“My name is Bob Arrington and I live here in Battlement Mesa. A lot of my experience comes with the fact that I’ve seen many accidents related to oil and gas. I’ve been involved with the spills, witnessed a major spill and there is a helplessness because they don’t tell the truth about the magnitude of the accident or the spill. I might mention I am a professional engineer, licensed and registered. I’ve done analysis of these problems and quite often companies come up short of fixing the problem.”
“Western Colorado Congress was providing support through community organization and working with the organizer at that time is how I got involved. So I started attending some of their board meetings and I ultimately became a director at large with WCC. I could bring a little engineering to the table and business experience.
I think there’s many, many jobs that really need to be done. People in this oil and gas situation, people out in the gas patches have been disenfranchised completely. So much development has taken place on private land because basically a big oil company cannot bully the federal government that well. But they can bully the individual people. And pit them against one another and it’s a real operation. Unless the people know how to organize they’re just helpless to fight back.”
“One of the things my wife last year, had her fight with breast cancer. One of the things that causes breast cancer is pollution. Now to find a direct tie to maybe that spill, or the constant flaring that goes on in the valley there’s every possibility that her cancer was caused by that pollution. Could you prove it in a court of law? Probably not. Could you know that those things are carcinogens and cause problems? Yes. We’re really upset by it too. That’s the personal aspect of it.”
“We have a permanent flare at the gas plant. Because any time they over pressurize, then they burn a flare. It’s about 1½ miles up the valley [from us]. We were on a trip one time and we flew back into Grand Junction and flying over, that flare was the biggest landmark in Parachute. You could see that flare burning, although nothing compared to what they were doing up in North Dakota. But the whole point is, they waste so much gas, if the price is low on market, it would even be lower, if they weren’t wasting all that gas. The rush to production has caused a tremendous amount of waste.”