlin and Jim Williams for instrumental conversations along the way, and to the rest of my colleagues in the Sociology and Social Work Department and the Womens Studies Department at Texas Womans University for your support. Thank you to my friend Beth Fawcett; discussing method and research ethics was always better over the wet rock tea. Jimmie Lynn Harris, a fantastic reference librarian at the TWU library, your skills added gems of detail I never would have found on my own. I would also like to express my appreciation to the participants in the International Congress on Qualitative Inquiry who offered encouragement for my work. Thank you also to all my friends and colleagues who checked in on how things were going and who gave me a You can do it babe! when I felt I could not write any more.