By Kate Aronoff
Patricia Nelson was eager for a fresh start when she moved her
family from Louisiana back home to Weld County, Colorado, in 2016. Soon
after, Nelson’s friend encouraged her to come out to a meeting where
Lisa McKenzie, an environmental chemist and epidemiologist at the
Colorado School of Public Health, was presenting her research on the
health impacts of oil and natural gas drilling.
Weld County has one of the highest concentrations of oil and gas
wells in the country — 23,000 within county limits. Its air quality
carries an “F” rating from the American Lung Association, with infant
mortality rates twice as high
as those in surrounding counties. With around 50,000 active wells
overall, Colorado just surpassed California to become America’s
third-largest oil and gas producer after Texas and North Dakota.
“It was a crash course in fracking,” Nelson told me by phone.
Colorado law, she learned, states that drilling operations have to be
1,000 feet away from school buildings, but that ordinance — known as a
setback — doesn’t include surrounding school properties, like
playgrounds or soccer fields. There, as McKenzie would explain, kids
playing and running around breathe harder and heavier, increasing the
amount of poisoned air that enters their lungs and bloodstream.
All of this hit too close to home: As she also learned, oil companies
had just been approved to open 24 new drill sites near her
then-4-year-old son Diego’s school, the kindergarten through third grade
campus of Bella Romero Academy; the drilling would take place just
behind the fourth through eighth grade campus, where her niece and
nephew were students. The decision to drill near Bella Romero at all —
where 87 percent of attendees are students of color, and 90 percent fall
below the poverty line — was made after parents at an overwhelmingly
white school refused to have the same rigs in their kids’ backyards.
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Source: The Intercept_
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