The Good Life

By Louise Dearing

Carlsbad

We live 15 miles south of Carlsbad, on 10 acres of land, in a small house.   We have lived here 22 years and raised 4 children. Once, it was a wonderful place full of peace and quiet. Our closest neighbor was 1/2 mile away. The kids used to just run wild, swimming and fishing in the river.   We had a horn that we blew when we needed them to come home, since I couldn't whistle loud enough for them to hear. For most of this time, my husband Roy worked for the oil and gas industry, setting up oil rigs, working on compressors and pipeline.

The kids are gone now and have homes of their own, but they still like to come out and bring their kids to the country.   We’ve had many cookouts with our families; our children who live out of town would bring their campers or tents, or just sleep on cots on the patio.

Then on March 21, 2001 Duke Energy started up a 1,200-horsepower Compressor Station, 500 feet from our home. The noise was so loud we couldn't stand being out in the yard and in the house it wasn't much better. We were forced to turn our TV up about twice as loud as normal. Our house constantly vibrated.   The fumes off the Compressor would burn your eyes. Duke Energy dumped gas in the air very often.   We didn't know if it was H2S (a poisonous gas that has no smell and can kill in seconds).   When we had a lighting storm our kids would call for us to come to their home. They did this because so many explosions and fires were happening around the area from lightening hitting storage tanks, like the compressor 500 feet from our home. The Carlsbad area is referred to as the “lightning belt”, because we have so much lightning during storms.

We started contacting everyone we could think of, Duke Energy, the Sheriff’s Dept., County Commissioners. Most people talked to us about how much money this sort of activity put into state and county coffers. They said they understood our situation, but oil and gas did so much for the community, we would just have to live with it. Duke Energy offered to buy us out and said they would put many more compressors on our property, meaning our neighbors would have to suffer. To this we said no!   It is not our way   to turn on our neighbors.

Finally, the Carlsbad Current-Argus wrote about our plight and things started happening. One thing is clear, multinational companies like Duke Energy don't like bad publicity. We sent packets to representatives and filmed work crews as gas flared into the night skies next to our home. About a year and a half into our nightmare we were contacted by the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance and they agreed to help us. They wrote editorials, spoke to reporters and eventually went with us to Washington to meet with our delegation.

When we returned home we already had two calls from Congressman Joe Skeen and Senator Jeff Bingaman’s offices. They had spoken with Duke Energy and they agreed to remove the compressor. After this we discovered that Duke Energy never had the proper permit for the compressor! On November 18, 2002 just 3 days shy of 20 months it was shut down and they started moving it.

We can't tell you how wonderful it is to have our peace and quiet back. This summer our family has come back to visit.   Fish fries and the laughter of children have replaced the roar of a gas compressor.    It feels good to be home again.

Why I fight: The coming gas explosion from the West
By Tweeti Blancett

Aztec

Here's what I once believed: that if the President knew about the damage done to our land by the energy industry, the damage would cease.

I once believed that if you could show that industry can extract gas without damaging land right near us - as it does on the Southern Ute Indian Reservation, and on Ted Turner's Vermejo Ranch - that those examples would be followed by every company.

Believing that, I went to Washington, D.C., in August 2002, and met with Kathleen Clarke, who runs the Bureau of Land Management; I met with Rebecca Watson, a Montanan high in the Department of Interior; I met with V.A. Stephens, who is with the Council on Environmental Quality; and I met with the New Mexico congressional staffs. I told them all that gas drilling could be done right but that it was being done wrong.   I begged them to enforce existing regulations.

I came home to the small town of Aztec, N.M., and waited for change. I'm still waiting. I suppose not everyone can waltz into Washington and get that kind of entree. But I ran George Bush's 2000 campaign in my part of New Mexico.   I ran Sen. Pete Domenici's campaign in my county in 1996. Our family has been on the land here for six generations and going on three centuries. We graze cattle on 17 square-miles of Bureau of Land Management, state and our private land.

We once ran 600 cows on those 35,000 acres. Today, we can barely keep100 cows. Grass and shrubs are now roads, drill pads or scars left by pipeline paths. We have trouble keeping our few cows alive because they get run over by trucks servicing wells each day, or they get poisoned when they lap up the sweet anti-freeze leaking out of unfenced compressor engines.   I have not taken this quietly. I have been on a mission for 16 years. In the beginning, I wanted to save the 400-acre farm and the adjacent piece of wild land in northwest New Mexico that I care most about. That's not much out of 35,000 acres. My family thought I was nuts. My son was a senior in high school, and resisted my attempts to enlist him. My husband said I was wasting my time.

They knew I was going against an industry that sharpened its teeth chewing on little people. They thought industry had the upper hand, legally speaking. But I believed industry had the upper hand because it threatened and intimidated. I once met Rosa Parks. I thought: If that little lady could sit, alone, in the front of a bus filled with hostile passengers, then I could act to protect where I live.

Gradually, I came to see why everyone else thought I was nuts. All of San Juan County in southern New Mexico has been leased for 50 years to gas companies. Our fathers and grandfathers signed these "perpetual" leases long ago, when the gas companies were owned and run by neighbors. The rest of the land is federally managed.

The industry claims its right to underground minerals trumps our rights to the surface. We don't deny their rights. We just say that we also have rights. Unfortunately for us and our cows and the wildlife, we are on top of unimaginable wealth, in the form of coal-bed methane. Each year, our small, rural and fairly poor county produces $2.4 billion, and most of that money flows right out of here.

My 400 acres sit at the heart of this wealth. Nevertheless, several of us last fall locked the gates to our private land. We have not denied access to those who have leases. But we now control the access. We were tired of being told by the companies that "someone else" had killed the cow, or the deer, or drove across freshly reseeded land. Now we know who is on our land, and when.

It's perfectly logical and legal to control access to private land, except in gas country. So the companies pulled us into court. This, it turned out, was not a bad thing. We found out that industry doesn't have the rights its says it has. And when we go to court, we don't go alone. We bring our rancher friends. We bring our environmental friends - friends we never dreamed of having. We bring pictures of the surface damage - pictures that are so bad other states use them to show what happens when you trust industry and the BLM to "do the right thing."

We've been in more newspapers than I can count. We've been in People magazine. We've been on Tom Brokaw's TV news program. This natural gas boom has become a Western plague. In conservative Wyoming, home to Vice President Dick Cheney, the reaction against coal bed methane helped elected a Democratic governor.

But this isn't a partisan issue. We had as much trouble under Clinton as we do under Bush. This is a campaign-contribution problem. They give more than we can.

At times it seems hopeless. Then I hear from people facing similar situations in Colorado, in Montana, in Wyoming, in Utah. Many are like us - conservative, Republican, pro-free enterprise people. Others are environmentalists, or just care about land and animals.

Shortly, there will be a huge natural gas explosion, but it won't be pipelines or gas wells that blow. The explosion will come from the average Westerner, who is tired of being used by the oil and gas industry, with the help of state and federal officials.