Tag: water pollution
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Working to Prove Accountability: A Hydrogeologist’s Perspective on the Pavillion Water Crisis
Mike Wireman, a hydrogeologist, has spent the last five years trying to understand what is causing the Pavillion water crisis in relation to oil and gas development.
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Bonding Crisis Looms in Colorado as Gas Prices Tip Into the Red
Residents of Battlement Mesa and Rifle, Colorado, are on the verge of seeing gas companies abandoning their wells and leaving taxpayers to clean up the mess. Leslie Robinson lives in Rifle, Colorado, a town nestled on the banks of the Colorado River. Dave Devanney lives 20 minutes to the west, downriver, in Battlement Mesa, Colorado.…
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Lax Permitting, Poor Construction Lead to Groundwater Contamination
Thirty years after faulty gas wells and unlined holding ponds began contaminating groundwater, residents of Pavillion, Wyoming, still can’t drink the water. Sue Spencer, a hydrogeologist based in Laramie, Wyo, looks down from a sandy bluff on a two-football-field-sized swath of cleared land that designates a capped natural gas well. Two men in unmarked blue…
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Fighting for Clean Air in North Dakota
Joletta Bird Bear and Fort Berthold POWER Still Have a Long Way to Go to Get Clean Air on the Reservation. Flares danced all the way out to the horizon in every direction among the rolling hills of North Dakota’s Fort Berthold Reservation. The six closest flares were clumped only a few hundred feet away,…
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How an Oil Boom Takes on a Life of Its Own
“My name is Pat Wilson. I’m a 67 year old cattle rancher who’s had a somewhat checkered career. I grew up on the family cattle ranch by Bainville, Montana and worked at that through high school. When I went to college I came back every summer and worked on the ranch. Then I went…