Dirty Fracking Business

by Peter Ralph

  A widow for fifteen years, Mrs Elliot liked to peer over the top of her frameless spectacles while she interrogated anyone unlucky enough not to avoid her, although a few people, like Len Forrest and Buffy, enjoyed talking to her. She knew all about the goings on in town, but Steve did not appreciate her comments about his courage and his nether regions.

  As he walked around the corner, she said, ‘Good afternoon, Steven. I so enjoyed your article about the Spurling Downs.’

  He looked up at her sitting in her rocking chair. Bugger, why hadn’t he gone the long way? ‘Thank you, Mrs Elliot.’ He fought the urge to cringe. ‘How are you?’

  ‘As if you care,’ she cackled. ‘You purposely avoid walking past my house. Buffy tells me everything.’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘Never mind. I’m pleased to see that you’ve finally seen the light. But why are you still running their advertisements?’

  ‘That’s private and confidential, Mrs Elliot, and something I can’t discuss, other than to say that after the end of September they’ll cease.’

  ‘And not before time. My Arthur, God bless his soul, used to always say that it was all right to make a mistake so long as you fixed it as soon as you realised the error of your ways. Is that something you believe in, Steven?’

  ‘It’s something I’ve never thought much about. I’m sorry, Mrs Elliot, I have to get to the post office.’

  ‘No you don’t. It doesn’t close for another three hours. You just want to get away from me.’ She removed her spectacles to wipe away an imaginary tear.

  He knew it was an act, yet he still felt sorry for her.

  ‘No I don’t.’ he responded, wishing he was nasty enough to have said yeah, that’s right.

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ she asked. Before he could respond, she followed up with, ‘Who are you taking to the mayor’s annual dinner dance, now that your beautiful ex-girlfriend has taken up with that land access consultant?’

  God, he’d never gotten a guernsey to the mayor’s dinner dance before, as invitations usually just went to Paisley’s rich and esteemed, and he guessed he’d only been invited because of the articles that he’d had published in the National Advocate. He hadn’t even told Buffy about the invitation, so how did Mrs Elliot know? He had been intending to try and make up with Bianca and then ask her, having no idea that she and Donny Drayton were now ‘an item’. ‘I should offer you a job as a reporter on the Chronicle, Mrs Elliot.’

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t accept, Steven, because that would mean I’d have to pry into other people’s affairs.’

  He fought back the urge to laugh as he looked at the frail little lady rocking back and forth on the porch. ‘I do have to go; I have to get back to the office.’

  ‘All right, all right; but who are you going to take to the dinner dance?’

  ‘I really don’t know. I’ll find someone.’

  ‘I think that nice policewoman who booked you for speeding will say yes, if you ask her nicely.’

  ‘Good-bye, Mrs Elliot.’ He scurried away, wondering if there was anything that occurred in the valley that she did not know about.

  Chapter 23

  Your Nation’s exposé on the coal seam gas industry was heavily advertised on Channel Six in the week leading up to its screening and those who lived in the rural areas of Queensland and New South Wales were glued to their televisions. Their neighbours in the smaller, more densely-populated Victoria were more laid-back. After all, the scourge which was the coal seam gas companies had barely scraped the surface of their state.

  The program commenced by summarising the havoc that the oil and gas companies had wreaked in Colorado and Pennsylvania. It showed them entering and destroying properties that, under the notional laws of human fairness, they had no right to be on.

  A woman living on one of the properties contracted the rare condition known as Conn Syndrome, a benign tumour in one of her glands, which she put down to bad luck. Later she would find that her condition was directly linked to the chemicals that the oil and gas companies had used to extract methane.

  The presenter said that the perpetrators in Colorado were the same companies driving the industry in Australia: huge American companies like Filliburton, Plumberjay and SK Services.

  Libby Hanover appeared on screen, wearing dark blue jeans, a light blue shirt and riding boots. She was standing on a grassy mound with a drill rig and two gas wells in the background. ‘How would you like it if big gas rolled onto your land without your authority or permission and then proceeded to jeopardise the health and livelihood of you and your family? It’d be bad enough if it was happening in a third-world country, but it’s happening right here in Queensland, aided and abetted by laws enacted by politicians more interested in collecting royalties and taxes than protecting the health, property, water and food security of the community.’

  Next, the program showed aerial footage of the lush, fertile land on the Spurling Downs. The area was defiled with thousands of gas wells. Libby, sitting next to the pilot in the helicopter, in an incredulous voice said, ‘This on land that produces wheat, maize, millet, cotton, soybeans, sorghum, carrots, grapes and watermelons and is a major sheep, cattle and dairying area and the home of many horse studs.’

  The camera panned to Libby interviewing the Queensland Minister for Mines, who was perspiring heavily, and whose incessantly-blinking eyes darted everywhere but the camera. ‘Minister, do you know what chemicals are being pumped down into those wells?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You know what chemicals are used?

  ‘Well, not exactly, no.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you?’

  ‘Uhmm,’ he turned up his palms expressively and shrugged.

  These were moments that journalists lived for and Libby had no intention of letting the minister off the hook. ‘Shouldn’t you know what chemicals they’re pumping down those wells?’

  ‘Well, what I’m assured about is the processes they employ are appropriate for the extraction of coal seam gas.’

  One of the cameramen was heard to laugh in the background and whisper, ‘Gas company self-regulation, the regulation you have when there is no regulation.’ Clearly the producers could have edited this out but chose not to.

  The camera then picked up Libby sitting opposite a tall, gangly man, with receding black hair. ‘Gareth Mumford is a hydro-geologist from Queensland University. He is seriously concerned that coal seam gas extraction might impact on Australia’s vast reserves of underground water.’

  ‘A lot of communities around here,’ Mumford said, ‘are dependent on ground water and the coal seams are quite close to where people are pumping water from.’

  ‘Then what’s the worst case scenario?’

  ‘If it were to happen, the depletion and pollution of the Great Artesian Basin would rank high amongst the world’s worst environmental disasters. Millions of acres of fertile land could be rendered useless and the Basin might never recover.’

  Turning back to the minister, Libby asked, ‘Doesn’t drilling wells fragment the water tables?’

  ‘That’s one of the assertions that has been made.’

  ‘Isn’t it true?’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, wiping the sweat from his brow, still not looking into the camera.

  ‘Are you saying it’s not true?’

  ‘Well there is …’

  Libby interrupted him. ‘You’re the minister but you don’t know, do you?’

  ‘No, no, there are two bodies of opinion. One that says that water extracted from coal seams causes water to be released from the Great Artesian Basin and another that says it doesn’t.’

  ‘So, you don’t know, but you’re still issuing exploration licences. Minister, why are you taking such a risk?’

  ‘I … I’m not, we ha … have a very vig … vigorous monitoring regime.’

  ‘Isn’t it a fact that when gas wells are drilled there are thousands of megalitres of water released that is contamin
ated with saline, fracking chemicals and pollutants, and that this is caused by removing the water pressure on the coal seams? That being the case, isn’t there a possibility that the aquifers and the Great Artesian Basin might not only be severely depleted but poisoned as well?’

  ‘I … I reject that.’

  Libby smiled. ‘So, minister, like your federal counterpart, you reject the findings of the National Water Commissioner. Perhaps you’d like to outline the evidence, if any, that disproves the Water Commissioner’s findings.’

  ‘Uhmm … aah … well it’s …’

  ‘Thank you, Minister. I think that opinion sums up a precarious situation very nicely.’

  A few seconds later she was standing in front of a water bore with a gas well in the background. ‘This bore has been in use for over a hundred years without any problems but since coal seam gas wells were drilled on the property it’s been bubbling,’ she said, nodding to a man holding a long pole with a burning rag attached to the end of it. He held the rag over the bore and the water exploded into flames.

  ‘It’s really flowing,’ he said.

  ‘That’s methane and it can be inhaled or ingested through drinking or eating and it’s deadly,’ Libby said, gravely.

  The man, his adult son and Libby then clambered into a four-wheel-drive and drove to the gas well, stopping about fifty metres from the pad. As they walked through the grass towards it, the hissing became louder and louder, ‘That’s methane escaping into the atmosphere,’ she said.

  The man forced the gate open and held a methane detector next to the valve on the well-head and the gauge flickered wildly. ‘This stuff’s highly flammable,’ he said, ‘and if it ignites we’re for it. I’m getting out of here.’

  They scampered back to the four-wheel-drive. ‘Don’t get in, we can’t risk a spark,’ the son said to Libby. ‘We’re going to push it fifty metres away before we kick it over.’

  The camera panned to an aerial shot of Paisley and back to the interior of the Channel Six helicopter, with Libby sitting next to a dark-haired, heavily-tanned man. ‘Dean Prezky, better known as the gas-man, is passionate about protecting the Fisher Valley and Australia from the ravages of coal seam gas. He bought his little piece of paradise in the Tura estates but finds it under threat from the huge international company, CEGL, which has a licence to come onto his property and drill five exploratory wells. Dean, didn’t you initially support the gas companies?’

  ‘Not really, but I wasn’t opposed to them and I thought that one day they might provide jobs for my kids.’

  ‘You hate them with fervour now. What brought that on?’

  ‘They knowingly poisoned my dams, and my kids and I got very sick.’

  The helicopter zoomed over vineyards and farms before following the rapidly-flowing Blaxland River north. If anything, the valley was even more picturesque and abundant than the Spurling Downs and the gas wells were fewer and more sparsely spaced.

  ‘CEGL’s contractor, Filliburton,’ Libby continued with voice-over, ‘admitted to the environment authorities that they accidentally released wastewater which, as you can see, has totally destroyed many acres of surrounding land. The toxicity of this wastewater can be best exemplified by the huge gum tree directly below us. It has lost its foliage and is obviously dying. What’s really worrying is the dumping of this water so close to the Blaxland River. You might wonder what action the environment authorities and government took against CEGL for this supposedly accidental release of poisonous water. I can answer that in one word - nothing. We can actually see how this gas well was drilled and you can determine for yourself if the discharge of wastewater was, as claimed, accidental.’

  Dean’s edited footage appeared on screen, accompanied by chilling music. Frank Beck appeared on the well-pad shouting at his employees installing the pump and then directing them to lay the black tubing in the wastewater pit and run it through the long grass, where water was seen flowing into the vegetation. Conspicuous was the huge, distinctive gum tree in its previously healthy, flourishing condition. Any concerns Dean had had about the editing vanished.

  The camera panned back to a close-up of a grim-faced Libby in the studio. ‘We were able to obtain a chemical analysis of the wastewater that Filiburton pumped into the environment, that destroyed the bushland and that huge gum tree. The complete analysis can be seen on our website, but some of the chemicals were boric acid which can result in chronic poisoning, hydrochloric acid which may be fatal and can cause severe damage to the skin and eyes, methanol which if ingested might cause death or lead to blindness, and acetic acid which can cause severe burns to the eyes and skin.

  ‘The industry would have you believe that of the total solution hydraulically pumped into the ground, only two percent are fracking chemicals and that may well be right. Doesn’t sound much does it?’ She paused. ‘But what if I told you on average every time a well is fracked, nineteen tonnes of these chemicals are pumped into the ground with fifty percent returning to the surface and the balance remaining in the ground? Think about this. The 40,000 gas wells planned for Queensland could result in seven hundred and sixty thousand tonnes of this poisonous muck being pumped into the ground, through and adjacent to aquifers, the Great Artesian Basin and rivers. And this assumes that these gas wells will only be fracked once, when we know that this could occur up to twenty times before their productive lives are over.

  ‘We’ve seen what these chemicals can do on the surface but what I find really scary is what’s left behind below the ground. In the longer term, where will the chemicals eventually seep to, what will they contaminate, will they poison our livestock or, worse, will they lead to human deaths? Already in the Fisher Valley there have been claims, admittedly not yet proven, that one little boy struck down by cancer before his seventh birthday may have been the first victim of this insidious, uncontrolled industry.’ She paused again. ‘That’s our program for this week and I’m pleased to say that next Sunday we’ll tell you the heartwarming story of the McEvoy quins, which for me will make a pleasant change.’

  The following morning the Your Nation program was front page news in the Brisbane and Sydney dailies and across all the talkback radio stations. It barely rated a mention in Melbourne’s newspapers, being seen as an unfortunate malaise impacting its cousins to the north, but having no direct relevance to its smug citizens.

  Harbrow fumed when he saw what Filliburton had done, not because the environmental effects concerned him in the slightest, but because they had been stupid enough to get caught. Someone had unlawfully trespassed, used recording equipment without permission and had stolen water samples, but he knew that Your Nation would claim journalistic privilege and refuse to disclose their source. He already suspected it was that gas-man idiot, and, if it was, he intended to make his life a misery in the courts.

  All of Harbrow’s power centred around making others rich. As the share price eroded before his very eyes, his ability to push others around and get his own way deteriorated. He’d already fielded a phone call from Phillip Bancroft, whining about all the money that his clients were losing on CEGL’s stock and daring to tell him that he had better get his act together. He’d get his act together all right and, when he did, Bancroft would be the second director shown the door, right behind Moira Raymond.

  Frank Beck was stunned when he saw himself shown on the well-pad shouting instructions at the others to break environment laws and regulations, and was surprised when his bosses took it in their stride. ‘Take a few weeks off,’ he was told. ‘You need a break.’ When he queried them about what the environment authorities were going to do, they said, ‘Don’t worry, the state needs us more than we need it. There’ll be an outcry, we’ll blame a few low-level employees for issuing you with erroneous instructions and then sack them. We’ll give them nice pay-offs, they’ll sign confidentiality agreements, and, when you come back from leave in three weeks, it’ll all be forgotten. The government’s with us, Frank. You’ve nothing to be
concerned about and you’re going to need a break because we’ve got a big assignment for you when you return.’

  Sandi Carlisle, wearing low-cut jeans, a clinging black T-shirt and matching sandals, arrived suitably late at the Valley Wine Bar for her first date with Steve. It was cosy, with an open brick fireplace, subtle, dimly-lit tan-leather cubicles around the walls, and cattle hides over the polished timber floorboards. Steve was in one of the cubicles at the rear. He stood up as she came through the door and looked around as if to check everything out, before slowly approaching and kissing him lightly on the cheek.

  ‘Wow. Didn’t you want to be seen with me?’

  ‘I actually thought it was romantic.’

  ‘Romantic huh? How come it took you so long to phone?’

  ‘I’m not with you.’

  ‘Oh, come on! That I day I booked you, you never stopped leering at me. It was embarrassing.’

  ‘Was I? It must have been subconscious. But I do remember you almost holding my hand when you gave me the ticket.’ He laughed.

  ‘Subconscious my foot.’ She leaned over and gently pushed his forearm. He felt a charge shoot through him and momentarily dropped his eyes to her tightly-fitted T-shirt. She wasn’t stunningly beautiful or voluptuous like Bianca, but there was something indefinable about her. ‘Excuse me! There’s certainly nothing subtle about your staring, is there?’

  The waitress interrupted and they ordered two glasses of one of the Fisher Valley’s finest house reds and a platter of crackers and assorted cheeses. As soon as the waitress left, Sandi said, ‘Well?’

  ‘Guilty, constable. You’re an attractive woman.’

  For the next hour they talked and joked, while nibbling and sipping.

  ‘You’ve hardly touched your wine,’ she said, ‘You don’t drink, do you?’

  ‘You can’t talk.’ He nodded towards her glass. ‘But that’s right, detective. I hardly drink, but on rare occasions I’ve been known to lash out. I ordered the wine because some women won’t drink unless their date does.’