Impacted Resident Testimony

To me, it wasn’t what I planned for my retirement. I didn’t plan to spend 10 years of my life complaining about the industry. But I felt that it was not right that industry can come into a covenant- protected community and drill a well pad within 500 to 1000 feet of five different neighborhoods.

Sometimes the smells were so bad, we had to come inside and turn our swamp cooler off and shut the doors. I mean, it was really wretched. Sometimes the noises would be that bad, too.

A lot of my experience comes with the fact that I’ve seen many accidents related to oil and gas. I’ve been involved with the spills, witnessed a major spill and there is a helplessness because they don’t tell the truth about the magnitude of the accident or the spill.

From a driller’s perspective I can see where this would be ideal for them. From our perspective and all the people that live here, this isn’t right. And unfortunately, too many government officials are so enamored by the lure of easy oil and gas revenues that they have allowed it to cloud their civic consciences.

The company, [Extraction Oil and Gas], has consistently lied about the project.

Oil companies don’t seem to have to be as safe as we were in dealing with their water treatment and wastewater.

The Colorado taxpayer is held responsible if we want to have these abandoned orphan wells plugged, we’re going to have to pay for it. The state is going to have to go in and plug those wells.

Impacted Resident Testimony“Without drinkable water you cannot sustain life…but in this country, people are just totally unaware or totally uninterested by that,” Don Lumbardy said. “Look at Flint Michigan, they still don’t have clean water and nobody seems to care....

In suburban Adams County in 2019, there were 650 proposed wells on 34 sites. 33 of which were located next to homes and schools. Several of them are near my suburban home.

One of the soil gas measurements taken showed elevated levels of methane in a new housing development and near our kids’ newly-built K-8 school.

Oil and gas development is incompatible with the local economy, the reputation we’ve built here.

We have seriously contemplated moving, but where would we go?

I’m currently raising three little girls in Thornton while teaching with the Adams 12 School District. Watching the tidal wave of Oil and Gas operations coming at us from the north is making me consider, for the first time in my life, moving away from my beautiful Colorado home. Living within close proximity to large-scale oil and gas operations comes with daily stress and anxiety.

As residents who do not have mineral rights, we have no say in process, yet we will experience the negative impacts of living near the pad.

It’s important for kids to be able to grow up in a healthy environment, knowing that they’re breathing clean air.

Two years and 1000 volunteer hours ago, the choice to enter into a lawsuit to protect our health didn’t seem like a choice as much as a moral imperative. 500 feet from my neighbors’ houses was too close.

We understood just enough to suffer a lot of anxiety going into the holidays: there was going to be drilling occurring under our property, which is in town and on a golf course, and we could agree to the terms outlined in the extraction company’s offer or we would be forced to become a legally liable partner in the drilling.

Oil and gas development began on the Triple Creek site behind Lowell and Margie Lewis’ home in the fall of 2016. By January 2017, Margie’s asthma had flared and it continued all year. She had 14 visits to her pulmonologist and to her internist over the course of the next year and a half. Due to the severity of the symptoms, she required oral steroids multiple times.

Colorado families need legislators and commissioners of the COGCC – along with officials from the CDPHE – to build a framework with protocols that are tripped when someone presents with exposure illness so that Mothers are not left alone at their dining room tables trying to piece together what happened and how to fix it.

By 2006 we could count over 40 wells that had been placed in various locations in the area. Another boom would occur around 2016 when developers bought out farmers, and oil and gas rushed in to drill before houses could be built.

The consequence is that we are now surrounded by a constellation of wells that have moved closer and closer to houses, schools, and playgrounds.