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Effort Avoid Vote on Fracking Falters in Colorado
Posted by New York Times: Jack Healy on July 16th, 2014
New York Times: Efforts by leading Colorado Democrats to head off a costly and divisive election-year fight over oil and gas drilling appeared to crumble on Wednesday as Gov. John W. Hickenlooper announced that he did not have enough support to pass a compromise law giving local towns more control over fracking in their backyards.
“Despite our best efforts and those of other willing partners, we have not been able to secure the broader stakeholder support necessary to pass bipartisan legislation in a special...
After the Floods, a Deluge of Worry About Oil
Posted by New York Times: Jack Healy on September 26th, 2013
New York Times: When floodwaters surged into Colorado’s drilling center, they swamped wells, broke pipes and swept huge oil tanks off their foundations. The state has counted a dozen “notable” spills stemming from the catastrophic floods this month. Now, as the waters drain east and regulators move to assess the environmental toll, the sight of drowning oil wells has inflamed the emotional debate over the West’s new resource rush. It is a familiar argument here in a state where oil wells dot farmers’ fields and...
In Colorado, Nature Takes a Fiery Toll Despite a Community’s Efforts to Prepare
Posted by New York Times: Jack Healy on June 14th, 2013
New York Times: For years, families in Black Forest, Colo., did what they could to keep the flames at bay. They scooped up pine needles and trimmed low-hanging branches around their homes. They chopped down saplings and hauled dead trees to the community mulcher. But when the fire came this week, hundreds of their homes still burned. As fire crews fought Friday to contain the most destructive wildfire in Colorado’s history — a blaze that has now burned 400 homes, killed two people and spread across 15,000 acres...
Posted in Water Conservation 
Comments Off on In Colorado, Nature Takes a Fiery Toll Despite a Community’s Efforts to PrepareIn Drought-Stricken Heartland, Snow is No Savior
Posted by New York Times: Jack Healy on February 22nd, 2013
New York Times: After enduring last summer’s destructive drought, farmers, ranchers and officials across the parched Western states had hoped that plentiful winter snows would replenish the ground and refill their rivers, breaking the grip of one of the worst dry spells in American history. No such luck. Lakes are half full and mountain snows are thin, omens of another summer of drought and wildfire. Complicating matters, many of the worst-hit states have even less water on hand than a year ago, raising the specter...
City in Colorado Is Sued Over a Drilling Ban
Posted by New York Times: Jack Healy on December 19th, 2012
New York Times: An industry group representing oil and gas companies has sued a city in Colorado that outlawed hydraulic fracturing, saying voters had no right to ban the drilling practice. The lawsuit, filed on Monday by the Colorado Oil and Gas Association, seeks to overturn the ban on the contentious practice that passed by a wide margin last month in the northern Colorado city of Longmont. The measure, the first of its kind in the state, still allows oil and gas drilling within city limits, but it prohibits...
Drought and Economic Woes Vex Sheep Farmers
Posted by New York Times: Jack Healy on December 10th, 2012
New York Times: Since he was a boy in western Colorado, John Bartmann seemed destined to become a sheep man. He raised lambs with the local 4-H club and sheared them for elderly German farmers. His office is lined with paintings of sheep and a plaque honoring him for “promoting culinary excellence” in lambs. But over the last few years, skyrocketing costs, a brutal drought and plunging lamb prices have battered Mr. Bartmann and the 80,000 ranchers across the county who raise sheep — from a few to several thousand....
With Ban on Fracking, Colorado Town Lands in Thick of Dispute
Posted by New York Times: Jack Healy on November 26th, 2012
New York Times: This old farming town near the base of the Rocky Mountains has long been considered a conservative next-door neighbor to the ultraliberal college town of Boulder, a place bisected by the railroad and where middle-class families found a living at the vegetable cannery, sugar mill and Butterball turkey plant. But this month, Longmont became the first town in Colorado to outlaw hydraulic fracturing, the oil-drilling practice commonly known as fracking. The ban has propelled Longmont to the fiercely...
Posted in Water Conservation Comments Off on With Ban on Fracking, Colorado Town Lands in Thick of DisputeFor Farms in the West, Oil Wells Are Thirsty Rivals
Posted by New York Times: Jack Healy on September 6th, 2012
New York Times: A new race for water is rippling through the drought-scorched heartland, pitting farmers against oil and gas interests, driven by new drilling techniques that use powerful streams of water, sand and chemicals to crack the ground and release stores of oil and gas. A single such well can require five million gallons of water, and energy companies are flocking to water auctions, farm ponds, irrigation ditches and municipal fire hydrants to get what they need. That thirst is helping to drive an explosion...
Heat leaves ranchers a stark option: Sell
Posted by New York Times: Jack Healy on July 16th, 2012
New York Times: As a relentless drought bakes prairie soil to dust and dries up streams across the country, ranchers struggling to feed their cattle are unloading them by the thousands, a wrenching decision likely to ripple from the Plains to supermarket shelves over the next year. Ranchers say they are reducing their herds and selling their cattle months ahead of schedule to avoid the mounting losses of a drought that now stretches across a record-breaking 1,016 American counties. Irrigation ponds are shriveling...