“We live on the most precious water aquifer in the state,” said Martha Pearce, Navajo County resident, who brought another impassioned appeal to the Navajo County Board of Supervisors at the July 10 meeting to stop the potential of fracking with regard to the prospective oil and gas leasing of nine tracts of Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands within two townships in Navajo County located three to six miles south and southeast of Woodruff
“I can’t stress to you your moral obligation to the people of this community to start thinking about this and let’s get a discussion going on how absolutely heinous fracking is,” shared Pearce. “One small mistake in the fracking process can absolutely blow out and pollute our entire aquifer. We are going to keep coming back to share our view with you as you have the power to change and we are going to remind you that we have the power also.”
Pearce’s husband, Wayne Pearce also took a moment to the address the board stating that in his research he found that one well can take up to six million gallons of water for the fracking process, sometimes less and sometimes more. To that water is added an estimated 30,000 gallons of unnamed chemicals. “I know that the oil and gas companies say that they will do everything possible to avoid poisoning our water and I believe them, but it doesn’t change the many documented cases where bad things happened to the water after fracking and those stories cannot all be made up. So I ask you, even beg you, to do whatever you can to protect our precious water.”
Chairman Steve Williams noted that a couple of meetings ago the board had asked the staff to look into the issue of fracking and invited the couple to meet with Economic and Workforce Development Director Paul Watson who has a lot of information on the issue.
A 10 day public comment period should be available soon on the eplanning.blm.gov website, with directions as to how the public can submit comments and concerns. The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) filing number for this lease is: DOI-BLM-AZ- G0101-2018-0027-DNA. According to the website, the release date is set for this Friday, July 20, with the public comment period still not noted. The easiest way to access the site is to put the NEPA filing number in a Google search.
