CONWAY — My first visit to the new Panera Bread Co. at the Village at Hendrix in Conway came on a cloudy Thursday afternoon several weeks ago.
I opened my laptop to work and lazily nibbled at my half-empty bread bowl of broccoli-cheddar soup.
It seemed like the right kind of atmosphere for some intellectual discussion over coffee about literature or history, or something.
But my ears perked up when, from just a few feet away, I heard the word “fracking.”
It’s a funny-sounding word with a somewhat complicated definition.
Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, is the process of extracting natural gas by breaking up shale.
As much as I strained my neck and ears to hear the conversation, I could only pick up bits and pieces.
The overall-clad Faulkner County man kept saying things like, “Can you believe what they’re doing up there?” By up there, I assume he meant Van Buren County, and the rest of the north-central region of the state.
Their neighbors to the south know that the area has been through a lot, but I think Kirk Reamey, administrator at Ozark Health Medical Center, put it best when he called the community resilient.
“We’ve had tornadoes, ice storms, water and electrical outages,” Reamey pointed out. “It’s amazing what these people have been through.”
When a storm hits, you clean up the damage. When utilities go out, you turn them back on. These are problems that often bring communities together. But when you have gas trucks tearing up county roads and chemicals being pumped into the ground in the name of much-needed economic development, things don’t seem so black and white anymore, and neighbors begin to butt heads.
Most chamber of commerce directors and economic development officers say the gas industry is a good thing for Arkansas.
“No matter what you think of the gas companies, they really have done a lot for the communities,” said Melisa Gardner of the Heber Springs Area Chamber of Commerce.
Chesapeake, for example, has sponsored little league baseball teams in the area.
On the other hand, some research, like the kind shown by recent visiting filmmaker Josh Fox, says chemicals used in the fracking process can be harmful to health and the environment.
With election season looming, it seems every politician has an opinion.
Jeff Pistole is concerned. The Van Buren County justice of the peace (who is making a run for county judge this November) passed an ordinance with the Quorum Court to form an oil and gas advisory board.
Although it turns out a Quorum Court member isn’t technically allowed to sit on an advisory board as he originally planned, Pistole is still working with the group of five others as a liaison to the Quorum Court.
It sounds as if the advisory board is planning on shaking things up a bit. Already in the works after its first meeting are the completion of a mission statement, a public survey
and researching how to put a moratorium on injection wells — the hole that is dug during the fracking process.
Pistole announced his initial plans and ideas for the advisory board at the screening of Fox’s film GASLAND, when Pistole said he never thought this would be such a big issue.
“I didn’t know when I was elected that I would be standing here talking about
fracking,” Pistole said.
Similarly, Fox never wanted to make documentaries.
“But now it’s taken me all over the country,” Fox said. “It’s an important issue.”
It’s drawn people out of the woodwork — even people like Pistole, who says he’s usually pretty conservative.
“It’s one of those tree-hugger-type things,” he said. “But when we’re talking about my water where I live ...”
We’ll see where it goes from here.