You wouldn’t know it from the rhetoric of candidates and the coverage of issues by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. These indicators are heavily influenced by big money and are very well controlled.
The list of questions posed to the candidates for election to Chuck Silcox’s former District 3 Council seat at the poorly attended forum at Trinity Valley School on April 29 show how far off the mark public perception of what is going on here really is. Here are the questions:
· For several years, the Fort Worth City Council has been pursuing a policy of increased density for the central city: more vertical apartments and condominiums and more commercial development near downtown and nearer traditionally single family central city neighborhoods. What policies and programs would you work to establish to ensure that single-family neighborhoods are not further encroached upon and that the quality of life in these neighborhoods improves?
· The Trinity River Vision project plans show that the project depends on a tremendous amount of high-end downtown housing development. Tax dollars will be used to develop the land for this use.
· Do you support the Trinity River Vision?
· Should Fort Worth develop this housing given the fact that not all current downtown housing is occupied?
· How do TRV and the expenditures on it affect Fort Worth’s neighborhoods?
· What groups besides realtors, developers, and title companies benefit financially from TRV?
· Do you support the use of eminent domain for economic development projects?
· Neighborhood planning is an integral part of a City’s sustainability. What can you do to ensure that neighborhood planning becomes a big part of what City Hall does with and for neighborhoods?
· What should the City do to support and revitalize the large amount of affordable housing that already exists in central city neighborhoods?
· What is your philosophy on zoning?
· Should neighborhood interests trump commercial development or institutional interests?
· Or should commercial development or institutional interests trump neighborhood interests?
· At City Hall, citizens hear elected officials repeatedly say, (on whatever the issue; gas drilling, zoning, economic development, etc.) “We are working to balance the interests of the neighborhoods with other kinds of development.”
· Do you believe that there must always be a “balance” struck in all situations or are there times when the appropriate action is to tip the scale to ensure that the citizen (taxpayer) and neighborhood interest comes out on top?
· Gas drilling experts have said that we will not know the environmental impact of gas drilling in Fort Worth for many years to come i.e.; emissions into the air, potential pipeline leaks under parks, near homes, under the Trinity River, etc.
· What should the City do to revise its ordinance and gas drilling practices so that the impact of gas drilling on citizens and the environment is as negligible as possible?
· Would you support working with the Texas Legislature to craft legislation which would end the ability of pipeline companies to use the power of eminent domain to lay gas transmission pipelines on urban residential property in Fort Worth?
· How should state legislation regulating urban drilling be revised to benefit the citizens of Fort Worth?
These questions were assembled by a committee from, I believe, three neighborhood associations who sponsored this forum. The first thing to notice is that no mention is made of the dictatorial, iron-fisted control of the Council by Mayor Moncrief and his “Fort Worth Way” abridgment of free speech at Council hearings. The second thing to notice is that the questions give the impression that there is only philosophical concern about gas drilling and production policy. No crisis is perceived. Thirdly, the questions give the impression that the usual issues facing cities are as important in this election as gas drilling and production policy. Ho hum.
The fact that Moncrief has stuffed the last two gas drilling task forces with gas drillers doesn’t get any attention. The enormous amount of money spent by the gas industry to purchase good will and influence here is not of concern. In short, the gas drilling issues have been diluted with a generous dollop of the usual fare and homogenized so that no special concern is apparent.
The questions have obvious desired answers. And, of course, all candidates were anxious to please. They all sounded the same. The worst thing about it all is that as the candidates have worked through the many candidate forums leading up to this one they have helped to create a sense that everything is normal in Fort Worth. Nothing could be further from the truth.
District 3 voters are filling the seat of the late Chuck Silcox, a man of the people, who for 17 years was their watchdog against profligate spending and neglect of basic city services by the City Council under the guidance of the downtown boomer crowd and various commercial and corporate interests. Even when Chuck was a lone voice in opposition to tax giveaways, a city owned hotel, and other raids on the city treasury he prevented many such ripoffs from being conducted in the back room. He was a thorn in the side of the drilling industry that they desperately want to see gone until all their plans have been executed. Two more years will do the trick for them. That is why Chesapeake and XTO are watching this race like hawks. And that is why there are seven candidates for the District 3 seat.
The only candidate who will prevent the drillers from gaining complete control of the fate of this city is Gary Hogan. The presence of two Lockheed Martin present or past executives, a retired Air Force general, two obvious wannabe professional politicians, and a landman in this race pitted against the only candidate with a record of public service in the fight against the plans of the drilling industry has made it possible to control the dialogue of the campaign so that the gas drilling issue appears to be no more critical than chuckholes in city streets. The plan is an application of the principle stated in the following pithy quote from Thomas Pynchon:
“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.”
So…what is at stake in this election? Take a drive out State Highway 377 toward Granbury. Notice how many eighteen wheeler gas well service tank trucks there are on the highway. At Cresson and Granbury notice the recent appearance of parking lots for these trucks and the storage yards for gas well drilling equipment. Notice how much of the landscape is covered with drilling pads and gas well infrastructure. Each drilling pad is visited daily by one of the large tank trucks to empty the polluted water storage tanks that stand on each pad.
The drilling pads are nodes in a network of gas gathering pipelines that carry the raw wet corrosive gas from the wells at a pressure of about 200 pounds per square inch to processing plants where the water and impurities are removed and the dry natural gas is compressed to 1200 pounds per square inch for injection into larger transmission pipelines that carry the gas far away to East Coast markets.
Now think of this network and service activity superimposed on Fort Worth. That is what is coming to town in the next few years if the drillers have their way. Every page of the MAPSCO book of Fort Worth will have several drilling pads. The gas gathering line network inside the city will contain several hundred miles of gathering pipe. It will be necessary to impose eminent domain on residential property to construct this pipeline network. The number of homes that will fall victim to this confiscation of pipeline right of way is many hundreds, perhaps as many as a few thousand.
Moncrief’s job is to minimize the public awareness of these activities, and that is what he’s been doing since he was recruited to run for Mayor by the industry in 2002. Until 2008 pipelines were never mentioned to the public or to City Council members. Then we saw the first appearance of the use of eminent domain on Carter Avenue on the east side and in Westcliff on the south side of town. Suddenly everybody became aware of pipelines and eminent domain. Surprise! Moncrief and Burdette knew this would be coming all along, as did Chesapeake and XTO, but nobody said a word.
Why didn’t Moncrief and Carter Burdette raise concern about what they knew was coming to town? They knew. Due diligence was not performed. Hear no evil; see no evil; speak no evil. That was the tactic used by the unholy alliance of drillers and city government in Fort Worth.
There are now more than 1000 gas wells inside the city, with 4000 to 6000 more needed to fully produce the gas underneath the city with current drilling technology. There is still time to manage the situation in a responsible way, but in two years it will be too late.
The statistics of gas pipeline disasters are available and have been presented to Moncrief and his minions. They have simply ignored the warning. They haven’t even been concerned enough to commission an independent investigation by a disinterested qualified statistical mathematician. Instead, all we have seen is a chanting of the mantra of the dominance of mineral rights over surface rights, an untested legal question.
Whenever there is an incident, such as the one in Forest Hill in 2006, the discussion is carefully focused on regulation as the answer. This approach ignores the fact that the disaster statistics are for a nationwide system that is fully regulated in the way in which Fort Worth’s system will be regulated. The focus on regulation is a canard to permit continued unfettered gas well drilling. The question should be, “Does profit really legally trump safety in these matters?” The unholy alliance does not want a definitive answer to this question, so they wave their hands and point to regulation as the solution. That is not due diligence; it is criminal negligence.
If Gary Hogan does not win the District 3 seat and if Moncrief wins reelection, the rest of the plan will become our reality and our albatross for at least the next thirty years.
So…what will that reality look like? What do the statistics say will happen here when the drillers are finished? The math says that the rate of accidents increases as the number of wells and miles of pipeline increase. In a gas field of 3000 wells developed with current technology the statistics show that there will be, on average, two disasters per year. Now, that won’t happen in every 12 month period over the life of the wells. One percent of the time there will be 28 months or more between successive disasters. There may be 5000 to 7000 wells inside Fort Worth if the city gas resources are fully developed. The rate of disasters would obviously increase.
So what would this mean to us who live here? As time goes by the damages caused by these unavoidable events will attract the attention of the insurance industry. Recalling what happened with the black mold scare, we can reasonably expect steep mandatory home insurance premium increases. Mortgage companies will require homeowners within some distance of a gathering pipeline to buy this insurance. The few who own their homes will be required to purchase the insurance or sign a waiver that will exclude coverage for these disasters.
The continuing sequence of disasters will cause an exodus from the city for economic, safety, and health reasons, similar to the history of Detroit and Newark, NJ. Property values and tax revenues will plummet. City services will decay. At some point Wall Street will take notice and degrade bonds for all taxing authorities in the county.
All of this has been brought to the attention of Moncrief and his minions and has been greeted with dead silence.
And though I have given a presentation on all of this to somewhere between 2000 and 2500 Fort Worth voters, the District 3 candidate forums proceed as if there was no crisis.
What kind of disasters are we talking about? The database from which the statistics are computed contains data on “significant incidents”, defined as pipeline failures that cause fire, explosion, mass evacuation, human injury or death, or at least $50,000 in property damage. The data are compiled by the US Department of Transportation. Each state has a designated agency that is responsible for collecting the data. In Texas that agency is the Texas Railroad Commission. Reporting is mandatory by law. The data I used are incidents that occurred in the Barnett Shale in gas gathering lines from 2004 through 2007.
The data do not permit estimation of the damage radius as a function of variables that affect the amount of energy liberated in an incident. But we can get a very good sense of this by looking at some of the reports and published photos. The explosion in Forest Hill in 2006 involved one fatality and the forced evacuation of 500 homes. One in Hood County shattered windows 800 feet away. Total immolation of combustible material within 100 yards is typical. A few pictures may serve to provide a qualitative sense of what these incidents involve.
South Central Texas, date unknown
Parker County, Texas 2007
Edison, NJ 1848 feet from explosion, 1994
Carthage, Texas, 2008
One explosion in Palo Pinto County, Texas in 2005 created a 750 foot wide crater. The incident happened at night, and the flash was seen 100 miles away.
After seeing this information, under what conditions do you think it is safe and responsible to permit the siting of a 16 inch diameter raw gas pipeline carrying gas at 200 pounds per square inch at a distance of 30 feet from a home? That is what current Fort Worth policy would permit. Remember, we are talking hundreds of miles of this kind of pipeline inside the Fort Worth city limits.
The survival of Fort Worth as a viable, livable, vibrant city is what this election is really about.
