One of the people featured in the video produced by Preserve the Beartooth Front is Deb Thomas, a Red Lodge native now residing in Clark, Wyo. She has been living near six oil wells for 15 years.
Deb Thomas of Clark, Wyo., talks about the many disadvantages of living near six oil wells — the air and water pollution, the dust, noise, lights and heavy traffic.
Bob and Mary Johnson talk about living in the midst of the Bakken oil boom on their North Dakota farm, and their hopes that the same kind of development doesn’t come to the Red Lodge area, where they retired.
Dennis and Cathy Rickman Hoyem of Nye and Bonnie Martinell of Belfry talk mostly about water, how important it is in Montana, and how much water is needed to operate a modern oil well.
All of them tell their stories in a video released Wednesday by Preserve the Beartooth Front, a group working to make sure that oil and gas development in Stillwater and Carbon counties respects the rights and concerns of the people who live there.
“We’re not trying to stop this,” David Katz said. “We just don’t want it done in a way that overruns people’s property rights.”
Katz operates the Preserve the Beartooth Front blog, a clearinghouse of information, links, personal stories and calls to action. He was also one of the key people involved in producing the 18-minute video.
He said the video intentionally stays away from inflammatory language and political stances. Elsewhere in the country, he said, the debate over oil and gas development is portrayed as a divisive political issue, a battle between environmentalists who want no drilling and those who want jobs and energy independence,
“In Montana it needs to be a very different kind of argument,” Katz said. “It’s really about preserving community, preserving a way of life.”
Other organizations are working at the state and national level to deal with some of the larger issues regarding oil and gas development. Those efforts are important, Katz said, but “on a local level, we’re feeling an immediate threat. ECA is on our doorstep.”
That would be the Energy Corporation of America, whose chief executive, John Mork, announced in Billings last October that the Denver-based company was working to develop oil and gas up and down the Beartooth Front.
He was quoted in the Billings Gazette as saying: “I would love to bring something like the Bakken, maybe something a little more orderly than what is going on in Williston right now, to the area in the Big Horns and other areas in Montana. It would fundamentally change these areas the way it has changed other areas of the United States.”
It was a statement tailor-made to fire up people who didn’t think their communities needed to be fundamentally changed, and Mork must soon have regretted uttering those words.
Some of the residents’ fears were quickly realized. Besides the dust, noise and heavy traffic around an ECA well near Martinell’s farm in Belfry — the first ECA well permitted by the Montana Board of Oil and Gas Conservation — there was an immediate clash over water use.
Soon after ECA starting drilling there in May, Martinell documented what she thought was the company’s illegal taking of water from a gravel pit near the well site. She complained to the state Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, which quickly determined that the owner of the pit had no right to the water in it. ECA was forced to find a new water source.
Katz said the incident shows what property owners are up against. State laws are tilted heavily in favor of the oil and gas industry, he said, and even when the industry acts illegally there’s little enforcement or monitoring.
“That’s a cost that ought to be borne by the oil and gas operator,” he said.
That’s the point he makes in regard to all the impacts of the industry — that property owners shouldn’t have to bear the short- and long-term costs of development.
He said residents of Carbon and Stillwater counties would be seeking local remedies to certain problems without waiting for action from the state. He said county-level regulations could govern noise and light management, the design of wells and waste pits, traffic, setbacks from houses and the placement of well pads in relation to water sources.
“We’re looking over the next several months to present these things to elected officials,” he said.
In conjunction with the video, residents have created a new website, Beartooth Front: Get Involved, as another source of information and center of action.
The video, funded by an Indiegogo campaign, was designed to be “a conversation starter,” Katz said. It gives people information on what they can do to protect their property and livelihoods.
And though the makers hope the video will also be seen by policymakers, Katz said, “the real idea of the video is for neighbors to share it with neighbors.”
The video was the work of many people, Katz said, including the Beartooth Front Joint Committee, the Northern Plains Resource Council and its affiliates, the Carbon County Resource Council and the Stillwater Protective Association, and numerous other local residents.
In addition to the testimony and personal experiences of landowners along the Beartooth Front, the video features the words of Hank Lischer, a retired professor of tax law who lives in Nye, and Mark Quarles, a geological engineer who testified before the oil and gas board on ECA’s permit application.
Quarles speaks of numerous violations by ECA and environmental enforcement actions against the company in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, and he talks about how state law, like laws in many other states, favor industry over property owners.
Lischer talks about some of the same issues with state law, and delivers this warning about oil and gas development: “If we let that go on as it’s done in many places in the west, there’s a huge threat to things that are very important to all of us. We need to get educated about what goes on with oil and gas activity.”
Extra: If you’re in the mood for videos, here’s another one, “Mixing Oil and Water,” produced by the Northern Plains Resource Council. Its focus is statewide but does mention the Beartooth Front.
