Even in Oil industry strongholds like Texas, Oklahoma, and Alberta – the effects of the drilling process known as fracking, on health, and on seismic activity, have awakened a growing pushback from local populations. A recent court ruling in Oklahoma, which has become the new Earthquake capital of the US, could be a game changer.
If you live in Oklahoma, and you’ve been injured by an earthquake that was possibly triggered by oil and gas operations, you can now sue the oil company for damages.
That’s the effect of a ruling by the Oklahoma Supreme Court, which on Tuesday rejected efforts by the oil industry to prevent earthquake injury lawsuits from being heard in court. Instead of being decided by juries and judges, the industry was arguing that cases should be resolved by the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, a state regulatory agency.
The state’s high court rejected that argument.
“The Commission, although possessing many of the powers of a court of record, is without the authority to entertain a suit for damages,” the opinion reads. “Private tort actions, therefore, are exclusively within the jurisdiction of district courts.”
The ruling is a win for Sandra Ladra, the woman at the center of the lawsuit. Ladra claims that on Nov. 5, 2011, she was watching television with her family when a 5.6 magnitude intraplate earthquake struck, causing huge chunks of rock to fall from her fireplace and chimney. Some of the rocks fell onto Ladra’s legs and into her lap, causing what the lawsuit describes as “significant injury.”
Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, extracts far more water from these underground oil-laden rocks than traditional drilling. Currently there is no way to treat, store and release the billions of gallons of wastewater at the surface. Instead, drillers pump the fluid back underground, below groundwater, into wells where it sometimes triggers earthquakes.
For instance, in Oklahoma, state records show that companies injected more than 1.1 billion barrels of wastewater into the ground in 2013, the most recent year for which data is available. The following year, Oklahoma had more magnitude-3 earthquakes than California did. The quakes clustered around wastewater injection wells.
Oklahoma’s current earthquake rate is now 600 times higher than its pre-fracking rate, which was based on the state’s natural seismicity, the state geological survey said.
New research and presentations by both provincial and federal scientists show that the shale gas industry, which the B.C. government hopes will eventually supply proposed liquefied natural gas terminals with fracked gas, has caused more than a thousand earthquakes in northeast B.C. since 2006 and changed the region’s seismicity.
The earthquakes, ranging in magnitude from 1.0 to 4.3, include six events higher than 4.0 and more than 20 events that shook buildings and moved furniture in places like Fort St. John. Several events caused casing damage to horizontal wells. Moreover, industry-caused tremors remain an ongoing geological revolution for the region.
Earthquakes with a magnitude of about 2.0 or less are called microquakes and can’t be felt at the surface. Events above 3.0 can be felt on the ground, and tremors just larger than 4.0 can cause minor damage. A great earthquake, capable of extensive damage, typically measures a magnitude of 8.0.
Scientists originally thought that hydraulic fracturing wouldn’t trigger anything more than microquakes. But now that the technology has set off magnitude 4.4 quakes in Alberta, scientists are grappling to determine what kind of hazard industrial tremors might pose to pipelines, dams and other infrastructure.
At Upper Halfway, a community northeast of Fort St. John, residents have described the tremors as a series of crashes and bangs comparable to someone driving “a truck into the side of the house.”
–But even in Texas, where Big Oil reigns supreme, there are concerns.
Last year, the Lubbock Board of Health released a report focusing on the human health impacts of air and water pollution as a result of fracking. It found that volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, associated with fracking could be linked to increased rates of leukemia and possible fetal abnormalities.
VOCs, chemicals found naturally in oil and gas, are also used to fracture wells. They include benzene, toluene, ethyl benzene and xylene.
The report found at six sites, 15 of 17 measurements of benzene alone were exceeding the allowable limit of one part per million for 15 minutes of exposure. The wells were giving off 200 times that.
Through examining more than 100,000 births between 1996 and 2009 in rural Colorado, the report concluded that babies born within a high concentration of wells saw a 30 per cent increase in congenital heart disease.
In the tangled mess of externalities that is fossil carbon extraction, conversion, and use, denial is used as a means of shifting, deflecting, or delaying blame as a means of maintaining profits.
It’s pretty hard to do so with earthquakes from fracking when areas that historically have seen little to no earthquake activity suddenly have hundreds to thousands of tremors that center around drill sites and coincide perfectly in their timing from drilling activity. It’s something of a smoking gun.
Still, they’ll try:
http://www.tulsaworld.com/business/energy/state-supreme-court-decision-seen-as-a-victory-for-earthquake/article_be91c7f1-5f7d-5286-b265-531f00956bf4.html
Here’s what Oklahoma Oil and Gas Association President Chad Warmington has to say in defense of the practice of injecting wastewater underground:
— “I don’t think people realize just how nasty this water is,” Warmington said. —
The guy has an interesting last name, too.