'Conclusive Link' Between Fracking, Aquifer Contamination Found in Texas
Scientists say water samples from Texas man's well show identical chemical signatures from nearby gas drilling operations
- Jon Queally, staff writer
Parker
County homeowner Steve Lipsky demonstrated for local TV news outlet
WFAA how water coming from his underground well can be ignited.
(Credit: WFAA)Independent scientists who have reviewed a
water analysis conducted by state authorities of a Texas resident's
drinking well say the chemical signatures found in the water may provide
"the nation's first conclusive link" between fracking operations and aquifer contamination.
Though
a state investigation—conducted by the Texas Railroad Commission in
response to an official complaint filed by landowner and Parker County
resident Steve Lipsky—said it found the chemical analysis of the water
inconclusive, experts shown the results say the commission was simply
wrong. "And not just by a little," reports local ABC-affiliate WFAA News who shared the results with several scientists, "but by a lot."
Lipsky said he has long believed that nearby hydraulic fracturing by
the Range Resources company was to blame for the increasing amounts of
methane and other chemicals in his drinking water. Since 2010, he says,
growing amounts of methane have been seeping into the groundwater
beneath his land - enough of it so that he can literally light the water
coming out of his well on fire.
Range Resources says there is no connection between the methane in
Lipsky's well and their drilling, but scientists shown the results from
the water analysis—specifically one called an isotopic analysis—say the
chemical composition shows they are an exact match to the gas being
fracked at two nearby drilling sites—called Butler and the Teal—within
the Barnett Shale deposit.
"The methane and ethane numbers from the Butler and Teal production
are essentially exactly the same as from Lipsky's water well,” said
earth scientist Geoffrey Thyne of Wyoming, who reviewed the data for WFAA. “It tells me that the gas is the same, and that the gas in Lipsky's water well was derived from the Barnett formation."
And soil scientist Bryce Payne of Pennsylvania—who himself conducted
testing Lipsky's water in 2013—agreed with that assessment and told WFAA
the gas in Lipsky's water (referred to in the state's report as "well
number 8") is clearly the result of fracking operations.
"The gas from well number 8 is coming from the Barnett and it's coming nearly straight from the Barnett," Payne said.
Thyne and Payne separately told WFAA that they believe the test
results could represent the nation's first conclusive link between
fracking and aquifer contamination, even if the state commission has so
far refused to acknowledge the weight of the evidence.
Once again the County Property I use @ work has been VANDALIZED!
How Totally Fucking Insane do you have to be to do shit like this? This is the behavior of someone who is in dire need of Help; as in the kind of a long vacation in a padded room w/ drugs and possibly ECST!
No one who is Normal & Sane would ever do something like this.....
Chair w/ Left Arm Pulled Down/Out of Alignment
Left Arm Unbolted from Chair
Right Arm Still Bolted to Chair
2nd View Left Arm Torn From Chair
Who in the Hell (well We ALL Know Who) is so Freaking Sociopathic.... How does one work w/ someone like this on a 5/40 basis? Defending one's self only makes retaliation worse...... Yet this person tells the staff how "Christian" they are.... Sorry to say; this isn't any thing that Jesus would do, Not Ever. But Day of Judgment is Upon You!
So once again a Security Incident Report & Facility Loss Report has been filed w/ photographs....... Making note that the chair was in PERFECT Condition when I left work Tuesday night, June 2nd @ 9:00 pm.......
But this doesn't even take into consideration the personal items that have been stolen/removed from my desk, cubicle walls, & kitchen shelf.........
How in the Hell can management ignore this? How does the Union support this type of thing and protect the Sociopath?
23 Alaskan Tribesmen broke the law when they overfished King Salmon but they claim their faith gave them no choice
Adam Weymouth
Photos by Lauren Holmes
June 3rd 2014
“So there is a black fish swimming up the river, looking for a fish trap to swim into. Cycle of life, right?”
Grant Kashatok was telling me stories the traditional Yup’ik way—his fingers entwined with string, like a child playing cat’s cradle. As he spoke, he looped the string into different shapes: it became a hunter, a mountain, a boat, an oar. “And he came to a fish trap that was broken,” he said, “and some of the fish in it were dead. The black fish poked his head out of the river to see who it was that owned the trap, and he saw that the village was dirty, and that the dogs were not tied up, and the woman came out to throw out the scraps of a fish dinner and he watched the dogs fight over the bones. The fish did not want his bones fought over. So he carried on swimming up river.”
Kashatok is the principal of the only school in Newtok, Alaska—a town of 354 perched at the mouth of the Ninglick River, just a few miles from the Pacific Ocean. In 2009, it was one of 26 indigenous villages listed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as “priority action communities”: The ground beneath it is slipping into the sea at such a rate that the village may only have two more years before the first houses fall away.
Throughout the state, climate change is intensifying storm surges and thawing the permafrost—land that previously remained frozen throughout the year. Parts of highways are sinking. Trees around Fairbanks have slipped to such rakish angles that they have become known as drunken forests.
But it’s not hard to see why the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, a watershed the size of Britain, is especially vulnerable. Approaching from the air, it’s difficult to determine whether this region is a landmass with many lakes or a body of water with many islands. The Yup’ik never intended to live here year-round: They were a nomadic people forced into settlements by missionaries and the government. The villages where the Yup’ik now live year-round were once their summer fishing and hunting grounds. Salmon dry in the sun in the indigenous Alaskan village of Chefornak.I went to the Delta to cover the trial of 23 Yup’ik fishermen who had violated a ban on the fishing of king (or Chinook) salmon. In late June and early July, as many as 40 million of the fish have been known to migrate throughout the state, returning from the sea to spawn on gravel beds. They run so thick that the fish swimming on the outer edges of the river are forced onto the banks. King salmon, I am told, can weigh as much as sled dogs.
But over the past few years, their numbers have dropped dramatically. By the beginning of the 2012 season, the Department of Fish and Game was alarmed enough to gather a panel of fishery scientists and ecologists from across Alaska to determine a response.
They came up with seven hypotheses for the decline. Natural cycles are cited, but the report returns again and again to climate change. Rivers are breaking up earlier along their routes, sending more vulnerable juveniles out into the ocean. Changing ocean currents may be spreading disease. There are shifts in other species in the food chain upon which the salmon depend. Warmer waters are depleting the energy of the fish, causing higher mortality rates along the migration route. The impact of each of these factors is currently unknown. In June 2012, after Fish and Game announced a ban throughout the Delta, State Trooper Brett Scott Gibbens was sent out to patrol the rivers around Bethel, the central hub of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. He’d learned, through a press release, that a group of Yup’ik fishermen planned to defy the ban, and as he came down the Kuskokwim River, he found a small fleet of boats—somewhere between 12 and 16, he later testified. The gill nets they were using were perhaps 50 fathoms long, which made them illegal under the ban. Many of the fishermen pulled their gear and left as he was identifying and rounding up the others. Some of the fishermen later went on to pay fines. But 23 of them refused, and last summer, they stood trial in a Bethel courtroom. Fishing for salmon in the Kivia River, close to the Bering Sea
On the first morning of the trial, the court was standing-room only, crowded with defendants, supporters, families with babies, and a handful of journalists and cops. Behind Judge Bruce Ward, next to the American flag, hung a traditional Yup’ik mask. Someone produced a Ziploc of salmon jerky and passed it down the row. Everyone took a piece and chewed on it, including the two state troopers. The courtroom began to smell like a fish market.
Felix Flynn was the first fisherman to take the stand. “Is it okay if he occasionally breaks into Yup’ik?” asked his lawyer, Jim Davis, pushing back a luxuriant sweep of hair. He is one of the founders of the Northern Justice Project, a private firm that represents low- and middle-income native Alaskans, and had taken this case pro bono.
“We'll cross that bridge when we come to it,” replied the judge. Dana Kopanuk (left), a 78-year-old defendant, shares dried king salmon with his fellow fishermen and their supporters.Flynn raised his hand and swore on the Bible. A short man with drooping moustaches and cheeks scarred by frostbite, he began by telling the court how his father took him out herring fishing when he was a boy. “To start with, all I see is ocean,” he said. “Then after a while there’s glassy water, and there’s other water that’s not glassy. And that means the herring are here. That’s what I learnt from my father. I'm subsistence. I was born and raised an Eskimo. It’s in my blood. It’s in my family blood.”
“And what does that mean to you, subsistence?” prompted Davis, leaning over with his hands on the podium.
“Subsistence is living from the land,” said Flynn. “It’s what we've always done. We go hunt ducks and seals in the ocean in the springtime. Ptarmigan. Salmon. My great-grandfather and grandfather told us we have to be very careful what we catch. God made them for everyone. I was living subsistence even when I was in the military. My whole life. I make a fish camp every year and dry 30, 40 kings. I set a net last summer but there was too much closure. Things have been rough.”
“And how did it feel not to be able to catch enough?” Davis asked him.
“I have a grandchild, 2 years old—” He paused and rubbed his eyes. Several other men in the gallery also began to cry. “My grandson said to me, ‘When we gonna go check the net?’ And I couldn't say anything.”
Michael Cresswell, a state trooper, leaned over and whispered in my ear: “This is momentous. This is climate change on trial.”
Michael Andrew testifies about his belief in "ellam yua," the creator who provides king salmon to the Yup’ik people.
A few days later, I flew to the small village of Akiak, population 346, to visit Mike Williams, the current chief of the Yupiit nation. Williams is one of Alaska’s most outspoken voices on climate change. In 2007, he was invited to testify before a U.S. Representatives Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. “If global warming is not addressed,” he told them, “the impacts on Alaskan Natives and American Indians will be immense.” He spoke to Congress about the Iditarod, the thousand-mile sled dog race from Anchorage to Nome. “To keep the dogs cool, since the days are too warm, we have to mostly mush by night now,” Williams told the politicians. “And we also mush more on land and less on frozen rivers because of thawing.” The Iditarod’s sponsors include, among others, ExxonMobil.
A dog team prepares to begin the Iditarod. Warming temperatures have drastically changed the terrain for the annual race. Now, Williams was helping to coordinate the fishermen’s defense. To get to his Akiak office, you have to enter through a bingo hall. The doors hang from their hinges, the plasterboard sags from the ceiling. The toilet is broken. During our interview, the Internet was down; he spent much of the two hours trying to check his Yahoo account. “This is my war room,” he said, gesturing around himself. “This is where I cause trouble. I'm doing better than Gandhi.”
In court, the fishermen’s civil disobedience has been framed as a First Amendment issue: The Yup’ik believe they have an obligation to continue their ancestral traditions. As Jim Davis summarized it, in a brief submitted before the trial: “If Yup’ik people do not fish for King Salmon, the King Salmon spirit will be offended and it will not return to the river.”
“Spiritually, it brought me down,” said David Phillip, explaining on the witness stand how last year’s shortage of king salmon affected him.Anamicus brieffiled by the American Civil Liberties Union elaborated further:
A Yup’ik fisherman who is a sincere believer in his religious role as a steward of nature, believes that he must fulfill his prescribed role to maintain this 'collaborative reciprocity' between hunter and game. Completely barring him from the salmon fishery thwarts the practice of a real religious belief. Under Yup’ik religious belief, this cycle of interplay between humans and animals helped perpetuate the seasons; without the maintaining of that balance, a new year will not follow the old one.
But now the seasons are out of balance, and the Yup’ik can't stop hold the sea back. According to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, an estimated 86 percent of indigenous villages in Alaska will need to move within the next 50 years, at a cost of $200 to $500 million per village. Newtok is preparing to move to a new site, across the water to Nelson Island, but a struggle against the village leadership has recently stalled the relocation effort.
As Williams drove me back to his house for lunch, he told me how Akiak had lost its graveyard to the water three years earlier. The bones and skulls of their ancestors had started emerging from the banks, drifting down toward Bethel. The community had gathered up what they could and carried the remains to a new mass grave on the other side of town. Simple wooden crosses mark the grave sites at an indigenous cemetery in Chefornak.Lunch was a soup of whitefront goose, shot by one of Mike’s five kids. I sucked at the thin flesh of a boiled head, its eyes cooked to cataracts, its teeth a saw line. Dessert was the local version of ice cream: blueberries, margarine, and sugar, mixed and frozen. The soup was good, the ice cream revolting. The paneled walls were lined with photos of sledding kids bundled up in parkas, dream catchers, graduation portraits, animal hide drums, mushing memorabilia, and a Moravian church calendar. There was a basketball game on the corner—Montana vs. Indiana. A wood-burning stove in the corner heated the room, fueled with driftwood snagged from the river. Outside, Williams told me he wanted to show me where he had been born. He led me down to his dog yard by the river. His 30-year-old son, Mike Jr.—who ran his first Iditarod last year and came in 22 places ahead of his dad—was putting eight dogs into their traces and tethering them to a quad bike, the only way to exercise them without snow on the ground. About 40 dogs were pacing on their chains, yelping and yammering—a mottled crew of huskies and malamutes, lean, strong, and eager.
“So where were you born?” I asked, looking at the houses around us: cheap rectangular structures raised on stilts. Their yards were full of buoys and outboards, caribou antlers and skulls, snowmobiles and aluminum skiffs awaiting their respective seasons. Williams pointed out toward the middle of the river.
“Out there.”
That, he told me, is where the hospital once was—where all of Akiak once was. He waved his hand expansively. “I'm continuously moving my dog yard,” he said. I followed him down a dirt track that stopped abruptly at the river. “We lost this whole road last year,” he said. “One day I was driving down it. The next day, it was gone.”
Shrubs had slipped, pointing horizontally across the water. The detritus of a house lay beside them—twisted sheets of corrugated iron, sodden insulation, pipes and tubes and lumber. It looked like the flotsam from a storm.
“Nobody here knows the weather,” said 66-year-old fisherman Noah Okoviak, speaking from the witness stand in the Bethel courtroom. “Nobody here knows how many fish will come. Only the creator.”
Judge Ward listened to Okoviak’s defense and found his beliefs to be sincere. But as with the other 22 fishermen, he found Okoviak guilty. The state had sufficient reason to impose the ban, the judge explained, and the fishermen had violated it. But the sentences were lenient—a year of probation and a fine of $250 apiece (in one case, $500) to be paid over the course of a year or sometimes two. At times, the judge was openly sympathetic. “When this case goes up for appeal,” he said, as Okoviak took his seat, “the cold transcript will not reflect that everyone in the courtroom was standing, and that record will not reflect that there are a number of people in the courtroom with tears in their eyes.”
Max Olick, a village public safety officer, explains why he decided to flout the ban despite his law-enforcement position: “I risked my job going out [for] something that I believe.”The fishermen’s cases have indeed moved on to the Alaska Court of Appeals, where their oral arguments may be heard as early as this summer. There, state-appointed judges will grapple with the same question the court faced in 1979, when an indigenous hunter named Carlos Frank was charged with illegally transporting a newly slain moose. Frank argued that he had needed the animal for a religious ceremony. Two lower courts found him guilty, but the Alaska Supreme Court reversed the verdict, calling moose meat “the sacramental equivalent to the wine and wafer in Christianity.”
This, in the end, is what’s at stake for the Yup’ik fishermen. Their villages may be swallowed up by the sea, but the people themselves won’t float away. They’ll relocate en masse or drift into the urban diaspora of Anchorage. But if they stop fishing king salmon, the Yup’ik believe they’ll lose something far more fundamental than their homes. Harold Borbridge, an indigenous Fairbanks-based consultant with a wife from Newtok, put it this way: “If they can move the things that are important, the language, the culture, the dancing, if they can move the character, they'll have been successful. Anyone can move a few houses.”
Adam Weymouth is a freelance writer based in London.
Kimberly-Ann Talbert will retire after more than three decades with LCF facility.
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Kimberly-Ann Talbert,
library assistant and circulation supervisor at the La Cañada Flintridge
Library, poses in front of her award-winning photography. On June 27,
Talbert plans to retire from the local branch after more than 34 years.
(Courtesy of Kimberly-Ann Talbert / June 5, 2014)
Kimberly-Ann Talbert has
witnessed a lot of changes at the La Cañada Flintridge Library since she
first arrived as a library aide on April 1, 1980.
She came as a
young woman who loved working with books and saw the library as a vital
network of literacy and information. As she worked her way from aide to
library assistant, eventually earning her master’s degree in library
science, the library underwent its own subtle changes, from rubber
stamps and LPs to online catalogs and DVDs.
Talbert helped first-generation
La Cañadans, who regularly patronized the library in the ’80s. She saw
little kids — story-time regulars — grow up to become teenagers and
adults who brought their own children in to be read to.
Through all the changes, she persisted, teaching herself new technologies and learning virtually every job at the branch.
“We’re
here to help you find information and fulfill your curiosity and create
and think beyond. That, to me, is what the library is,” she said.
Now,
with more than three decades and a lifetime of memories under her belt,
Talbert has decided on a new adventure. She plans to retire to spend
more time traveling, living and pursuing her artistic passion for
photography and gourd art. Her last day is June 27.
Co-worker
Elaine Braddock, the adult and teen services librarian, says she will
sorely miss Talbert’s wisdom, humor and attention to detail.
“She’s
lively and she just has this big personality,” said Braddock, who’s
become “outside friends” with Talbert during her three years at the La
Cañada branch. “On days when she’s not here, you feel that loss. It’s
sort of too quiet without her.”
Talbert said she’s looking
forward to focusing more on her photography, a passion she’s developed
since childhood. She currently serves as second vice president of the
Verdugo Hills Art Assn. and has helped bring regular art and photography
shows to the library.
She also hopes to continue her work on
painted gourds, a practice she says brings her closer to Native American
culture, another interest.
Reflecting back on her long tenure,
Talbert said she appreciates all that she was able to accomplish as an
employee with the Los Angeles County Library, which oversees the local
branch.
“This job has enabled me to have my life,” she said. “I love this library. I love my community, and I love doing what I do.”
In
her role as library assistant II and circulation supervisor, Talbert
has helped inform the branch’s purchase of large-print editions, mystery
and audio books as well as music. Library Manager Mark Totten admires
her knowledge of the community and its needs.
“It seems like
she’s part of the bricks and mortar,” he added. “We’re losing somebody
who literally has so much knowledge of how things work, that whoever
replaces her is going to have a big learning curve.”
To young aides or assistants just starting out in the library business, Talbert offered her own advice.
“Learn everything and do it to the best of your ability,” she said. “Be reliable, and know you can be counted on.”
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