Coalition urges Brown to shut down illegal injection wells

Coalition urges Gov. Brown to shut down illegal injection wells

by Dan Bacher

(Sacramento) Just two days after over 8,000 protesters marched through the streets of Oakland in the largest anti-fracking protest in U.S. history, documents released by state regulators revealed that thousands of oil and gas wells and hundreds of illegally operating oil industry waste-disposal wells are injecting fluids into aquifers in violation of state law and the federal Safe Drinking Water Act.

"California state agencies had until Feb. 6 to submit a plan to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency detailing how the state agencies will protect water resources associated with oil development," according to a news release from Californians Against Fracking. "The plan submitted by the Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources last Friday allows oil companies in California to continue injecting wastewater into aquifers for several more months and, in some instances, until 2017. State regulators have already allowed aquifers that were suitable for drinking water and agriculture to be contaminated."

The coalition noted that oil regulators shut down a handful of illegal waste-disposal wells last summer, but hundreds of others are still operating across the state, including wells in Monterey, Kern and Los Angeles counties and near San Luis Obispo.

“Gov. Jerry Brown must immediately ban fracking and halt the use of illegal injection wells in California,” said Adam Scow, California director of Food and Water Watch, on behalf of Californians Against Fracking. “This fiasco shows that the state simply cannot handle the massive toxic wastewater problem produced by fracking and oil and gas development. It shows that the state has not complied with the minimum protections required by federal law. All unsafe and illegal injection needs to stop immediately.”

Californians Against Fracking is a coalition of about 200 environmental business, health, agriculture, labor, political and environmental justice organizations working to win a statewide ban on fracking and other dangerous extraction techniques in California. Follow @CAagainstFrack on Twitter.

Kathryn Phillips, Director of Sierra Club California, responded to the release of the documents by calling for an outside investigation into DOGGR's practices.

“It is extraordinarily distressing that for so many years the state has essentially put California’s diminishing water supply in the pathway of serious pollution," said Phillips. “If this were a one-time incident it would be bad enough. But to permit thousands of questionable wells defies common sense.

“It’s time for an outside investigation into DOGGR’s practices," stated Phillips. "While USEPA’s calling for a plan to stop injecting into sensitive aquifers is commendable, that’s not enough. It’s time for the U.S. Attorney’s office to investigate how and why this permitting continued even after the federal agency warnings.”

Sierra Club California is the legislative and regulatory advocacy arm of the 13 Sierra Club chapters in California, representing more than 380,000 members and supporters statewide. For more information, go to: http://california2.sierraclub.org/

For radio coverage of Saturday's march, go to: http://fsrn.org/2015/02/californians-call-for-statewide-fracking-ban/

The documents were released at time when California's fish, waterways and environment are in state of crisis. Delta smelt, the indicator species that demonstrate the health of the Bay-Delta Estuary, are near extinction, American River steelhead are in collapse and Central Valley salmon are imperiled, due to abysmal management by the Brown and Obama administration's of the state's rivers and reservoirs during a record drought.

To make matters worse, as fracking is polluting aquifers throughout the state, Governor Jerry Brown is rushing the construction of the Bay Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP) to build the peripheral tunnels, the most environmentally devastating public works project in California history. The construction of the massive tunnels under the Delta would hasten the extinction of Central Valley Chinook salmon, Delta and longfin smelt, green sturgeon and a host of other species, as well as imperil the salmon and steelhead populations on the Trinity and Klamath rivers.