Just like the oldtime movie theatres, a double feature – built around the suddenly steamy theme of the oil drilling method known as fracking – was playing last night at City Hall to turnaway crowds.
Identifying the main event was arguable.
Perhaps it was the 250 noisy, well-informed, sign-bearing anti-fracking protestors reported for duty in front of City Hall at 5:30.
This was an hour and a half before a state commission would convene an all-evening community workshop/talk-back session on why fracking should be reined in this summer.
Organized by foodandwaterwatch.org, Citizens Coalition for a Safe Community (ccfasc.org) and Make Culver City Safe (makeccsafe@gmail.com), the newfangled protest in normally serene Culver City, splashing all over the Courtyard of City Hall, grabbed the media and popular attention it was aggressively courting.
Whether it was a better show than what went on later inside (well, not just inside) remains debatable this morning.
It is a chilly day in the afterlife when the 175-seat capacity of Council Chambers is taxed. What happened for the workshop bordered on the unprecedented. At least 350 people wanted to enter and volubly tell the state, in hurried, condensed language, how they felt about the perceived perils of fracking.
Rejected at the door, some disappointed passionate persons were funneled into two separate indoors satellite areas where screenings of the meeting were provided.
The third and final layer of spillover activists was sentenced to audio-only reception outdoors on folding chairs in the Courtyard. This was not to be mistaken for a holding area for the unwashed, though. In the midst of the crowd in the gathering darkness was City Manager John Nachbar, contentedly listening.
In the midst of a seven-city, length of the state listening tour of fracking-worried communities, the commission known as DOGGR, the state Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources, held court for 3½ hours, 90 minutes beyond the scheduled 7 to 9 program.
Every objector who wanted to speak evidently did.
What did the flurry of fracking flag-waving mean?
That will not be known for a number of months.
“Success will be measured by what the draft regulations turn out to be,” said Mayor Andy Weissman.
No such wait is necessary for grading the Ban Fracking protest.
All Ages Represented
Militants and slightly sleepy-eyed newcomers to the suddenly pulsating universe of ubiquitous fracking freely mingled.
No one was left out – from 84-year-old Lee Welinsky and 84-year-old Mim Shapiro down to an attractive young mom toting a tyke four or five generations behind those senior ladies.
Between television crews and honking motorists in the bosom of Downtown, the corner of Culver Boulevard and Duquesne Avenue was the rockin’ place to be at the dinner hour.
They marched, they chanted, they did interviews and they celebrated how swiftly exploding fears about the dangers of fracking have spread through their section of the world.
A Prayer and Fasting Response
Dr. Suzanne De Benedittis, one of the prominent forces for fracking change, and an organizer of the protest, couched her feelings in sui generis terms.
She could have been the keynote speaker.
“If we have to take our cause to Gov. Brown, and if he doesn’t listen, let me tell you,” she began.
“He is a former seminarian. I am a former Catholic nun. If we have to do a hunger strike, a fast or whatever to get his attention, we will.
“This is a matter of conscience, 300,000 people living on fragile land, around the perimeter of an active fault line they are going to drill into.
“If the governor cannot force his own regulators to put a ban on fracking in the Baldwin Hills Oil Field, if he cannot honor the will of the people who elected him, we will have to take all democratic means and spiritual means, such as prayer and fasting.”
