When it comes to water, opponents of Measure J have been tellingly silent. They know this historic drought burning up the state is an urgent issue with San Benito residents, including farmers, vintners and ranchers.
They also know they don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell in winning hearts and minds if they were to tell folks the truth: that the extreme oil drilling techniques Measure J would ban use millions of gallons of precious water, either from underground aquifers or trucked in from other sources. Already, most of the county’s surface water in stock ponds, reservoirs and creeks has dried up.
So now, opponents of Measure J are lobbing the next Big Lie at everyone: “Let’s tell people that the ‘outside radical activists’ pushing for Yes on J tried to turn off farmers’ water some time ago.”
Pathetic. It is not the first time they tried to equate supporters of J with some other organization or agency, and then tacked another lie onto it. We are low on water allocations because we are perilously low on water! And those “outside radical activists” are, in reality, longtime local residents who appreciate our ag industry, and may even be a part of it. Oh, and they like clean water.
The water issue not withstanding – an argument they will never win – the No on J people are screaming about property rights. “Hey, these big city slickers can’t tell us cowboys what to do on our land!” says John Eade in his incessant Big Oil-sponsored TV ads. The big city slickers, by the way, live in Hollister, Aromas, San Juan Bautista, Panoche Valley, New Idria, Paicines, Bitterwater and many rural parts in between those busy, big city-slicking towns.
No, we can’t tell them what to do on their land. No one should. But underground aquifers belong to everyone, and that water doesn’t heed fence boundaries. So if some oil driller wants to frack or acidize or cyclic steam “his” aquifer, he fracks his neighbor’s aquifer and his neighbor’s neighbor’s aquifer. What about their property rights?
Yes, it is normally against the law to poison someone’s well. But not if it is poisoned with 649 toxic chemicals that have leached in from a neighbor’s fracked property. You see, the oil and gas industry is the only one in the nation exempt from the Safe Water Drinking Act, thanks to the Halliburton Loophole of 2005, pushed through Congress by former President and Energy Czar Dick Cheney (also the former Grand Poobah of Halliburton).
So when oil drillers commit toxic trespassing, there’s not a lot any adjoining landowner can do about it. Except now: you can vote YES on Measure J to make sure it doesn’t happen to you or your neighbors.
In addition to water and property rights, oil interests step on mineral rights as well.
Big Oil has gobbled up more than a million mineral claims in this nation. Most property owners in America – 75 percent, according to the documentary Split Estate – don’t even know that their property deed does not include mineral rights.
It means that Big Oil can grab mineral rights from property owners, without them knowing it, and drill any way they want to under that property.
Big Oil and Gas usually give a stipend to the property owner for “easement,” to rip a road on the land, set up their frack tanks and drills, and then stick in a big putrid burn-off pipe that throws out flame and methane 24-7. After all, the property owner does have “surface rights.” The property owner can’t steward cattle or crops anymore because all the water is poisoned, but heck! That’s the price of energy independence. Never mind that we live in a global market and any oil sucked up here is shipped to China and India, the highest bidders.
The nightmare of “split estates” is happening all over America, as well as to some of our ranchers here in San Benito, like Kathy and Joe Spencer of the Peterson Land & Cattle Company in southwest county. Their 100-year old ranch is next door to the Citadel Indian Wells cyclic steam injection oil project. The Spencers are fearful, too, because oil giant Occidental Oil Corp. owns the mineral rights under their land.
Citadel CEO Armen Nahabedian told the Spencers that it didn’t matter that his company doesn’t have their mineral rights – he can drill horizontally underground from the parcel next to theirs and get their oil that way. I kid thee not.
Citadel and the misguided local farm bureau have a “jubilee dream” of planting 1,000 cyclic steam injection oil wells, with each well using more than a million gallons of water per injection job. And where do you think that water will come from?
If that 1,000-oil well dream manifests, the Spencers and any other rancher living near the Pinnacles National Park can say goodbye to their cattle operations. Their water wells will evaporate to bone dry.
“If the water goes, we go,” says Kathy Spencer in a new five-minute video documentary, created by the Natural Resources Defense Council. Check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfdcnDuZjGo
It’s quite simple: Voting YES on J will prevent Big Oil from sucking out much of the water that remains in our aquifers and contaminating the rest. Voting YES on J will prevent fracking, acidization and cyclic steam injection drilling here in San Benito. It ALLOWS conventional oil drilling. YES on J is a vote that protects both our water and a good way of life for all of us.
Kate Woods is a county resident.
