Q: What is the Coke bottle in St.
Tammany Parish?
In 1980, a small-budget South
African movie called The Gods Must Be
Crazy hit the big screen. In it, from an airplane flying over a tribal region
of Botswana a Coke bottle was tossed. It lands among the natives who, while finding
it useful, become rent with dissension over it. Believing it came from the gods
who provide everything but feeling compelled to reject the malevolent thing,
one of their own is dispatched to return it to them, with the ensuing hilarity
of someone who never has had contact with anything but primitive cultures
suddenly now coming to grips with the outside world.
If you’ve ever seen the film –
which became the highest grossing foreign film in America at the time – you
can’t help but get the same feeling observing the reactions of the natives in
St. Tammany Parish when confronted with the possibility that somebody might
frac a well into existence on their sacred ground. These natives also have been
blessed by the gods, with wealth (ranking in the top three parishes in the
state in all of per capita, median family, and median household incomes) from
having a major metropolitan area nearby yet a lake to separate them from the
grubbiness of the hoi polloi and all
its problems to the south. They also suddenly have something alien tossed into
their midst, and struggle to fit it into their own paradigm that is detached
from the rest of the world.
And it’s something that
discomfits a number, although unlikely anywhere near a majority, of people in
the area. Ever since just weeks ago a driller announced it was going to frac a
well, from the reaction of some of them you would have thought the world was
going to come to an end. The highlight came with a meeting last week in the
parish where speakers
intoned that the worst case scenarios were a near certainty when it came
not just to the fracking process, but after. Although there’s no legal recourse
for the parish to involve itself in the actual process – although it can
regulate in related matters as have Bossier
and Caddo Parishes – now a
suit
has been filed claiming irregularities in the state and federal permitting
process that seeks to slow down the awarding of it.
When New Orleans Times-Picayune columnist James Varney wrote
about the juxtaposition of the energy-hungry lifestyles of fellow attendees of
this meeting to their willingness to entertain hysterical and paranoid scenarios
of obtaining that energy near their backyards that culminates into a NIMBY
attitude, this got state Rep. Tim Burns all in
a huff, declaring that Varney unfairly
ridiculed these poor souls and proceeded to send out an alarm that “the
fracking site chosen off Interstate 12 and Highway 1088 is zoned residential
and is 2,000 feet from a school.” Of course, not that drilling a well is an
unusual thing in St. Tammany; there are dozens of producing ones in the parish,
and more again inactive.
And, by way of perspective … if I
were to crane my head out the window in front of me as I type and look to the
left, likely I could see the hulk drilling what is identified on its permit as
well #246890 (Dickson 37 well 2), a half mile away. No production yet, but I’m
hopeful that maybe if it gets online its production could wrest our royalties
into triple digits for this year.
What we are getting comes from a
well about a mile to the east (too far for me to see from here straight out the
window, as completed wells have much lower horizons), #239530 (Dickson 37 well
1), which ended drilling Dec. 20, 2009 at a depth of 15,737 feet. Although
actually technically in Caddo Parish, the horizontal drilling places most of
its production into our section in Bossier Parish. Of its 19,465 mcf of gas
delivered as of the Mar. 1 reporting date for the month’s production, 17,518
came from Bossier. (This isn’t magic by which I get this information, but from
the state’s handy SONRIS website.)
On the way to Mass yesterday, I
drove by five more wells, all operational or close to it. Two were within 200
yards of an elementary school and a hundred or so residences. Those two also
were a half mile north of a high school, along with three others within a mile
of it, one of the latter being 200 yards from a subdivision. And for those
first two plus the Dickson 37 wells, within a mile and a half radius live
several thousand people while U.S. Highway 80 is a half mile from all except
the Caddo well, which itself is within a mile of the Jimmie Davis Bridge. Oh,
by the way, they were all fracked, and, as readers may have gathered, I’m still
here, not drinking poisoned water or breathing foul air or experiencing any of
the maladies spoken of at the meeting, and neither has my severely immunocompromised
wife. To almost anybody who has any experience living around a fracking
environment, the reaction of the restless St. Tammany natives seems
unfathomably alarmist.
The larger point being that, when
proper safety protocols are followed, there is about
zero chance of any deleterious effect happening. In all technology,
something always can go wrong (perhaps St. Tammany denizens don’t realize that
they’re about 100 miles downwind from one nuclear power plant and another sits
almost on Lake Pontchartrain to the south) so harm could come as a result of a
fracking operation. But it is an extremely remote possibility, and it borders
on the unbalanced to think doom is so likely that anything related to fracking
should earn a fatwa – especially since
roughly 90 percent of all petroleum wells drilled since the 1990s have involved
a fracking technique.
But St. Tammany Parish always has
been weird that way, with a general bunker mentality having worked into its prevailing
localized political culture. Perhaps more than any other parish (Bossier
perhaps being the only other one on par) it votes Republican and for
conservative candidates, yet at the same time adopts the remarkably liberal
trait of keeping its hand out to grab whatever it can from everybody else while
avoiding reversing the transaction.
For example, two consecutive
Republican parish presidents tacitly, if not explicitly, have endorsed past
and present candidacies of Democrat Sen. Mary
Landrieu on the grounds that she brought home the bacon – never mind her
promoting policies that disproportionately take and spend what parish citizens
earn. And when the state closed the former Southeast Louisiana Hospital,
current Parish President Pat Brister – a former top state GOP official – and Republican
legislators, all of whom you would think would want the state to make a move to
save
taxpayer dollars and even improve service delivery by letting a
nongovernment provider take it over, protested vehemently against this because of
the potential reduction of direct state dollars and jobs into the parish that the
move would trigger.
In other words, St. Tammany’s
political elites fit marvelously into the state’s slowly deteriorating populist
political culture. As long as they can reap the benefits and avoid all costs
from something, they’re game, but as soon as it looks as if they’ll have to put
a little down on something, this thing becomes anathema and they’ll do anything
to avoid it. Such is the pattern seen on this issue – even as not only local
governments could reap
a financial windfall from the drilling activity, but so could the citizenry.
So Fortress St. Tammany has
gotten itself into a tizzy over a Coke bottle. We’ll have to see whether they
find a way to throw it back or have the histrionics shift into overdrive if
they can’t.
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