Audio By Carbonatix
Maybe you’ve seen the ads: On Wednesday we’re co-sponsoring a special screening of Gasland at the Texas Theatre, which isn’t the only movie we’re screening next week. More about that later. But Josh Fox’s Oscar-nominated film, as you probably know, features that now-infamous scene of a Colorado man being able to light his tap water, which oil-and-gas bizzers insist has nothing whatsoever do with nearby gas drilling, no sir, unh-unh. As former Dish mayor Calvin Tillman writes, “The natural gas industry keeps stating that the flaming water in Gasland was ‘naturally occurring’ methane.”
Tillman, of course, doesn’t buy it — and neither do Steven and Shyla Lipsky, a Weatherford couple who, in 2004, bought 7.5 acres in Weatherford and spent the next five years and $4.5 million building their “dream home” in Parker County. But in 2010, they say, they discovered their well water was flammable — due, they insist in legal docs filed earlier this week in Parker County District Court, to Range Production Company’s fracking nearby. That, they say, wasn’t part of the deal: They insist Silverado on the Brazos Development Co. told them a decade ago no oil or gas drilling would be allowed near the development. Only … not so much.
The couple’s Dallas and Fort Worth attorneys issued this release concerning the lawsuit against Range and Silverado on the Brazos earlier this week; it says the couple has “discovered that their well water contained benzene, toluene, ethane and a large amount of methane gas [and] due to the large amount of methane present, the well is no longer usable.” Courthouse News has the docs, in which the couple’s asking for $6.5 million.
Of course, the Environmental Protection Agency is already suing Range over water contamination from gas drilling in the Barnett Shale in Parker and Hood County.
