If gas industry representatives get their way during the final Gas Drilling Task Force meeting next Tuesday, fracking will be allowed much closer to homes and schools, and even inside Dallas parks, a reversal of previous positions. What’s ironic is that the President of the Dallas Parks and Recreation, Joan Walne, may facilitate these efforts. Walne has been voting with industry throughout the course of the Task Force meetings, participating in votes this week that removed protections already agreed to for flood plain drilling. In the past, she’s had no problem with the idea of sacrificing city parks to drilling rigs. She’s expected to be a key vote next Tuesday. “As it turns out, putting Joan Walne in charge of protecting Dallas public parks from the gas industry on this Task Force was like putting John Dillinger in charge of protecting the city’s bank account,” said Downwinders at Risk Director Jim Schermbeck. Besides allowing rigs and giant compressors in parks, the Task Force is also expected to be asked by industry representatives to “revisit” the current recommendation requiring a 1000 foot setback from all homes, schools, churches and hospitals. They want it rolled back to between 500 and 700 feet, similar to how drilling is handled in Fort Worth. “After already agreeing to inadequate 1000-foot buffer zones weeks ago for these ‘protected uses,’ industry now wants to go back and have another try at drilling right in our back yards,” warned Zac Trahan of the Texas Campaign for the Environment. “They want to put a well pad as close as 500 feet from a school, hospital or home – and as close as 300 feet from an office building, retail store or restaurant. A well pad could mean as many as 24 wells, a battery of storage tanks, and a large compressor that generates thousands of tons of air pollution a year. That’s unacceptable to us, and we think, most Dallas residents.” Waln, as well as Texas Business for Clean Air Director Margaret Keliher, and Dallas attorney John McCall are expected to be key votes on the setbacks issue. Keliher had led the effort to disregard the current ordinance and allow drilling in the Trinity River floodplain, while McCall is supporting rigs as close as 300 feet to commercial pieces of property like office building, restaurant or other place of business. Both Schermbeck and Trahan urged Dallas residents to e-mail the Task Force member and express their concern at the upcoming votes. “With only 11 members, and previous protections hanging on lots of 6-5 votes, an absence or change of heart has large ramifications,” said Schermbeck.  “We need Dallas residents to wake up and realize their fate is hanging on only a couple of votes from people they didn’t elect.” E-Mail Addresses of Dallas Gas Task Force members: joniwalne@aol.com loisgfinkelman@sbcglobal.net  john@attorneymccall.com   RAlvarez@edf.org biegler@southcrossenergy.com  cherelle.blazer@gmail.com   bbullock@mail.cox.smu.edu  margaret@margaretkeliher.com   pshaw@woodshawlaw.com  David.Sterling@unthsc.edu  twelch@bhlaw.net
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You might have already heard or read about the Dallas City Hall news conference that took place yesterday where a new and startling map of gas-drilling leases already approved by the City of Dallas was unveiled for the first time. It wasn't a product of city staff. A citizen put it together from Open Records Act requests submitted over the last two-three months. Mountain Creek Neighborhood Alliance President Ed Meyer assembled the information and then plotted it on a map. Downwinders, along with the Dallas Sierra Club, Texas Campaign for the Environment, and Earthworks Oil and Gas Accoiuntaibility Project all participated in presenting the finished product to the public and press under their new coalition name of "Dallas Residents at Risk." Even though the controversy over gas drilling in Dallas has been going on for almost two years, there's never been an attempt to plot the inventory of gas leases in the city. Instead attention has been focused on a handful of sites that were already partially through the city's permitting system when the current moratorium was declared and the effort to write a new drilling ordinance was begun. When Meyer finally got all the dots on his map, even he was surprised at the result. In total, there are 110 leases for gas drilling on land owned by the City of Dallas, totaling 130 tracts of land, and covering almost 1400 acres, from Royal Lane in North Dallas to the new Margaret Hunt bridge in West Dallas to Joe Pool Lake in the South. Copies of the map, along with a explaniton of how it was made were delivered to all city council members. It was released on Tuesday, the day of the penultimate Dallas Gas Force Drilling Task Force, when new issues and old, unresolved ones were up for debate. Next Tuesday, the 28th will be the Task Force's last scheduled meeting and the stakes could not be higher.  On the chopping block are the 1000 foot set-backs now recommended for homes, schools, hospitals and churches, as well as a proposal from industry to be allowed to drill in parks. If successful, this industry move could be the single largest rollback so far in the process. Stay tuned. We're going to have more on this attempt to roll back the protections already won in Dallas.
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That's an old grassroots slogan and it's one of Downwinders guideposts as a grassroots group. Since the moment we were founded, our board has included a wide spectrum of ideological points of view. When your property, family and community are under assault, you're not really that interested in the politics of the person working beside you other than the common goal of ending the threat. Urgency trumps ideology. And so it is in Frisco these days. When Downwinders was invited to come to Frisco and help citizens defend themselves against and unresponsive government and corporation, there were those knee-jerk thinkers who condemned us as a manifestation of the vast left-wing, tree-hugging conspiracy. We knew better, and so did the citizens who established Frisco Unleaded, our sponsored local group, last summer. Now comes the announcement of a new city-wide group in Frisco organizing under the name "We are Frisco" who proudly proclaim that they are "Your Conservative Vision For Frisco." Originally a Frisco residents group who wanted access to Frisco ISD facilities, the organization is spreading its wings and endorsing a broad platform of local issues, including, er, the Exide lead smelter controversy. Now if you're a knee-jerk thinker yourself, you're already imagining a diatribe on how the city's efforts to relocate Exide are a prime example of unjust "takings" and how those lefty enviros have ganged-up on this poor company that was here in 1964 and deserves to stay no matter how many schools are near-buy. And you'd be just as wrong as your counterparts who stereotype Downwinders. Here's what the Conservative Vision for Frisco has to say about the lead smelter: "Lights Out At Exide! No amount of lead contamination is acceptable. Exide executives and many civic leaders have claimed for years the battery recycling plant in Frisco is “a good corporate partner”. If true, why have they not been cleaning up their own mess without being forced to do so? The Exide lead contamination problem first became a major issue after the discovery they were in violation of pollution laws. The company worked with elected officials to craft new, more stringent pollution guidelines. Exide’s absurd “good faith” move in respect to adhering to the new agreement was to attempt to revert to building codes from 1964 to begin construction on modifications. If Exide has already been violating existing pollution guidelines, how can we trust them not to violate new ones? However, the question is moot as new rules will not fix the problem. There is no acceptable amount of lead contamination we can expose the area businesses and children to. Additionally, economic development is hampered by the location of the facility. Would you locate a business in old downtown Frisco knowing it was close to a lead contamination threat? Exide employs 135 people.  The loss of jobs by moving the plant is very concerning. More concerning, however, are the hundreds of jobs that will never be without removal of the facility from Frisco. The city has outgrown Exide.  It’s time for them to go.  Period."  Couldn't have said it better ourselves. Welcome to the fight WAF.
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After 21 years, four Presidents, countless political battles and lots of pollution, the EPA finally released its health reassessment of Dioxin this past Friday. Like so many environmental decisions from this Administration, the report splits important hairs. While confirming that ultra-low exposures (we're talking 1 millionth of a gram or less) to Dioxin can cause damage to a person's immune and reproductive systems, cause skin rashes and liver damage, EPA says that levels of exposure for most Americans have declined so much over the last two decades that there should be no significant risk. To at least one expert, that was an      "very odd statement." Arnold Schecter of University of Texas School of Public Health, noted that EPA's assurances really didn't jibe "because some people are more highly exposed than average and some groups, such as fetuses and nursing babies, are more sensitive to the effects." What other populations are more highly exposed to Dioxin? People who live downwind of facilities where its emitted - power plants, cement plants, and lead smelters, to name a few. DFW residents live downwind from all three. Exide's lead smelter in Frisco was the 9th largest dioxin polluter in Texas in 2009, releasing more of the poison than industrial facilities many times its size. While most exposures come through eating or drinking animal products that contain dioxin because the animals themselves were contaminated and store it in their fat, breathing in dioxins directly is also a pathway of exposure when you live near a place that burns hazardous wastes, smelts metals, or deals with a lot of chlorinated materials. Like millions of DFW residents. While there was a lot of disappointment by environmentalists at the lack of follow-through on the report, the food industry is sweating bullets over its conclusions. Last year, food industry groups wrote the EPA, stating that  most Americans could “easily exceed the daily [0.7 picogram limit] after consuming a single meal or heavy snack." Now they're afraid safer food advocates will use the report to push for new restrictions on how much of one of the most poisonous substances ever discovered can be included in their food products. Indeed. How unreasonable to expect less human-made poison dreck in your food. No release date for the part of the reassessment dealing with cancer risks.   Read More

This week, we've examined new studies linking brain damage to breathing. Let's take on heart disease now. Short-term exposure - less than seven days - to common air pollutants raises the risks of heart attack, according to a new study that looked at air quality from 100 studies on five continents. "...an improvement in air quality could have a significant effect on public health,” wrote the authors, led by Dr. Hazrije Mustafic of the Paris Cardiovascular Research Center at University Paris Descartes. Dr. Jesus Araujo, an assistant professor of medicine and director of environmental cardiology at UCLA, said there is now “more than enough evidence” from human, animal and cellular studies that air pollution kills. One of the most important findings of the new research is that it confirms that heart attacks increase even when exposures to worsening air quality are short in duration.“We don’t have to be exposed for weeks or months or years,” Araujo said. The study found harmful effects to the heart from breathing in microscopic particulate matter, or soot, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide, often at levels that are considered "safe." “The more scientists look, the more they find effects at lower exposures,” said Jean Ospital, Director of Southern California's Air quality District, “This is a question that always comes up, how low do we need to go to protect public health? It seems to be a moving target in terms of where the health effects are, where we really need to go to have health protection.” Indeed.   Read More