Anywhere but here...

Where can you drill in Texas? Just about anywhere, except under the 8th Wonder of the World, known as the Dallas Cowboys Stadium in Arlington.

How is it safe enough to run pipelines through yards and drill in residential neighborhoods but not where the Cowboys play?

You can read the entire article from WFAA.com here. We'll give you the highlights...

City Attorney Jay Doegey said that standard language in contracts with the Dallas Cowboys probably would prohibit drilling under the team's new stadium. He said there are concerns – although they are remote – that drilling could affect the building's structural integrity.

"We don't want the ground to give and cause it to crack or sink," Doegey said about the rock beneath the stadium.

The language was put in the contracts long before five small earthquakes shook Cleburne in a single week in early June. Researchers are looking into whether those and many others recently were the result of extensive gas drilling in the underground Barnett Shale formation.
Earthquakes have been rare in North Texas until recently. Thousands of wells have been drilled in the western areas of North Texas in recent years.
Doegey said the city hasn't conducted any research to calculate potential dangers of drilling underneath a megastructure like Cowboys Stadium. But he said there has to be a concern about drilling beneath a structure that expensive ($1.15 billion) and that heavy (more than 805 million pounds).

Doegey said that when he lived in Southern California, oil extraction had caused some surface collapses and seawater had to be injected into the rock to mitigate that.

While gathering the land needed for the stadium, Arlington bought some property and condemned other tracts. Instead of taking the straightforward route, the city dropped its eminent domain cases against Sodd's clients. He then had a portion of the mineral rights deeded to a company owned by his law firm, according to county records.