Over twenty people showed up at the SJB City Council meeting to support a ban on fracking and drilling within our city limits on Tuesday, December 17, 2013. San Benito Rising (SBR), a grassroots activist organization in San Benito County, dedicated to the purpose of educating the public about the dangers of enhanced oil drilling techniques and presenting sustainable alternatives, presented a proposal to the City Council of San Juan Bautista. SBR member Andy gave a PowerPoint presentation and city council members asked many questions, requesting that sample language from other municipalities to ban fracking be supplied to them. The city council wants to discuss this topic further at their next meeting in January. Eleven people spoke during the public comment period in support of a proposal that SJB write a ban on enhanced drilling techniques within the city limits, into the city’s general plan.
To some this may not seem like much, being we are such a tiny community. Yet, this very technique is one that has been applied across our nation in dealing with the misinformation perpetrated by corporate oil. City Manager, Roger Grimsley noted that the protection of our groundwater is the overriding issue at stake in this consideration, since SJB currently has only one of its three wells available for potable water. Mayor Tony Boch stated that this discussion should be continued next month at the next city council meeting, to be held Tuesday, January 21 at 6 pm. San Benito Rising can be reached at https://www.facebook.com/sanbenitorising
Who pays for all of this enhanced drilling? As noted in my researched previous articles, the oil companies procure their product upon the support of our dime and sell it back to us at exorbitant rates. In the process, they destroy our roads, use millions of gallons of our valuable water, pollute our ground, aquifers and air and then leave us, the taxpayers, to clean up the messes. Are we going to wait until we have allowed this kind of contamination and ruination of our habitat, rendering ourselves to a poverty level existence at best, before we step up and say this is enough? Try selling your home after an oil drilling company has been in your backyard.
So let’s look at why it is important to urge the City of San Juan Bautista to move forward with this proposition. In many communities in the US, this sort of progressive action has always started, with the cities. Enough cities who enact such bans, then unite to influence their County Supervisors. Then together the counties and cities influence their state governments. In a progressive state like California, this process should accelerate rapidly. This action may also put SJB “on the map” for progressive action in the area of habitat protection.
2013 was an important year for the people of the United States in the fight against fracking. Cities and towns in Vermont, townships in Upstate NY, Pennsylvania and Colorado have enacted moratoriums against fracking in 2013. Also, many of your signatures on a petition from the Center for Biological Diversity concerning Offshore Fracking helped spur a 150 other eco conscious groups to join the fight and gain media attention about this potential hazardous situation. In February 2014, the California Coastal Commission will be reviewing the issue of offshore fracking, and the dangers it continues to pose for our food chain and wildlife, national parks and our economic infrastructure.
Things citizens can do are: sign a petition from LA County’s Citizen’s Coalition for a Safe Community. Ban Fracking in California is a petition by Aura Walker to be delivered to The California State House, The California State Senate, Governor Jerry Brown, and The United States House of Representatives. California is already earthquake prone. Fracking will exacerbate the risks of earthquakes as huge hydraulic drills will core deep into the earth, moving already loose tectonic plates. Additionally, poisonous gases will permanently pollute many precious aquifers, irreversibly poisoning our drinking water. Please follow the sane example of Vermont, and Ban Fracking in California. http://pac.petitions.moveon.org/sign/ban-fracking-in-califoria?source=none&fb_test=0.
In the first weeks of January, the California Department of Conservation’s Division of Oil, Gas & Geothermal Resources (DOGGR) will be meeting. They are being asked to review the fracking issues and unsafe regulations proposed by the SB4 Weakened Pavley Bill of 2013. DOGGR is now accepting public comment on their proposed regulations for fracking and other risky drilling techniques including acidizing. Comments regarding the proposed regulations can be submitted via email to DOGGRRegulations@conservation.ca.gov; via FAX to (916) 324-0948; or via regular mail to the Department of Conservation Office of Governmental and Environmental Relations, 801 K Street MS 24-02, Sacramento, CA, 95814, Attention: Well Stimulation Regulations.
Let’s remind ourselves to reconsider our local resources and economics. Our county is highly dependent upon agriculture and to some extent tourism. The threats of enhanced oil and natural gas drilling, could ruin this environment, by polluting our water aquifers, air and roads, from unusually heavy traffic due to thousands of truck trips to and from drilling sites. The oil companies claim they are bringing “jobs” to our area, but the facts show that these jobs go to “outside oil workers,” while potentially threatening our livelihoods.
Also, when we look at the costs of water now, since SJB has one of the highest water rates around. Treating our water is a major concern, because we have so little of it left on which to draw. Fracking adds a sizeable chance for Corporate Oil to contaminate our water supplies, we could end up like Coalinga, CA, a city that has no potable water reserves. Coalinga is built on a fault that went bad in 1983, polluting their water resources. The processes of enhanced drilling techniques have caused earthquakes in locations where there was no known seismic activity. Plenty of studies from Oklahoma, Texas and Pennsylvania have proven this unintended consequence of fracking. In a seismically active area like ours why would we want to risk this sort of irrevocable damage here?
Add to this the fact that most of these enhanced drilling techniques use millions of gallons of water to extract these resources, contaminating it with potently lethal chemicals, and either leave it in open ponding basins to “gas off” and pollute our air, or pump it back into the wells, where it can potentially pollute our aquifers. So the very resources upon which we, the public, must survive are being used against our own good. Is this how we want to live?