Re “With Muscle and Compromise, Weissman and Sahli-Wells Rescue an Evening”
[Editor’s Note: Technology lapses that were not his fault hampered Mr. Ferrazzi’s anti-fracking presentation at last night’s City Council meeting.]
Here is what I intended to say and show on the screen in Council Chambers:
What I thought would be my 120 seconds of limited free speech at the City Council meeting concerned the hazards of urban oil field production and how Los Angeles and its residents have seen them realized:
• The Baldwin Hills Dam Collapse in 1963 and
• The Fairfax District Ross Dress for Less explosion to name only two among several that have occurred.
Culver City has experienced it recently in the Boneyard, now the Dog Park, as PXP produced water along with methane and VOC migrating to the surface, breaching the groundwater system and contaminating the fresh water sands.
Playa Vista has a well that has been abandoned twice and continues to leak millions of cubic feet of gas daily.
The point is: Once you break something in nature, you generally cannot mitigate it. Do we really want to be living in a city that needs to build vent stacks into its sidewalks to vent oil field gases above street level if a fault, even a minor fault, is activated under Culver City residences and infrastructure, which would allow gas to migrate to the surface?
The subsurface of Culver City is heavily faulted and led to the abandonment of three wells drilled in 1959-1960 on the MGM lot, now Sony property, off of Overland Avenue.
Culver City has revitalized its downtown.
I don't think homeowners or businesses should be made to accept the risks to their heath and safety associated with the private corporate industrial operation of hydraulic fracturing in the subsurface of their property.
The oil and gas industry representatives tout that they have been using hydraulic fracturing for 60 years safely in California. This industry assertion begs the question:
Could either of the two examples given of oil field operation-related disasters have been caused or exacerbated by hydraulic fracturing in either of the two oil fields at the time?
Oil wells and their structural integrity need to last forever.
Unfortunately, they don't. Once abandoned, they cannot be maintained to lengthen the time before they corrode and become compromised.
Eventually, wells will leak, I don't want to see it happen again in Culver City or in the surrounding communities of the Baldwin Hills.
Mr. Ferrazzi, Executive Director of Citizens Coalition for a Safe Community, may be contacted at www.ccfasc.org
