Gasland Part II Page #10

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of citizens testifying

at EPA hearings, DOE hearings,

DEC hearings, DRBC hearings.

And Sean and Yoko went

on "Jimmy Fallon" and sang about it on national TV.

Don't frack my mother

Don't frack me!

Don't frack me!

BOTH:
Please

FOX, VOICE-OVER:

The anti-fracking movement had arrived...

SEAN LENNON AND JIMMY FALLON:

Don't frack my mother

[Cheers and applause]

FOX, VOICE-OVER:

And we had a hammer.

The good and bad

are all tangled up in this world,

and you almost

laugh.

You never know what's

going to happen,

and I am convinced

we are gonna stop

this frackin'.

[Cheers and applause]

FOX, VOICE-OVER:
But every time

you looked up, fracking was spreading someplace new,

even to Tinsel Town.

Not many people know this,

but there's a thousand-acre

oil field in the center of Los Angeles.

But when oil prices went up

and gas prices went up,

the Baldwin Hills oil field

became viable again.

Fracking rigs for oil were right

in the middle of L.A.

FOX:
Where are we,

exactly?

MAN:
Baldwin Hills.

Baldwin Hills.

We're smack in the middle

of Los Angeles.

Hollywood's that way,

Beverly Hills is that way.

Venice is behind us.

Right.

And there's talking

about fracking here?

They already are

fracking here.

On the fault line?

All through the fault line.

In fact, in one

of their original

injection wells, which is

the way they're doing it--

There's an

injection well here? Yeah.

In the middle

of L.A.? Oh, yeah.

FOX, VOICE-OVER:

Fracking the fault line in L.A. sounded more

like a Hollywood plotline

than reality.

That kind of thing just didn't

happen in California.

It happened in places

like Arkansas.

CYNTHIA McFADDEN: In Arkansas,

some geologists think

the disposal of wastewater

from fracking may be leading

to an incredible uptick

in earthquakes,

more than 1,100

since September.

What happens.

[Chuckles]

This is what I think is

happening in this state.

And when something

goes on and the house starts rocking,

then you'll see it

start moving.

Every few minutes, we were

having another quake,

another quake,

another quake.

WOMAN:

You see all this? FOX: Mm-hmm.

And these are all

active wells.

Now, if I

zoom in here on Greenbrier...

Right.

all of these little

orange dots...

Right.

are earthquakes.

This house was literally

just rocking.

FOX, VOICE-OVER:

Most of the quakes were small, micro-quakes.

FOX:
And how often

does this happen? Usually...

Every day.

Every day.

FOX, VOICE-OVER:

But then a 4.7 put cracks

in the walls of

the local high school,

popularizing iPhone's

earthquake app

with high-schoolers

and knocked the

earthquake lady's husband out of his La-Z-Boy.

And he's a big man.

FOX, VOICE-OVER:
Dirk DeTurck,

a Vietnam veteran,

and his sons' friends,

who are Iraq War veterans,

are having PTSD flashbacks

from the drilling

and earthquakes.

He'd been obsessively

tracking earthquakes on a notepad at home.

DeTURCK:

October up till December.

FOX, VOICE-OVER:

Looked like he hadn't played pool in months.

DeTURCK:

There's, like, 630

or something like that,

in here, I believe.

[Voice cracking]

And these guys coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan...

"Sorry if you made it

through that.

Good luck in

your neighborhood."

FOX, VOICE-OVER:

But it wasn't just in Arkansas.

Earthquakes near fracking

and wastewater injection wells

were happening in Ohio,

Oklahoma, Texas.

This is the magnitude-4

earthquake

which occurred very close

to Youngstown, Ohio.

TV NEWSWOMAN:

Before March, there had not been a recorded earthquake.

Since then, there have been 11.

MAN:
These earthquakes

were sitting there, waiting to happen.

We have triggered

these earthquakes.

TV NEWSWOMAN:
Armbruster

believes the trigger was this Youngstown well

that disposes

of contaminated water.

The water is a by-product of oil

and natural gas extraction

called "fracking."

The disposal well pumps

thousands of gallons of the waste

into rock a mile or more below.

Armbruster says the fluid

may have made its way

into an earthquake fault line.

BRITISH NEWSMAN:

Exploration digging for shale gas deep

in the rocks of Lancashire

has been suspended

after two earthquakes

in two months.

PAINE:

Just behind that truck

are some of the wealthiest

neighborhoods in Los Angeles.

That's Santa Monica,

Beverly Hills, Bel Air,

West L.A.--it's all,

like, there.

FOX, VOICE-OVER:
FEMA did

a study of what a 7.2 earthquake

would do to Los Angeles

along the Newport-Inglewood fault line:

thousands of projected

casualties,

trillions of dollars of damage,

comprehensive damage

to buildings,

bridges, and infrastructure.

But the thousand-acre

oil field in Los Angeles

is far from California's

biggest emerging problem...

so I'm going to show you

a little bit here on the map

where most of the produce is

created in California--

the Central Valley,

central California's

agricultural basin.

Dependent on irrigation,

it's the stuff

of American lore--"Land's End,"

the promise of America.

The Central Valley is

over the biggest shale play in the west, the Monterey Shale.

That could mean hundreds of

thousands of oil and gas wells up and down California.

But there's one other thing

that's in American mythology

and American life

that we know really well--

California earthquakes--

and the San Andreas Fault,

probably the most famous fault line in the world,

runs straight through

the Monterey Shale.

I was starting to add it up...

worldwide energy,

choices about where

it was going to come from.

Flying over the United States

on my way home,

seeing the pockmarks of wells

drilled all across

the Rockies...

brought the choices

into high relief,

right out the window

of a commercial flight.

This is what

it really looks like.

July 1st, the year was up...

and Governor Andrew Cuomo

let the moratorium

on drilling and fracking

in New York State expire.

The decision in my backyard

was now in the hands

of Governor Cuomo

and President Obama.

Governor Cuomo announces

that he's going to let science,

not emotion, decide his policy

on hydrofracking.

In the fall of 2011,

he got both--mounting protests across New York

and 67,000 public comments

on their Environmental Impact Statement.

But I was about to find out

that this was much bigger than my backyard.

That fall, Hurricane Irene came

storming up the East Coast.

It was the first time

that I could remember a hurricane

hitting upstate New York

and central Pennsylvania.

The stream swelled to 9 feet

above its normal level.

We lost lots of trees,

but it was nothing

compared to what happened

in upstate New York.

Whole towns washed away.

Hundred-year-old bridges washed

away in the blink of an eye.

A freak storm supercharged

by warming temperatures,

two words on everyone's mind--

climate change.

MAN:
I don't think

we live in times

that are particularly kind

to objective information.

Well, the hypothesis here is

shale gas is better for global warming

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