Citing potential threats to water supplies and endangered wildlife, a U.S. district judge on September 6 overturned a Bureau of Land Management plan to open more than one million acres of public land and mineral estate in central California to drilling and fracking. The ruling comes in response to a lawsuit brought by the Center for Biological Diversity and Los Padres ForestWatch, represented by Earthjustice.

The court ruled that the Bureau of Land Management failed to analyze the risks of fracking and other dangerous oil and gas extraction techniques when preparing a resource management plan that would have allowed drilling on vast stretches of land in California’s Central Valley, the southern Sierra Nevada, and in Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo and Ventura counties.

The ruling notes that BLM officials estimate that oil companies would frack 25 percent of new wells drilled on these lands. Yet the bureau’s 1,073-page management plan contained just three brief mentions of fracking and offered no analysis of fracking pollution’s threats to endangered species or California’s water supplies. Fracking blasts huge amounts of water mixed with toxic chemicals underground to release oil and gas.

Read More