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Author Topic: Pollution  (Read 59463 times)

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AGelbert

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Re: Pollution
« Reply #180 on: April 06, 2015, 07:31:43 pm »
Published Mar 23, 2015
Life, Death and Chemicals
Quote

Much of America’s strawberry supply is farmed atop a rich deposit of oil. For a family living among the pesticides and drilling, the source of their health problems is a painful mystery. Welcome to the California tar sands.

Story by Natalie Cherot

Snippet 1:
Quote
On the morning of June 21, 2011, a 54-year-old Chevron worker named David Taylor was checking on a well in Kern County, northeast of Oxnard. Cyclic steaming is supposed to happen well below the surface, but, oddly, steam was rising from the ground. When Taylor and two co-workers went to check on it, the earth opened up and sucked him into a hole filled with hydrogen sulfide and water heated to nearly 90 degrees Celsius. A colleague later said, “Other workers could not react in time to save him from falling.” Taylor burned alive.

The state’s Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources, or DOGGR, launched an investigation and found that while Taylor had avoided stepping on wet ground, years of steaming had made even the dry ground at the oil field unstable.

An investigator’s photo of the crater shows Taylor’s hardhat laying beside it. That evening, workers found Taylor’s remains about five feet underground.

Nonetheless, regulators allowed Chevron to continue steaming, even as more of these euphemistically named “surface expressions” cropped up.

On Aug. 4 that year, the surface expressed violently: The ground 12 meters from Taylor’s crater exploded. Large rocks and oil catapulted 45 meters, a tsunami of oil.

DOGGR restricted steaming for 90 meters around the area. Less than two weeks later, on Aug. 17, another crater erupted. Steam billowed into the sky. DOGGR expanded the buffer to 240 meters but allowed drilling to continue. Steaming water and hot oil seeped up from craters on the well pad throughout September and November as Chevron continued its work. Employees said the earth shook beneath them.

In October, just four months after Taylor’s death, instead of imposing further new regulations, California Gov. Jerry Brown sought permitting shortcuts from regulators to let drillers begin steam injection faster. The head of the Department of Conservation, Derek Chernow, wrote a memo asserting that doing so would be illegal. A week later, Brown fired him.

For Taylor’s death, the state’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health fined Chevron $350.

Delgado saw Taylor’s death and the state’s response as proof that California bureaucrats were not interested in protecting the state from oil drillers. The same cyclic steaming happening in Kern was happening in their backyard.

SNIPPET 2:
Quote
The night before Christmas Eve last year, she called a special council meeting about the construction of a fourth power plant in the city. She invited Delgado and Anguiano to attend and speak out against it.

Locals queued for their three minutes at the podium, where one by one they demanded an end to chemical dumping, methane flares, pesticides, hydraulic fracturing and on and on. Delgado squirmed in his chair, but every position seemed painful. He was not in the mood to address the council. Tonight he would just watch and listen.

“There are too many chemicals here,” declared one resident from the crowd before she got up and walked out of the meeting.

Afterward, Anguiano approached Delgado and said, “My doctor says she wouldn’t even know what out there was making me sick if I got sick.”

“We expect the new city manager to perform miracles,” Delgado replied.

Actually, the miracle came at the end of last year, when the oil companies slowed down their drilling all on their own. And it had nothing to do with Ramirez, Anguiano, Delgado or regulators.

Between December and January, a global oversupply of crude sent the price plummeting so low that it sent shocks throughout the California oil industry. Oil companies and oil field subcontractors laid off workers and withdrew oil permit applications all across Ventura County. Without the drilling tax revenue, local governments were in a panic; Kern, the county where Taylor died, declared a fiscal emergency. On Jan. 19, crude hit $47 a barrel.

There was no celebration, however. That same day, Delgado went in for his first chemotherapy appointment. A week before Ramirez’s pre-Christmas meeting, Delgado’s doctor told him there was a tumor in his stomach. His prognosis is poor.

Natalie Cherot, PhD, is a journalist based in California.

http://latterlymagazine.com/life-death-and-chemicals/
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

 

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