I am coming out of the wilderness to set some facts straight – I normally wouldn’t, as a few might remember, for I hung up my whistle and pen in 2006 after 10 years of reporting for the old Pinnacle newspaper.
It has to do with the “Protect Our Water” anti-fracking initiative that will come before the San Benito voters this November. A large group of local citizens has managed to place a well-crafted six-page initiative on the November ballot that would ban fracking here, and ban other extreme methods of dangerous extraction such as cyclic steam injection (already being drilled near the Pinnacles National Park), acidization and acid well stimulation. You can read it here: http://sanbenitorising.weebly.com/read-the-initiative.html.
Yes, it also would prohibit conventional oil and gas drilling where people live, like downtown Hollister and its suburbs just outside city limits. Those suburbs, like the ones on Enterprise Road and Quail Hollow and Ridgemark Estates, are called rural residential.
The initiative will allow conventional drilling in 80 percent of the county – in all the parts designated agricultural. If you drive half a mile past our last southern town, Paicines – 12 miles outside Hollister – the rest of what you see is called agricultural. Guys like Marty Richman and the Free Lance Editorial Board won’t tell you that. They just keep spreading their misconceived notions that supporters of the initiative are “crazy wild-eyed liberals.”
Well, they are correct if they are referring to me, of course. But the people behind this push are not so easily defined. I have met the people of San Benito Rising, and have come to respect every one of them. They are retired scientists, teachers, artists, local Native Americans, tech experts, botanists – from all walks of San Benito life; all community-involved, all unpaid volunteers trying to save our ag economy and all in love with this county. We also have esteemed farmers and ranchers supporting our mission, like Paul and Peter Hain, Joe Morris, Sally Calhoun and Josh Jensen. Even local luminary Luis Valdez of Teatro Campesino fame supports this cause.
I have to write this because what is at stake is our water supply – the Life Blood of our agricultural and ranching economy, our entire way of life. I am one of a large group of San Benitoans who want to ban fracking in this county, indeed, the entire country, because I have seen what it has wreaked in so many other unprotected parts of the nation. Fracking has occurred in San Benito; I have seen the hundreds of cargo containers of toxic fracking fluid here in southeast county, in Panoche and above it in the Vallecitos.
And the drillers want to frack a lot more, being that one third of the southern end of this county contains the northern tip of the elusive Monterey Shale. For the moment, forget the fact that the U.S. Energy Department just declared that, because of the jumbled folding of underground rock caused by the state’s mass of fault lines, 96 percent of the oil hidden miles below in the Monterey Shale is currently unattainable and only 4 percent of it is. Big Oil talking heads have shot back that they are swiftly “developing new technologies” to get at it.
I shudder to think of something even more extreme than fracking, with its 600-plus toxic chemicals and the billions of gallons of water it poisons … during the worst drought in California’s history?
The repetitive detractors of the San Benito Protect Our Water initiative have seized upon that term, “rural residential,” because they think that the voters of this beautiful county are too ignorant to know the difference between zoning designations. They are assuming the voters will believe their repeated lie that the initiative would ban all drilling, even conventional, throughout the county. That is a lie, folks.
Their assumption is putrid. Frankly, I only know the difference because the planning department was one of my many beats so long ago.
The Big Oil and Gas industry is delighted that they have crackpots ballyhooing their Drill Baby Drill mantra for them – and they don’t even have to pay ’em! But just to hedge their bets, they did hire an operative named Kristina Chavez Wyatt to scrawl some recent libelous bilge in our community against folks in San Benito Rising, and worst yet, against a much loved and respected vintner who supports our cause – simply because he doesn’t want his vineyards to die of poisoned water!
I know this because I checked the state FPPC (Fair Political Practices Commission) website on her. So far, Wyatt has been paid $5,000 by a Texas oil company to spread her propaganda.
Listen: Water is for Farming, not Fracking. And even conventional oil drilling and drinking water do NOT MIX, which is why we want to ban drilling near our suburbs.
Vote YES this November to Protect Our Water.
Kate Woods, New Idria
