On Heels of Culver City Meeting, L.A. City Councilmembers Introduce Fracking Resolution

One of the many speakers at was Los Angeles 5th Council District representative for Paul Koretz’s office, Andy Shrader.

Shrader said he was at the meeting because the concerns of fracking reach far beyond Culver City; they affect all of Los Angeles County. Shrader told representatives from the State’s Conservation Department, “If you cannot 100 percent guarantee the health and safety of all 10 million people in Los Angeles County then fracking needs to stop.”

On Wednesday morning Councilmember Paul Koretz, together with Councilmembers Herb Wesson (10th District) and Bernard Parks (8th District) introduced the following resolution to the Los Angeles City Council, calling on the State to place a moratorium on the controversial practice of hydraulic fracturing.

R E S O L U T I O N

WHEREAS, any official position of the City of Los Angeles with respect to

legislation, rules, regulations, or policies proposed to or pending before a local, state, or

federal governmental body or agency must first have been adopted in the form of a

Resolution by the City Council with the concurrence of the Mayor; and

WHEREAS, hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking, is a type of resource

extraction that potentially threatens the health of both the public, the Los Angeles city

water supply and the environment, and requires unconventional drilling techniques, vast

quantities of water, and the use of toxic chemicals; and

WHEREAS, the oil and gas industry has been granted exceptions to multiple laws

and regulations, such as the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Clean Water Act, and

employs potentially hundreds of unknown chemicals of concern; and

WHEREAS, in a study of Pavillion, Wyoming, the Environmental Protection

Agency (EPA) recently documented water contamination from fracking chemicals; and

WHEREAS, fracking wastewater may often be laced with hundreds of toxic

chemicals, heavy metals, and naturally occurring radioactive materials (NORM); and

WHEREAS, due to the volume and chemical complexity of fracking waste,

treating such unknown waste is difficult, making the disposal of fracking wastewater a

significant challenge; and that the disposal methods currently available in California have

an imminent possibility of reaching local streams and rivers, which supply Los Angeles’

drinking water; and

WHEREAS, rivers, streams and wetlands across our state and particularly within

the watersheds from which the City of Los Angeles derives its water supply are

vulnerable to pollution by fracking; and

WHEREAS, fracking is currently causing serious local and regional air pollution

problems across the country, including the release of such hazardous air pollutants as

methanol, formaldehyde, and carbon disulfide; in addition to the release of volatile

organic compounds, including benzene and toluene, and nitrogen oxides; and emissions

from heavy-duty truck traffic, large generators and compressors at well sites which

contribute to smog formation; and

WHEREAS, emissions generated by producing, refining and burning shale oil,

and drilling and fracking for shale oil can result in significant uncontrolled emissions of

methane, a potent greenhouse gas often associated underground with oil; and

WHEREAS, fracking in California may undermine the state’s efforts to reduce

greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020; and

WHEREAS, much of the State of California and Los Angeles, in particular, is

located on top of fault lines within one of the most active and potentially dangerous

earthquake zones in the United States; and

WHEREAS, Ohio has experienced a dozen unusual earthquakes, the most severe

occurring on December 31, 2011, caused by a Class II injection well disposing of

fracking wastewater, which resulted in a moratorium on injection wells in the

Youngstown, Ohio, area; and

WHEREAS, there have been thousands of recorded minor earthquakes clustered

around fracking wastewater disposal wells in central Arkansas and Oklahoma, which the

United States Geological Survey “almost certainly” attributes to fracking wastewater

disposal activities, and a 5.6 quake in Oklahoma which “was possibly triggered by fluid

injection” at nearby wastewater wells; and

WHEREAS, numerous townships, cities, states, and countries have banned or

issued moratoriums on horizontal hydraulic fracturing and waste injection wells,

including the states of New Jersey, North Carolina, and New York; the cities of Buffalo,

NY and Pittsburgh, PA; the Delaware River Gap; and, internationally, in the Canadian

Province of Quebec, Germany, France and Bulgaria; and

WHEREAS, the EPA is currently conducting a study, to be completed in 2015, to

determine the risks associated with this new industry; and

WHEREAS, the State of California’s Division of Oil, Gas & Geothermal

Resources (DOGGR) reports that oil and gas companies are currently fracking in

California and specifically, in the Inglewood Oil Field in Los Angeles County, in a region

which also affects the residents of Los Angeles, and that these companies have proposed

future fracking activities; and

WHEREAS, the State of California’s Division of Oil, Gas & Geothermal

Resources (DOGGR) is not currently able to “identify where and how often hydraulic

fracturing occurs within the state” and “has not yet developed regulations to address this

activity.”

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, with the concurrence of the Mayor,

that by the adoption of this Resolution, the City of Los Angeles hereby includes in its

2011-2012 Legislative Program support for Governor Jerry Brown, for the Los Angeles

Board of Supervisors, and for the State of California’s Division of Oil, Gas &

Geothermal Resources (DOGGR) to move swiftly to place a moratorium on hydraulic

fracturing and on the disposal of fracking wastewater by injection wells until DOGGR, in

conjunction with local and state authorities, makes a determination that such processes

are safe for public health, for the Los Angeles water supply and for the environment.

PRESENTED BY __________________________ ____________________________

PAUL KORETZ HERB WESSON

Councilmember, 5th District Councilmember, 10th District

__________________________

BERNARD PARKS

Councilmember, 8th District

SECONDED BY _____________________