The shameless use of Colorado’s floods to attack drilling
Workers replace dirt displaced by recent flooding at a natural gas extraction well head run by Encana Oil & Gas in Erie on Sept. 25. (Brennan Linsley, The Associated Press)
“A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.” — Winston Churchill
Gov. John Hickenlooper knows a thing or two about people who won’t change the subject. The anti-fracking activists who believe every conversation should start and end with a denunciation of energy companies wouldn’t even give him a break while he toured communities overwhelmed by historic floods.
At one recovery stop, in an incident that can be seen on YouTube, Hickenlooper was beset by a fellow demanding to know whether “the property rights of a multinational corporation are more important than the devastation to these citizens.” He was upset, you see, because the state sued Longmont last year over its drilling regulations.
Another man challenged the governor to “suspend the gag order on health care professionals when it comes to the release of fracking fluid components.” Never mind that regulators months ago declared that medical officials are free to share “information claimed to be a trade secret … with patients, other health-care professionals or health systems, and with public health agencies” — with anyone, in short, who has reason to know.
Equally to the point, as the governor explained, no frack fluids seem to have been released. Then he put matters into perspective. “We’ve had 37,000 gallons of crude oil or condensates” released from storage tanks because of flooding. And “we had 20 million gallons, just so we’re clear, of raw sewage. If you talk to most health-care professionals in terms of what the risk is, that’s far more serious.”
Since the governor spoke, the estimate of oil and condensates released from overturned tanks has risen to 45,000 gallons — still not even close to the quantity of raw sewage. Such an amount would be a scandal if it had been triggered by most storms, but the rains in this case were described at one point even by the National Weather Service as biblical.
And yet anti-fracking groups swiveled into combat mode almost immediately, raising alarms about the quality of planning by regulators and energy companies. It would be inspiring to see representatives of Clean Water Action and Earthworks, who were quoted in a Denver Post article, offer constructive ideas for the next epochal deluge if their credibility weren’t undercut by pervasive anti-drilling bias. Clean Water Action, for example, has supported fracking bans or moratoriums in several states as well as anti-fracking events here. Its idea of sound planning is apparently an industry shutdown.
For sheer cynicism, however, you can’t beat the Sept. 23 press release from Environment Colorado. “We were concerned about fracking before the flooding,” an official with the group declared. “But now, oil and gas spilling into the floodwaters, contaminating drinking water, is an added exclamation point to the long list of dangers that fracking has brought to Colorado.”
One marvels that Environment Colorado isn’t bewailing the long list of alleged dangers that wastewater plants have brought to Colorado, given the far larger quantity of raw sewage washed into floodwaters.
On Tuesday, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment released results of water sampling in eight different rivers conducted last month. They “show no evidence of pollutants from oil and gas spills in rivers and streams affected by flooding,” the department said.
However, “the sample results show high levels of E. coli in some areas of the South Platte Basin. The highest concentrations of E. coli were sampled in the Boulder Creek and Big Thompson River watersheds.”
No surprise there — although don’t expect the news to matter. The definition of a disaster is bad things happening on such a grand scale that every opportunist has a chance to second guess.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.