FRACTURED, Part V: Trouble in Triple Creek

Colorado’s new rules fail to protect neighborhood residents from the impacts of oil and gas drilling.

It was Sept. 27, and the room was game-day tense. Greeley residents Lowell Lewis, Nelly Morales and Dawn Stein sat near the lawyer representing their neighborhood group at a meeting with the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC). Director Matthew Lepore and two others from the agency charged with regulating the state’s oil and gas industry sat around a table in their downtown Denver conference room, joined by two representatives from Extraction Oil and Gas, the company applying to drill in the residents’ Triple Creek neighborhood. Lepore and the Commission held the ultimate authority to decide the project’s fate, and the stakes were high for everybody.
The Greeley residents, part of a neighborhood group called Triple Creek Action, peppered Extraction representatives with questions about their company’s proposal to drill 22 oil and gas wells and place 24 storage tanks, 22 separators and assorted industrial machinery in a horse pasture adjacent to their neighborhood. Couldn’t Extraction find another place to put all those tanks? What about Extraction’s plan to install pipelines to reduce the number of trucks passing close to their homes?
“Why did you have to put the access route for your trucks 35 feet from my bedroom window?” 60-year-old resident Dawn Stein asked.   For the full story, click here on The Colorado Independent.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 5th, 2017 at 3:17 pm. It is filed under All Stories, Oil and Gas, Videos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.