Oil Company Risks City
Written by: Aron Brown
(Photo: National Cave And Karst Research Institute/AP)
The article: Oil industry sinkhole threatens to swallow city by Bryan Nelson explains how some oil drilling practices are now threatening the city of Carlsbad, N.M. How is this happening? Simple, the oil company has been extracting brine to help with drilling. To do this they pump fresh water 400 feet below the surface into a salt layer and then extract it. This leaves a giant opening, do this enough times and you get non-natural caverns.
If it collapses, the unnatural cavern is likely to take with it a church, a highway, several businesses and a trailer park. Massive fissures currently cleave through town, and one business owner has said that structural cracks have even formed in his store.
The problem has become so severe that they have issued a state of emergency. “It would be like a bomb going off in the middle of town,” according to hydrologist Jim Griswold, who works with the New Mexico Oil Conservation Division. So what has the oil company done in response to this disaster? Nothing, their only comment is that everyone is overreacting. As of now the company, I&W Trucking, has given up its brine operation and moved further down the road.
To even consider that the people of this town are overreacting is preposterous. They live next to Carlsbad Caverns National Park, you know a place full of natural caverns formed over thousands of years. So this is not their first time dealing with a sink hole. It just happens to be the first one to be in the center of the city.
The oil companies have squandered our trust, destroyed our land, taken our money, and now they threaten the very places we live. When will their stupidity end? I understand the need for oil, without fossil fuels to supply us with power we will not be able to build places that will allow us to create electricity without fossil fuels (an interesting predicament if there ever was one); However the fact that the oil companies would do this close enough to a city where people live is an outrage. They were not drilling for oil, they can get brine in many other places but they chose to do it next to Carlsbad, N.M.
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