Residents within Erie’s Vista Ridge neighborhood met with lawyer Dominick Saia on Wednesday night to discuss possible options for pushing back against nearby oil and gas sites that have long plagued the affluent community.
At question is Crestone Peak Resources’ Waste Connections oil and gas site, located along the southern border of Erie’s Weld County fringes, which residents assert has created increasing amounts of odor and noise.
As neighbors organize along the Front Range community, a perpetually split Erie Board of Trustees is calling for greater scrutiny on the town’s setback mandates. Erie straddles the line between Boulder County’s relatively fracking-free acreage, and Weld County, Colorado’s current hotbed for oil and gas activity.
The site has spurred dozens of complaints to the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission in recent weeks, including an official grievance from the town itself.
“We are dealing with the same smell situation that was happening at the Woolley-Sosa site,” resident Tiffany Taskey said Tuesday. “We are not anti-fracking people, but the proximity of what they are doing — we are all breathing this stuff in.
“We want the COGCC (Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission) to enforce the odor and dust,” she added. “It’s a tangible thing that we can hold them accountable for.”
Residents have organized in spite of a report from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment last week that found the air quality surrounding Erie’s often-derided Woolley-Sosa and Champlin oil and gas sites were “below non-cancer health-based reference” levels.
Now, as state and local officials find a swell of complaints near the Waste Connections site, health experts have turned their sights on the well north of Vista Ridge. Health officials will begin testing at the site this week, according to Mike Van Dyke, chief of environmental epidemiology with the CDPHE.
“We know they are drilling, and we know when the wind comes from the site is when residents are having concerns,” he said. “We have a decent idea that the concerns correlate with the wind direction and what is going on with the site — and we know that what is going on at those sites is drilling.”
Van Dyke said that the uptick in complaints — particularly around residential areas of Erie — could be attributed to housing developments getting closer and closer to oil and gas sites.
Spurred by April’s Firestone house explosion that rocked the oil and gas industry, a conversation among Erie town leaders about the coexistence of development and fracking has been amplified recently.
Erie’s Board of Trustees approved a contract amendment with Denver-based Pinyon Environmental Inc. in May, expanding the amount of wells slated for “additional air quality monitoring,” according to town documents.
“The Pinyon contract was our first attempt at being proactive versus reactive,” Erie Trustee Jennifer Carroll said Wednesday. “With the smell continuing and no action from the state, we are now having to react in addition to the proactive Pinyon monitoring. It’s a lot of work, but the health, safety and welfare of our residents is worth it and that’s what we are pledged to protect.”
The setbacks of new homes from old wells vary widely: 150 feet in Firestone and Dacono, 200 feet in Frederick and Broomfield, 350 feet in Louisville and Lafayette and 750 feet in Longmont, according to municipal codes.
“The general concern is that Waste Connections is inducing a nuisance to the neighborhood and community,” resident Mark Kadlecek said. “It’s the odors that are being perpetrated so that people can’t enjoy being in their homes, and can’t open their windows.”
There is no parallel regulation from the state, spokesman Todd Hartman said earlier this month, because “COGCC regulates the oil and gas industry; it doesn’t regulate homebuilders or developers or related entities.”
“There needs to be a unified voice and a unified opposition to what’s going on,” Carroll said. “When you just have a bunch of individuals complaining, unfortunately the state doesn’t take that as seriously as if you have a whole municipality lodging a complaint.
The conversation comes on the heals of yet another oil and gas tragedy — one that again involved an Anadarko-operated site — last week, when an oil tank battery that exploded while workers performed maintenance off Colo. 66 near Colorado Boulevard in Mead left one dead and three others injured.
“We feel like the guinea pigs for what is going to happen to anybody from these sites,” Taskey said. “Until I had a rig pop up in my backyard, I didn’t know anything about oil and gas.”
Anthony Hahn: 303-473-1422, hahna@dailycamera.com or twitter.com/_anthonyhahn
