City on Track to Ban Fracking

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Category: Community News
Published on Friday, 11 April 2014 16:26
Written by Carla Pineda
Los Angeles is on track to join the growing number of California cities to enact a fracking moratorium. Local activists motivated by the Murphy Drill Site in the West Adams community are urging the community to call their elected officials and push for a final moratorium.

The city council voted unanimously in favor of a moratorium on March 28 at a city council meeting that had a huge presence from West Adams residents who support a ban. Now the city attorney will draft the language that will be included in the final fracking suspension that is due back to the city council.

This phase is where residents need to get involved, said Donna Ann Ward, resident of Jefferson Park and a leader of CoWatchingOilLA, a group formed to stop drilling in West Adams. Ward and Brenna Norton, representative of Food and Water Watch, discussed their concerns with the fracking activity taking place at the Murphy Drill Site at at a community meeting March 29, where they educated residents on the drilling activity and the risks associated to it. They called for residents to express their concerns with local and state officials so any legislation includes all forms of well stimulation.

The growing group of citizens concerned with the activity taking place at the site is taking action at the state level as well. Dozens of local residents have attended rallies to support State Senator Holly Mitchell (D-Los Angeles) and Mark Leno’s (D-San Francisco) moratorium on well stimulation in State Bill 1132. The legislation is demanding “a comprehensive, independent and multi-agency review exploring the economic, environmental and public health impacts.” Scheduled for an April 8 hearing, this bill would expand a previous law that requires independent studies to describe the risks of fracking.

For the time being, community members as well as city council members are finding more potential risks of fracking in their everyday lives. Los Angeles City Councilman Paul Koretz questioned whether fracking played a role in a 4.4-magnitude earthquake that struck Los Angeles on March 18. The city council motion cited United States Geological Survey determinations that injecting fracking wastewater into the ground could cause earthquakes. Linking the tremor epicenter in Westwood to an oil extraction site on the Veteran’s Administration grounds in West Los Angeles. Koretz called for a multi-agency investigation on the likelihood of the earthquake being linked to the fracking activities in West Los Angeles. Another series of moderate earthquakes have shaken the Los Angeles basin in the two weeks after that initial quake.