Bootleg Fire in Oregon is too large and hot to contain

From an Article by Sarah Kaplan, Washington Post, July 1, 2021

Heat waves have toppled temperature records across the nation, and firefighters are actively battling 48 large blazes that have consumed more than half a million acres in 12 states. But land management agencies are carrying out fire mitigation measures at a fraction of the pace required, and the funds needed to make communities more resilient are one-seventh of what the government has supplied.

“We’re burning up, we’re choking up, we aren’t just heating up,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) told President Biden at a meeting with Cabinet officials and Western governors Wednesday. “Across the board we have to disabuse ourselves of the old timelines and the old frames of engagement. … We can’t just double down.”

Yet fire experts say the escalation of wildfires, fueled by climate change, demands an equally dramatic transformation in the nation’s response — from revamping the federal firefighting workforce to the management of public lands to the siting and construction of homes.

“As our seasons are getting worse and worse … it feels like we’ve reached a tipping point,” said Kelly Martin, a wildfire veteran and president of the advocacy group Grassroots Wildland Firefighters. “We need a new approach.”

The West’s hot, dry start to summer has already been devastating, to people as well as trees.

On Thursday, authorities across the Pacific Northwest and western Canada said they were investigating at least 500 suspected deaths from heat illness that occurred amid the week’s record-shattering temperatures.

Thousands of residents had to be rapidly evacuated from the sprawling Lava Fire, south of the Oregon-California border, when extreme heat and strong winds caused the blaze to explode.

Many people are still missing after a fast-moving wildfire overwhelmed the tiny mountain village of Lytton, British Columbia, on Wednesday — just a day after it notched Canada’s highest-ever temperature of 121 degrees Fahrenheit.

“This is becoming a regular cycle, and we know it’s getting worse,” Biden said Wednesday. “In fact, the threat of Western wildfires this year is as severe as it’s ever been.”

‘Always doing more with less’

When Martin started her career with the U.S. Forest Service more than three decades ago, the agency had a “warlike” approach to handling wildfires. Crews used bulldozers and other equipment to cut through vegetation and create barriers that could contain an approaching front. Helicopters and big air tankers dropped retardant from high above the flames. Although land managers knew fire was an important part of most Western ecosystems, they were also under pressure to stop blazes before they reached the area’s growing population centers.

“And we were very successful at it,” Martin said. To this day, more than 95 percent of fires are suppressed before they reach communities.

But by the time Martin retired as chief of fire and aviation at Yosemite National Park last year, climate change had fundamentally altered the nature of wildfire, making the blazes that did escape containment increasingly costly and dangerous to fight.

In most forest types, the proportion of fires that are “high severity” (killing the majority of vegetation) has at least doubled in recent decades. Firefighters are seeing more and more “extreme fire behavior” — whirling “fire tornadoes,” crown fires that spew embers into the wind and blazes that move so fast and burn so hot they create their own weather.

In 2018, a veteran Redding, Calif., firefighter was killed when a vortex the size of several football fields swept down upon him as he evacuated residents ahead of the catastrophic Carr Fire.

“Watching what the current wildland firefighters are faced with, last year and this year, it is exponentially greater in terms of risk and trauma,” Martin said.

The U.S. government is the nation’s biggest employer of what are known as “wildland” firefighters. Most are temporary workers, their salaries as low as $13.45 per hour for a starting forestry technician. They spend summers traveling the country, working 16-hour days, 12 days at a time, often relying on overtime and hazard pay to make ends meet.

For decades, they’ve relied on a months-long offseason to rest and recover.

But now there is no offseason; one fire year simply bleeds into the next, as winter rain and snow is delayed and diminished by climate change. About 100 families had to be evacuated from the Santa Cruz mountains in January — usually California’s wettest month — when winds re-ignited the embers of a fire that started last August.

And Recent Larger Quakes in Canada

Oklahoma Residents Sue 12 ‘Reckless’ Fracking Companies for Earthquake Damage

From an Article by Cole Mellino, EcoWatch.com, January 13, 2016

Oklahoma has seen a dramatic uptick in earthquakes in recent years, and some residents refuse to sit idly by. Some 14 residents of Edmond, Oklahoma have now filed a lawsuit against 12 energy companies, claiming their fracking operations contributed to a string of earthquakes that hit central Oklahoma in recent weeks.

The plaintiffs are specifically targeting the companies wastewater disposal wells, alleging that the injection of fracking wastewater into these wells “caused or contributed” to earthquakes and constituted an “ultrahazardous activity.” The companies named in the lawsuit are Devon Energy Production, Grayhorse Operating, Marjo Operating Mid-Continent, New Dominion, Northport Production, Pedestal Oil, Rainbo Service, R.C. Taylor Operating, Special Energy, Sundance Energy, TNT Operating and White Operating.

In the lawsuit, the residents focus on two earthquakes of magnitude 4.3 and 4.2, which struck Edmond on December 29, 2015 and January 1, respectively. Citing “reckless disregard for the consequences to others,” the plaintiffs argue in the lawsuit that the companies “injected large volumes of drilling waste in disposal wells located near the cities of Edmond and Oklahoma City, in the vicinity of the plaintiffs’ properties, under conditions that defendants knew or should have known would result in an increased likelihood that earthquakes or other adverse environmental impacts would occur, thereby unreasonably endangering the health, safety and welfare of persons and property, including plaintiffs and others.

“The use of disposal wells by defendants created conditions which, among other things, are the proximate cause of unnatural and unprecedented earthquakes that continue unabated, increasing in both frequency and magnitude within Oklahoma County and elsewhere in the state of Oklahoma, which have damaged plaintiffs and others and threaten to do so in the future.”

The residents have suffered and will continue to suffer “severe and permanent damage to their persons and property,” according to the lawsuit. This damage includes “cracked and broken interior and exterior walls” and “movement of the foundations beneath their dwellings.” The residents also cited “mental and emotional anguish, fear and worry” as a result of the earthquakes.

The plaintiffs are seeking a permanent injunction to stop the use of 16 disposal wells operated by the energy companies. “Mother Earth has spoken, and Oklahoma is in a dangerous, dangerous position,” attorney Garvin Isaacs, who represents the Edmond-area homeowners along with David Poarch, told The Oklahoman. “We must address this.”

Oklahoma went from two earthquakes a year before 2009 to two a day. The state now has more earthquakes than anywhere else in the world. Just in the past two weeks, Oklahoma experienced at least 82 earthquakes.

The Oklahoma Geological Survey concluded in April 2015 that the injection of wastewater byproducts into deep underground disposal wells from fracking operations has triggered the seismic activity in the state.

Even pro-business Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin has admitted that there’s a “direct correlation between the increase of earthquakes that we’ve seen in Oklahoma [and] disposal wells.” However, Fallin has maintained a nuanced stance on fracking, as Oklahoma is one of the top natural gas-producing states in the country, and the industry provides a significant number of jobs in the state.

“We want to do it wisely without harming the economic activity we certainly enjoy and the revenue, quite frankly, we certainly enjoy,” Fallin said at a water and energy event in September 2015. “The council has worked very hard to ensure the energy sector, state agencies, environmentalists and academia are all talking and sharing that data and we have a scientific-based approach to reducing seismicity in our state.”

And, to its credit, the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, which regulates the state’s oil and gas industry, has taken action to grapple with the near-constant earthquakes that have been plaguing the state. It has forced changes to more than 500 disposal wells around the state, including the shutdown of wells around the city of Cushing, which holds one of the largest crude oil storage facilities in the world. But with 3,500 disposal wells in operation, these regulations only apply to a fraction of existing wells.

The milquetoast response from state regulators has led Oklahoma residents, including the plaintiffs who filed suit on Monday, to take action into their own hands. At least two lawsuits were filed, according to the Oklahoman, after the state was hit with its largest earthquake to date, a 5.6-magnitude that hit the Prague area in 2011.

One of those suits, Ladra v. New Dominion, LLC, was initially dismissed by a lower court judge, who said such disputes should be handled by the Oklahoma Corporation Commission. The plaintiff, Prague resident Sandra Ladra, appealed the decision to the Oklahoma Supreme Court, which ruled in July 2015 that the lawsuit could proceed in district court. The ruling helped clear the way for citizens to sue the oil and gas companies responsible for the wells. Ladra’s case is still pending.

In October 2015, the Oklahoma Sierra Club and Washington-based Public Justice Foundation sent letters to four Oklahoma energy companies warning them of a lawsuit. Public Justice launched a petition, which has gathered more than 11,000 signatures that demands Oklahoma’s oil and gas companies take “immediate steps to curb their impact on the state’s people and environment.” The group told The Oklahoman that it still plans to file suit.

See also:

70 More Earthquakes Hit Oklahoma, Averaging Nearly Three a Day in 2015

Porter Ranch Natural Gas Leak Spews 150 Million Pounds of Methane, Will Take Months to Fix

Source: www.wvpolicy.org

Tax Reform Committee Public Hearing This Tuesday in WV

The Joint Select Committee on Tax Reform will host its first public hearing on Tuesday, October 20 starting at 9:00 AM in the House Chamber at the State Capitol.

West Virginia policy makers are already struggling to maintain funding for important programs. Governor Tomblin recently announced additional across-the-board budget cuts for the current fiscal year.

Individuals wishing to speak to the Committee will be given a chance to sign up that day and speak in the afternoon. Groups or agencies will speak during the morning session and were required to preregister.

For more, please visit the Committee’s Facebook page. See also the WV Center on Budget & Policy, advocates of a WV state tax on natural gas liquids production.

Last month, a diverse coalition of organizations that cares about kids, families, seniors and working people, community organizations and local governments released basic principles of fair taxation which we urge legislators to consider as they deliberate changes to the tax code.

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Carbon Fee and Dividend Promoted by Citizens Climate Lobby

Concerned about our changing climate? Come hear how you can get involved in doing something about it, Wednesday, October 21st at 6 pm at the Morgantown Public Library.  This is a free presentation and all are welcome.

The speaker will be Jim Probst of the Citizens Climate Lobby.  Other advocates are the Monongalia Friends Meeting and the Mon Valley Clean Air Coalition.

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New Concern Over Quakes in Oklahoma Near a Hub of U.S. Oil

From an Article by Michael Wines, New York Times, October 14, 2015

A sharp earthquake in central Oklahoma last weekend has raised fresh concern about the security of a vast crude oil storage complex, close to the quake’s center, that sits at the crossroads of the nation’s oil pipeline network.

The magnitude 4.5 quake struck Saturday afternoon about three miles northwest of Cushing, roughly midway between Oklahoma City and Tulsa. The town of about 8,000 people is home to the so-called Cushing Hub, a sprawling tank farm that is among the largest oil storage facilities in the world.

Scientists reported in a paper published online last month that a large earthquake near the storage hub “could seriously damage storage tanks and pipelines.” Saturday’s quake continues a worrisome pattern of moderate quakes, suggesting that a large earthquake is more than a passing concern, the lead author of that study, Daniel McNamara, said in an interview.

“When we see these fault systems producing multiple magnitude 4s, we start to get concerned that it could knock into higher magnitudes,” he said. “Given the number of magnitude 4s here, it’s a high concern.”

The federal government has designated the hub, run by energy industry companies, a critical national infrastructure. Major tank ruptures could cause serious environmental damage, raise the risk of fire and other disasters and disrupt the flow of oil to refineries nationwide, said Dr. McNamara, a research geophysicist at the National Earthquake Information Center in Colorado.

The Cushing quake is among the largest of thousands of temblors that have rocked central and northern Oklahoma in the past five years, largely set off by the injection of oil and gas industry wastes deep into the earth. The watery wastes effectively lubricate cracks, allowing rocks under intense pressure to slip past one another, causing quakes.

The tens of millions of barrels of injected wastewater have helped make Oklahoma the second most seismically active state, behind Alaska. Although quakes have damaged or destroyed buildings and roads and, in a few instances, injured people, regulators do not have the authority to seriously curb waste disposal, and politicians in a state dominated by the energy industry have made no move to give it to them.

The state had three earthquakes of magnitude 3 or greater in 2009. Last year, it had 585, and this year’s total exceeds that.

Many scientists say the largest earthquake recorded in Oklahoma, a magnitude 5.7 temblor in 2011, was apparently unleashed by injected waste. Research suggests that the Cushing faults hold the potential for a quake as large as magnitude 6, Dr. McNamara said.

The Cushing oil hub stores oil piped from across North America until it is dispatched to refineries. As of last week, it held 53 million barrels of crude. The earth beneath the tanks was comparatively stable until last October, when magnitude 4 and 4.3 earthquakes struck nearby in quick succession, revealing long-dormant faults beneath the complex. Three more quakes with magnitudes 4 and over have occurred within a few miles of the tanks in the past month.

The Department of Homeland Security has gauged potential earthquake dangers to the hub and concluded that a quake equivalent to the record magnitude 5.7 could significantly damage the tanks. Dr. McNamara’s study concludes that recent earthquakes have increased stresses along two stretches of fault that could lead to quakes of that size.

The vice chairman of the state’s oil and gas regulatory body, the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, said in an interview that the potential for a large earthquake in Cushing was among her biggest worries. “It’s the eye of the storm,” said the vice chairwoman, Dana Murphy. Nevertheless, Oklahoma’s attempt to deal with the earthquakes this autumn faces continuing obstacles.

The government’s chief seismologist, who came under oil industry pressure to minimize the quakes’ origins in waste disposal, left this fall, and his successor is scheduled to depart soon. The state budget for the fiscal year that began in July slashed appropriations to the Corporation Commission by nearly 45 percent.

The commission has used its limited power over oil and gas exploration and production to persuade some companies in quake-prone areas to reduce the amount of waste they inject underground. This week, however, a Tulsa energy company filed the first challenge to those efforts, calling them arbitrary and a violation of due process. The two sides are negotiating an accord.

See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net