Disposal Well Hell

Read about it in the FW Weekly. They do good work! Everyone needs to read the entire article. We'll give you a couple of incentives below. Don't miss WHERE the Fort Worth disposal well is or Louis McBee's question...it's an important one.

"There is no protection for the citizens," said Tim Lane, a University of North Texas psychologist who is dealing with fumes, noise, lights, runoff, and other concerns from a disposal well next to his small ranch in Cooke County. "From everything we see, their [the Railroad Commission's] purpose is to protect the oil and gas industry from the public."

If there is fear of the big companies, there's an even bigger fear of the unknown - about whether it's safe to drink the water, to breathe the air, and what the company on the other side of the fence is putting into the ground.

On East First Street in Fort Worth, in the Trinity River bottoms and not far from city ball fields and Gateway Park, a line of trucks leads the way to the city's only current disposal well. The trucks could eventually be replaced, at least in part, by a "significant" pipeline to carry the so-called "saltwater" from up to a hundred Chesapeake Energy gas wells strung out along the Trinity from Beach Street east to Arlington.

"How do you fix an aquifer" if it becomes contaminated, asked Louis McBee. "What are we going to do, react after it happens?"

By then it will be too late...