These companies are fighting Measure P because they want to ramp up high-intensity extraction all around us in Santa Barbara County. Regardless of whether they use fracking, or acidization, or steam injection, the risks to our local area are the same. All of these techniques use and pollute water, hurt our health, and increase air pollution, and they can even trigger earthquakes. If you are skeptical, take a visit to a Kern County oil field using fracking or steam injection and see what it’s like to be surrounded by thousands of wells.
Nor will this be good for our economy. Peter Rupert of the UCSB Economic Forecast project pointed out in a recent Santa Maria Times article, “Oil and gas is kind of a strange industry in the sense that the employment share is pretty low—less than 1 percent.” And it discourages growth in other, more sustainable, and more job-creating economic development. Again, look at Kern County, which has unemployment higher than Santa Maria or Lompoc. Do we really want that for our area?
California’s state water board recently confirmed that at least nine wastewater injection disposal wells have been illegally injecting fracking wastewater into aquifers that are protected by the federal Safe Drinking Water Act. The immediate and long-term health hazards from this pollution are grave indeed. This is pollution we all now have to live with. There is no getting this contamination back out of the water that our state so sorely needs for drinking, washing, and agriculture.
In our own Santa Barbara County, Measure P would ward off a massive surge in oil industry wastewater. As this pollution fiasco in the Central Valley has demonstrated, the industry isn’t prepared to dispose of such wastewater legally or safely.
Measure P doesn’t apply to current oil operations or any conventional drilling, but it would put the pause on this massive planned ramp up in risky extraction. If it is determined at a later date that some of this production is necessary, good, and safe, the law can be changed. The oil will be there. But if we hand over the keys to our county to oil speculators experimenting with damaging techniques, we could find our water and land permanently contaminated, our property values lost, our friends and neighbors sick, and if that happens, there is no way to go back. Vote Yes on Measure P.
