Tarrant Chronicle info on Kim Triolo Feil as Fractivist

The Tarrant Chronicle posted my top ten urban drilling wish list to fix loopholes in public safety, http://www.tarrantchronicle.com/top-ten-urban-drilling-needs/

Future publications:

• My name is Kim Triolo Feil, better known in Arlington Texas as an anti urban gas drilling activist. It is worth noting that my environmental activism did not start even after three major chemical exposure events while living in Louisiana near refinery row better known as cancer alley.
  

   

  I worked for eight years between the Shell Oil & Shell Chemical plants as a bank teller in Norco Louisiana in my early twenties. On two occasions I was in a lockdown situation at the American Bank on Apple street. Both times we breached the lock down to let helpless people find refuge in the bank lobby from the white chemical clouds enveloped the area. In 1988, I was trapped in my car less than hundred feet away from the ground rumbling, burning storage tanks releasing 159 million pounds of volatile chemical waste into the air in the infamous Shell Oil explosion event. The glass on my car window was too hot to the touch. My boyfriend and I was trying to evacuate an elderly person we knew lived across the street from ground zero. I received $200 for the paint peeling off my car and signed a non-disclosure agreement. I now wonder in retrospect how many decades it might take for my refinery exposure events to translate into some type of latent cancer.

   

  I spent my childhood in Independence Louisiana, fifty miles north of Norco in a small, Sicilian immigrant town of strawberry farmers. It was only in the last ten years of research into fracking that I was able to note the importance of how my best friend, Julie’s, dad stored the nasty smelling strawberry insecticide near their back door. I also recall how my grandparents did not let me play in their shed as they were strawberry farmers too. I remember them telling me never to go in there as that is where they stored their chemicals for the farm. Julie died of leukemia later when we were in high school. Last month forty years later, Julie’s only other sibling sister, likewise died of cancer. As a fractivist, I now suspiciously ask, what are the odds that both of the children raised near those farming chemicals never survived to see their golden years?

   

  When I moved to Arlington in my late twenties, I worked in eye shot of the GM plant for a hospital supply company on Great Southwest Parkway. Seeing the massive GM plant in Arlington as the lone industrial presence on the backdrop of Six Flags was a relief to my senses in comparison to the offensive odors of the refinery towns in Louisiana.
  

   

  As President of our Old Town Neighborhood Association in Arlington, I attended a neighborhood summit where then Mayor Cluck had an exuberant announcement of how Arlington was sitting on the sweet spot. He spoke of how we were in for a windfall of cash in extracting natural gas under the land we owned. After believing the snake oil land man explaining how the new horizontal drilling means they will not be close to us, and how low profile the well head was in being similar to a fire hydrant, I began rallying my neighbors. We had a mineral lease signing party. We were so relieved that we signed when we did as the signing price dropped in later years for subsequent signing party hold outs.

   

  Life came to a halt as I knew it soon after I became alarmed at how intrusive urban drilling is once I saw the flaring and smelled the familiar noxious odor when I drove by the GM plant who had also leased to Chesapeake Energy to drill for natural gas. I felt like the refinery town in Norco followed me to Arlington. As a cautious parent, I began following closely the blog of Texas Sharon. 

   

  In disbelief that I moved to yet another industrialized town, I started doing my own research and sent letters to the Arlington City Council cautioning them and sharing my findings of what I call “loopholes in public protections”. My blog, https://barnettshalehell.wordpress.com/, is mostly a cut and paste of these letters. I do post any rare responses over the years from our mostly silent mayor and council and invite you to search the website to learn how our drinking water has changed since urban drilling.

   

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  Shockingly, in July of 2010, we had a drilling operator “work-over” spill in Lake Arlington, our drinking water source, due to human error in not closing a valve all the way. We also have about one hundred drilling laterals under our lake that are at migration risk for seismic events and or cement failures. The future is bleak as the wells are starting to age and the operators are starting to change hands. For example Carrizo sold to Enervest who sold to Saddle Operating company, and Chesapeake has sold to Total.

   

  Over the years I get emails and calls from people sickened or alarmed about sounds, odors, and alleged cancer clusters in Arlington. In 2011, a fractivist friend, Jane, of mine had a nearby gas well spewing after a storm and raw gas entered her home which sickened her and her dog. It was one of two rouge gas wells spewing simultaneously across town when the electric compressor station lost power and backed up pressure into two different pad sites.
  

   

  In 2012, I unsuccessfully even ran for City Council. In 2013, I joined Jane in the ranks of having her home invaded as my mother-in-law and I endured a corrosive odor in my home while the Truman Cowboy Stadium Chesapeake pad site released noxious odors during their work over/drilling-out-the-plug stages. I interviewed and documented people sickened in the area. I noted how the media never covered the story even though five fire trucks and one ambulance was dispatched. I attempted to sue Chesapeake in small claims court representing myself against three high powered Kelly Hart & Hallman attorneys. During the discovery phase of the trial, I was able to obtain emails of documents proving Chesapeake lied to city and state officials about the source and location of the odor. The outcome was to have a retired judge (Judge Curnutt recused herself) throw out the case because I did not have a doctor nor an engineer’s report saying this happened proving the nuisance.
  

  Less than a decade later amid the frenzy of urban drilling here in the north Texas Barnett Shale, the citizens of Denton by referendum banned fracking. In response at the next legislative session, a statewide Texas “HB40 ban-against-fracking-bans” was passed on 4/17/2015. This was just days after a horrible gas well spill event happened near Lake Arlington in a densely crowded neighborhood.
  

   

  We have had over a dozen gas release emission events that the general public knows about. On September 10th 2018, Arlington Fire Department’s Sergeant Crowsen said at a Frown Hall meeting (due to a fracking accident) that they respond to about 10-15 gas well complaints a year. Per our 2019 budget on page 120, it will cost us almost $500,000 in 2019 for gas well emergency response readiness.

   

  I am glad that at our last midterm election that we were able to pass term limits. It is my hope that one day we will have a full council and mayoral seat of fractivists like myself trying to protect the citizen’s health in NOT rubber stamping expansions to our existing sixty or so pad sites in Arlington GASLAND TX.
  

   

  I only update my blog, https://barnettshalehell.wordpress.com/, on topics that I have already reported on, but I am still actively speaking against every agenda item related to drilling in Arlington.

   

  Thwarting my efforts in fixing the loopholes is that our local and state government does not enforce these two laws that are on already on the books….

  TEX LG. CODE ANN. A§ 253.005 : Texas Statutes – Section 253.005:

  LEASE OF OIL, GAS, OR MINERAL LAND“

  (c) A well may not be drilled in the thickly settled part of the municipality…”

   

  Texas Administrative Code, Title 30, Part 1, Chapter 101, Subchapter A,Rule 101.4,

  Environmental Quality, Nuisance

  No person shall discharge from any source whatsoever one or more air contaminants or combinations thereof, in such concentration and of such duration as are or may tend to be injurious to or to adversely affect human health or welfare, animal life, vegetation, or property, or as to interfere with the normal use and enjoyment of animal life, vegetation, or property”.

   

  And now with HB40 in place, council will hide behind this bill that essentially does not want any City ordinance changes to cost the drillers money as they have this “commercially reasonable” language that needs to be challenged in the courts. Since our mayor and council have defended themselves twice in the term limits fight, they should place a safer setback distance of 1,000 feet, go to court, and use as their main argument c) A well may not be drilled in the thickly settled part of the municipality…”. At the very least, they should not allow exceptions to develop existing pad sites that intrude on the 600 ft set back already existing in our ordinance. Currently, Arlington officials are only entertaining having to have a supermajority vote to be closer than 600 feet. The next time we can speak on the agenda item to tighten our gas drilling ordinance is quickly approaching. It may be a couple more years before they revisit our ordinance, or until the next highly publicized emission event.
  

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