Around 11:25 PM I woke from a dead sleep to a huge boom that turned into a loud rumble – the boom was so strong I could feel the vibrations inside the house. I threw open the back door and headed into the backyard – the sound was coming directly from behind our backyard.
Where oh where could this noise be coming from? The well about 400 feet directly behind us. Or any of the one of the 9 wells within 1/2 mile of our house. Could it be the compression station 800 feet from our house. Or the 7-acre massive industrial waste/gas processing facility across the way?
I suddenly feel so safe.
Not.
It’s now around 12:30AM and I’m just getting off the phone with TCEQ. Got 7 minutes you want to waste? I’m not sure if I’m doing it right or not, but please feel free to chime in on the complaint process. Rest assured the town police will be getting a call from me first thing in the morning – I think they are going to want to know about this.
At 1:09 AM I received a call from the TCEQ inspector and she was in the area, she arrived at our house by 1:15AM with a VOC detector. By this time we could smell some faint emissions, she described it as a flea dip smell (and we don’t dip our dogs), but her equipment didn’t pick up anything significant. She listened to the audio recording and inspected for a few minutes. I am fairly impressed with the middle-of-the-night response time and the inspector was very nice and thorough. She’s going to call me back in the morning and let me know if she found anything. I’ll keep you updated.
Now, I’m going to take some aspirin and try and get the dogs settled down so I can get back to sleep. Donkey didn’t like the VOC machine – I guess he took it for one of those very scary things called vacuum cleaners.
Maybe they decided to do a “blow down” of their equipment. But, some of these facilities run without anyone there, and something could have went wrong.
And, some of these fracking companies are so convinced of their plant’s safety they don’t bother to give out emergency numbers to call if the equipment goes crazy. It’s been seen on Sharon’s blog before.
you should ask her to put that VOC machine in the patch. I’ll be she would get some results there.
Oh Susan, You’ve been through and continue to go through so much. I don’t know what to say.
WTF?! I can’t believe the horror.
Susan, I can not believe all you are enduring. This is awful! I admire your tenacity and courage.
Susan, I live near a gas well, and the whole block heard a loud boom one evening. To this day, one one could tell us what caused that explosive sound. I feel for you and can relate to your phone conversation with TCEQ. I called them out this weekend for an odor complaint, and three nights ago the workers at the well site woke me up at 3:30 a.m. out of a deep sleep with banging and clanging sounds and loud work trucks. Interestingly enough, they were found to be in compliance with the City regarding sound levels. I think this is too big to fight. Perhaps we all need to move away and start a new chapter. But if you feel the call to fight, I applaud you. Don’t give up.