(Credit: ©2015 Julie Dermansky)
“Shit, the cops are here,” Jon said from behind the wheel. Our scouts had given the all clear just a few minutes ago, but now two police cars were blocking the road, red and blue lights flashing in the morning’s early glow.
With characteristic composure, Jon made a quick decision and jerked the wheel of the Mazda down a narrow road through the neighborhood by the fracking site. Children were walking to the school bus and stared in our windows as we drove by. Maggie got a text message and announced from the back seat that police were also blocking the road on the other end of the site.
“How are we going to get through?” I was panicked, and looked back over my shoulder at the tense faces of Tara Linn and Niki, jammed with Maggie in the back seat.
“We’ll figure it out,” Jon said as he pulled over at the end of a cul de sac and started calling the scouts. A van followed us down the street. “It’s the homies,” Maggie said, referring to a group of young friends and fracking activists who had come out to help us. They parked across the street from us and nodded nonchalantly in our direction.
It was 6:30 a.m. on June 1 in Denton, Texas, and we had come to defend our fracking ban. Last November, Denton citizens voted in a landslide to ban hydraulic fracturing (an oil and gas well stimulation technique that can be invasive and toxic). The ban was our last option after years of trying to accommodate an industry that refused to compromise. In January 2013, we passed rules to keep fracking away from residential areas. But in September of that year, they kept on fracking less than 200 feet from homes.
Gas well operators and industry representatives claimed they didn’t have to follow local rules, because they held more than 11,000 acres of Denton territory that were grandfathered under old laws written long before the impacts of fracking were understood. Without the ban, we feared our local regulations would be trampled again and again. It would be spell mass neighborhood industrialization across our town.
The Denton fracking ban shocked the world: We were a small Texas town that stood up to big oil and gas despite the fact that they outspent our grass-roots group 15 to 1. The industry sued the city the morning after the vote. Fearing that the ban would be upheld under the existing legal regime, however, they put most of their efforts into a legislative end run, using their outsize influence in Austin to change the rules of the game. Over the next several months the industry bought itself a new law. Known widely as HB 40, it declares that the state of Texas expressly preempts (trumps) regulations written by local governments. Cities and towns can only pass laws that the industry deems to be “commercially reasonable.”
HB 40 has been talked about as a ban on local fracking bans, but the impetus behind it is far more nefarious. It is an attempt to upend the long Texas tradition of local control over oil and gas, a tradition that prioritized community well-being over profits. It is the product of forces that are trying to disenfranchise communities across the state and roll back hard-won protections for health and safety. The industry is setting the stage for a renewed onslaught of fracking once they begin exporting liquefied natural gas to Europe and Asia where they can make much more money than on the saturated domestic market.
Tara Linn and I are members of the group that spearheaded the Frack Free Denton campaign. Niki and Tara Linn are two of the “Frackettes,” a parody singing troupe they created to mock the propaganda the industry had cooked up during the months leading up to the vote on the ban (at one point even claiming that I had “direct ties” to the Russian government). The plan on that June morning was for the three of us to blockade the access road to the frack site. Others would support us and take pictures. I had Maggie’s phone number written on my arm in case I needed to call her later about bail. But now the whole plan looked like it might fall through.
Sitting in the car, I watched the clock tick to 6:35. In 25 minutes, Vantage Energy would start fracking the first wells in Denton since the ban passed. We couldn’t sit back and just let that happen. I had stayed up past 2 a.m. polishing a post that would go live on Facebook in two hours. In it, I wrote, that “A just law would give those exposed to the harms of fracking a meaningful voice. An unjust law would subordinate those voices to the dictates of the powerful and wealthy. HB 40 is an unjust law.”
“All right,” Jon said as he put his phone back in his pocket. “Here’s the plan. There’s a little road up ahead that can get us close to the site. From there, we’ll just have to hope we can scurry to the gate before we are seen.”
We pulled up to the end of another residential street and I got out of the car, my body shaking with adrenaline. The air was still crisp and the grass was covered in dew. The homies pulled “the ordinance” out of the van – it was a 6-foot-wide piece of particle board with the preamble of our fracking ban painted on it. We were going to affix the giant ordinance to the gates of the site, so that the industry would have to literally rip apart our democratic vote in order to commence with fracking.
Everyone milled around aimlessly for a moment, trying to steel our nerves. Niki, Tara Linn and I decided against bringing our pillows with us, figuring we may not be on the site very long, if at all. Suddenly, Theo, a member of the support team, grabbed the ordinance with both hands and started to jog across a little ditch separating us from Nail Road, where the access gate was located. “Let’s do this!” he said looking over his shoulder at us as he lugged the ordinance through the wet grass. I turned to Tara Linn and she smiled at me before we made a run for it.
We got to the road in between the two police checkpoints about 50 yards from the gate. Because of the way the road curved we couldn’t see either checkpoint, and it appeared that we hadn’t been spotted. We didn’t know whether to run or walk, so we walked fast, hearts pounding. I caught up to Niki and Tara Linn and we held hands as we followed Jon to the site. There was one police car parked on the large concrete pad on the side of the road in front of the gate, but as we got close we heard Jon say, “There’s no one inside!”