Global Community Monitor : COLORADO: Silt Residents Rally Against Gas Drilling in Town

A Silt Mesa resident has turned her property into a veritable billboard, protesting the gas pads that have begun springing up near her home with little to no warning.

“One day, this convoy of trucks just starts rolling through,” Beth Strudley said, standing outside her home and motioning to the new gas pad in the distance. “They started drilling and after 11 days, they were already ‘fracking’. That’s how quick they were.”

It was just the first of several gas pads Denver-based Antero Resources would start constructing in the area. In response to Antero's operations in her backyard, Strudley began putting up large signs all over her property. A large white banner proclaiming, “Antero is going to poison our water,” with an ominous black skull and crossbones sits in her front yard. Smaller signs that say, “We are terrified of what Antero is doing to our water, air and land!” stand next to the street. The messages “FRACKING KILLS” and “ANTERO=POISON” hang in the windows.

“I’m going to protect my family no matter what,” Strudley said. “I’ll do whatever it takes. I’ll tell my message to whomever I can, and hopefully someone will listen.”

Strudley says it didn’t take long for her family, neighbors, and even herself to become seriously ill from the gas pad. She says for the past two weeks, flames reaching 50 feet high have been spewing from on of the pad’s apparatuses.

“It smells like burnt chemicals,” Strudley said. “I don’t know what they are, but they stink. We get really scratchy throats, really sore eyes, and rashes from it. One of my neighbors is so sick she can’t leave the house.”

Strudley says her family immediately stopped using tap water when the first Antero truck arrived. The family has instead been living off of delivered water jugs and even installed an expensive new cistern to start hauling in water.

Strudley says soon after drilling began, Silt residents received a letter from the town warning them that their drinking water was contaminated with high levels of a chemical called total trihalomethanes. The letter says TTHMs form as a result of adding chlorine to drinking water.

“We were at a lecture this past weekend and found out sometimes gas companies inject chlorine into the ground before they frack,” Strudley said. “I don’t know why, but we just thought it was very coincidental that this letter came out right before Antero started fracking.”

Now Strudley is rallying neighbors on the Silt Mesa along with residents in Battlement Mesa, where Antero has also started building well pads near homes. Strudley has even ordered t-shirts and pins--anything, she says, to get her message out.

The Strudley family of Silt Mesa is not happy about the way things are turning out in their neighborhood, whey they say they were told they'd never have to worry about gas drilling.

Smack between their property and the rising Grand Hogback hills to the north is a relatively new gas pad where a well has been drilled, frac'ed [hydraulically fractured] and appears ready for completion, said Beth Strudley.

On the road in front of their home, tanker trucks now regularly rumble up and down a steep incline, rolling either to or from the drilling pad, which is operated by Antero Resources.

The family has installed an expensive new cistern and is planning to begin hauling water for household use rather than trust to their 475-foot deep water well, which they now believe is threatened with contamination from the drilling activities.

And, to give voice to all their frustration and anxiety, they have begun displaying signs in their front yard that give vent to their feelings and let the world know where they stand.

They started creating and erecting the signs “when we saw the bulldozers clearing an area for the drilling,” said Beth Strudley on Sept. 22.

Beth Strudley, who grew up in Aspen and Carbondale, then moved oversees for a decade or so, returned to the area around the year 2000 and has lived on Silt Mesa for about four years.

“The whole thing I'm concerned about is, how they treat people,” she said, referring to gas drilling companies and their conflicts with area residents.

When concerns run deep

Beth Strudley cited tales of locals who have claimed their water has been contaminated by gas drilling nearby, of individuals and in cases entire families sickened after gas rigs moved into their neighborhoods, of lives upended by turmoil and disease, she waxed eloquent about her views of the industry.

“What happens when we do run out of water?” she asked, after maintaining that aquifers are already being polluted and arguing that such pollution cannot be mended.

She recalled speaking by telephone a few years ago, before they bought their Silt Mesa home, with Dave Neslin, executive director of the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission in Denver.

She said he told her that energy companies had explored the mesa back in the 1980s and concluded it would not be worthwhile to sink gas wells there, so she should not worry about the industry invading her neighborhood.

Neslin could not be reached Friday for confirmation, but since a well has been dug near her home, Strudley obviously feels misinformed by someone.

Just before the drilling started, Strudley said, her family received two different analyses of their well water.

One, by a private firm hired by the Strudleys, showed nothing hazardous in their water at that point, she said.

The other, she continued, was conducted by a firm associated with Antero, and detected small amounts of benzene, a cancer-causing chemical typically associated with gas drilling activities.

Antero officials could not be reached for comment about the analysis or other issues raised in this story, but Strudley commented hotly, “How can that be?”

Beth Strudley, whose husband, Bill, is a New Zealander and runs his own painting company, said her conflicts with Antero reached a new low recently when

someone erected a sign opposite the Strudleys' property that read, “People Like You Poison our country by employing illegal aliens.”

After explaining that her husband deals only with subcontractors, and has never hired an illegal alien in any event, she added that on the back of the sign she found the name, Antero Resources.

“You can't fight these guys, because they have so much money,” Strudley lamented. “They're corrupt, in my opinion. They don't care what they do to people's lives.”

When concerns run deep

The anger flows