GUY — I went to a meeting and a fight broke out — almost. For a while on Tuesday, Oct. 9, at the Guy-Perkins High School Auditorium, I thought there might be a fight.
“It’s about to get rowdy!” another media professional exclaimed to me via Twitter.
It was true, and it was nothing we hadn’t seen before.
The meeting that evening was about earthquakes and all of the recent seismic activity near Guy and around the Faulkner County area.
But what the meeting turned into was more or less an argument.
In one corner, we had Larry Bengal, director of the Arkansas Oil and Gas Commission, and in the other we had about 100 angry Faulkner County residents.
They came armed with printed pages of notes, studies and testimonies from others like them who have injection wells near their property.
It’s hard to say which side “won,” per se.
Toward the end of his question-and-answer session, Bengal did look tired.
It was understandable, after he was pounded with questions and comments from the crowd like, “Why aren’t you doing anything to shut the wells down just until the researchers are gone?” … “Why don’t we know what kind of chemicals are going into the ground? Where can we find out?” … “Have YOU felt an earthquake?”
And finally …
“Why aren’t people from the ADEQ and the gas companies here?”
“Because this was supposed to be a meeting about earthquakes,” Bengal said.
The Faulkner County residents are concerned that the drilling, specifically the fracking, is causing the shaking.
Bengal used metaphors about oak trees and chocolate cake to try to make his point, but the Faulkner County residents didn’t seem to buy into Bengal’s comparisons.
While at the meeting, I was fielding calls from a PR company representing the University of Arkansas Community College at Morrilton’s Petroleum Technology program.
“It’ll be such a great story,” gushed Ann-Marie Williams of Mitchell Communications Group. “UACCM has such a great program.”
I’ve been inundated lately with calls about the gas industry, both positive and negative, so I was interested to talk to someone who had actually worked on a rig.
And visiting with the folks in Morrilton was an eye-opening experience.
Jeff Lambert, the program’s director, worked for Southwestern Energy before moving into the education field. He teaches a class that deals with the environmental and legal issues surrounding the gas industry, but the class I got to see was a bit more hands-on with students practicing on a real rig.
I was surprised to see two women in the class I sat in on (or rather stood in on — on one of the coldest mornings so far this month). It’s a pretty male-dominated field.
Student Amanda Camel said she’s excited about a career as a lease operator in the oil and gas industry in the Northeast.
“A lot of parts of the industry are misleading,” she told me during an interview. “People don’t understand geology enough to make the accusations they make.”
What Faulkner County residents do know is that their well water is coming out brown and filled with sediment since the Fayetteville Shale play began several years ago.
The Arkansas Oil and Gas Commission will partner with the Arkansas Geological Survey to research a possible correlation between gas drilling and the recent Faulkner County earthquakes, and we’ll take it from there.
Right here in the River Valley & Ozark Edition, I’ll be sure to let you know what they find out.