REWIND: PART II, SAME AS IT EVER WAS (Culture appropriation and displacement in the Best of the West) | Commentary by Bill Keshlear
The truck-stop-diner anthropologist in me believes denigration of working-class culture masked by NIMBYistic environmentalism, appropriation of the Navajo Way by even marginally affluent Americans, and Navajo political opportunists rendered untouchable by invoking “sovereignty” and playing the race card lie at the core of the rift in San Juan County, Utah, provides a snapshot of the social, political and economic dynamic transforming the Best of the West.
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Marvin Hayden Washington survived
the aftermath of a world war aboard an armored cruiser anchored just off the
Russian port of Vladivostok, a global pandemic that killed millions, and the
Great Depression. He worked at whatever jobs came along during the oil boom
days of the 1920s in Texas. (Montage: Bill Keshlear)My grandfather, Marvin Hayden Washington was a soft-spoken Baptist who grew up in south Texas during a period when converts were taken to a muddy creek and, well, dunked “in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.”
He practically froze his keister off aboard an armored cruiser on station off Japan, China and Russia as part of U.S. strategy to contain the Bolshevik Revolution after World War I.
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Much of this report was first published in 2020 by the Canyon Country Zephyr Its chronology has not been updated.
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Hayden worked at whatever jobs came along, including leading a surly mule team delivering ice to sweltering rich folks in Houston. He was affectionately known as “Peachy” because of his lifelong sweet tooth for fruit of the family orchard.
Once upon a time, we harbored a soft spot for his kind as a class that built the juggernaut called “America.” Art and yarns of popular media of the day reflected and amplified that respect.
I still enjoy those stories. One of the taller tales was about the life and times of Gene McCarthy, a larger-than-life role model for many of us baby Baby Boomers in Texas.
From Texas Monthly:
“Remember the time he (McCarthy) made a half-million from a field that all the oil companies said was dry? That’s nothing, once he was a million and a half in debt, so he built a $700,000 house just for the hell of it. And remember the Shamrock opening in ’49, broadcast nationally on radio, when everybody who was anybody was there? And the time the Houston Country Club wrote him a letter saying that, all in all, they’d rather not have him around the place?”
Gene McCarthy, a wildcatter’s wildcatter, a manly man, on his 50,000-acre ranch in Texas back in the day.
James Dean portrayed McCarthy in the 1956 movie “Giant,” a retelling of Edna Ferber’s fable.
McCarthy was a rascal and buccaneer, even sporting a pencil mustache in the style of Errol Flynn and Clark Gable. He was the latest in a long line of Euro-Texicans stomping around, pursuing their pleasure, taking risks and considerable bounty back to Houston and Dallas. They didn’t look back at the havoc they wrought.
Taking cues from McCarthy and other legends of the Texas Oil Patch, me and my high school buddies became part of the vanguard in the latest wave of a continual cultural transformation that defines the Way of the West: from indigenous peoples counting coup versus indigenous peoples counting coup versus National Park “visionaries” (America’s Best Idea?) confiscating ancient hunting grounds and sodbusters and their mounted protectors sporting Colts and Winchesters and snappy Stetsons (our role models were John Wayne, of course, but Gary Cooper and Alan Ladd, lonely, steadfast, silent, deadly, all-American) versus cattle barons versus sheep herders versus drillers, diggers and loggers versus, nowadays, part-time residents of faux adobe, vaguely exotic but modern-y villas who feel entitled to a $100 meal (with a delicate French red, if you please) and Navajoland sunset views served up by someone somewhat indigenous making $10 per hour and living in a trailer 30 miles away.
I’ve been there.
A portrait of white, Anglo, male, middle-class cluelessness: We really didn’t think of ourselves as cultural colonists on road trips from Dallas to Santa Fe. Scott Keshlear, me and Omar Samper in a previous life. (Bill Keshlear)
Skiing and hiking in the
sacred (for Taos Pueblo) Sangre de Christo mountains of northern New Mexico? Check; more skiing, adjacent to the sacred (for Mescalero
Apaches) Sierra Blanca and playing the quarter horses at Ruidoso Downs and the Mescalero Apache-owned slots a few
miles away? Check; wannabe indulgences in fine
art, including Navajo jewelry, paintings, weavings and pottery in Santa Fe?
And even more skiing. Check and check.
That’s why the truck-stop-diner-anthropologist in me believes appropriation of the Navajo Way by even marginally affluent (white, mostly male) but thoroughly modern Anglo-Americans, Navajo political opportunists rendered untouchable by invoking “sovereignty” and playing the race card and denigration of working-class culture masked by NIMBYistic environmentalism lie at the core of the rift transforming San Juan County and many other parts of the West. (NIMBY means “not in my backyard.”)
Take the Bluff (Utah) Arts Festival. Please. (Sorry, I couldn't resist.) A three-day event held in October, the fest has no antecedent. It didn’t evolve organically over a period of years as an expression of pride in the accomplishments of, say, Mormon pioneers, Navajo Way or Cowboy Culture — although those elements are present.
It reflects a transplanted aesthetic sensibility because, at least in part, many of its current residents are themselves transplants. The festival is a sign of culture change; of what’s preferable to the latest residents.
A new kind of colonization: | kÉ’lÉ™nʌɪˈzeɪʃ(É™)n | noun [mass noun] the action or process of settling among and establishing control over the indigenous people of an area • the action of appropriating a place or domain for one’s own use.
Take “Dark Skies.” The nine-minute Vimeo preceded a panel discussion about “the importance of keeping our skies dark” at what was billed the “Bluff Film Festival” embedded into the arts fest. It was directed and edited by Salt Lake City-based public radio personality Doug Fabrizio and made possible through generous donations from listeners and viewers like you. Thank you.
Here’s the promotional blurb:
“There’s a price we pay when we illuminate our cities. The light interferes with our sleep cycles and can have real and serious health consequences. There are a few remote places, though, where you can still find true darkness. One of those is Torrey, Utah, where amateur astro-photographer Mark Bailey has an observatory that he calls his ‘portal to the deeper cosmos.’ ”
“Light pollution” is a thang to some folks in environmentally woke (should I say "environmentally awakened") enclaves in Utah such as Bluff, Kanab and Bailey’s Torrey and operators of tourist destinations who see opportunities in so-called astro-tourism. Others, less woke, see street lights as a source of personal security.
Grandpa Marvin Hayden “Peachy” Washington, or "George" as he was also known to friends, was well into adulthood after spending much of his life until then literally in the dark — illuminated only by lanterns whose wicks were dipped in oil and candles made of petroleum wax — when the Rural Electrification Act of 1936 turned darkness to dawn.
So roll on, Columbia, roll on
Green Douglas firs where the
waters cut through
Down her wild mountains and canyons she flew
Canadian Northwest to the oceans so blue
Roll on Columbia, roll on
Other great rivers add power to
you
Yakima, Snake, and the Klickitat, too
Sandy Willamette and Hood River too
So roll on, Columbia, roll on
Tom Jefferson's vision would not
let him rest
An empire he saw in the Pacific Northwest
Sent Lewis and Clark and they did the rest
So roll on, Columbia, roll on
It's there on your banks that we
fought many a fight
Sheridan's boys in the blockhouse that night
They saw us in death but never in flight
So roll on Columbia, roll on
At Bonneville now there are ships
in the locks
The waters have risen and cleared all the rocks
Shiploads of plenty will steam past the docks
So roll on, Columbia, roll on
And on up the river is Grand
Coulee Dam
The mightiest thing ever built by a man
To run the great factories and water the land
So roll on, Columbia, roll on
These mighty men labored by day
and by night
Matching their strength 'gainst the river's wild flight
Through rapids and falls, they won the hard fight
So roll on, Columbia, roll on
– Woody Guthrie
(UPDATE: A research paper published in 2016 by a student at Carroll College in Helena, Mont., understates the horrific consequences to tribes living along the Columbia River when the large-scale dams – the Bonneville, the Dalles and the Grand Coulee – were being built as part of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Guthrie and most Anglo-Americans were oblivious. If the text of the paper is a bit subdued, its title is not: "Dammed Societies: Effects of Dams on Native Americans in the Columbia River Basin.")
I wonder what Peachy would say about a privileged
few colonists of the New West who nowadays want to turn out the lights to open
a “portal to the deeper cosmos?” Probably just smile. He was of the old school: If you don't have anything good to say about a person, keep quiet.
Meanwhile, thousands living on the Navajo reservation a few miles from the film’s screening might prefer to not remain in the dark. “Among the 55,000 homes located on the 27,000 square mile reservation, about 15,000 do not have electricity,” according to Light Up Navajo. “They make up 75 percent of all unelectrified households in the United States.”
New Bluff contrasts with old New Helper, Utah, a once-thriving railroad and (dirty) coal town 200 miles to the north that had Peachy visited he might’ve briefly been transported to the days when you had to work for a living, walk 10 miles to school and scrape ice off the outhouse seat before taking advantage of its accommodation. New Helper embraces its past as part of a modest economic comeback. Although thin, it has at least a ring of authenticity.
A California-based tourism publication promotes Park City ski tours of dilapidated silver mines that litter the slopes. (Orange Coast Magazine)
On a similar but grander and more sanitized level, the ruins of Park City’s (toxic and hard-scrabble) glory days are part of a niche appeal so strong that walk-up-to-the-window, same-day-lift-ticket buyers willingly pay $189 to glide through time for one day.
Homage to the most economically significant activity in southeast Utah of the past 100 years, oil and gas exploration and extraction, was MIA at the Bluff fest.
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Bluff, Utah, in 10 or 20 years (Pueblo-ish cliffside abodes in Sedona, Arizona)? Current residents say they don't want it, but homogenized suburbanization has already begun on the west edge of town.
Here’s the pitch: “Elevated lot for best scenic views. Walk right up to the nearby ancient rock art panels and cliff dwellings from this lot. Breathtaking sunsets, glorious views in every direction.”
Or chit-chat under the stars for a privileged few, also in Sedona.
Or how about this Southwestern-ish, Spanish-y villa (a steal at $3.75 million) in Sedona?
It’s not hard to imagine a Sedona-ish incarnation of Bluff because of Bluff Dwellings Resort and Spa — “a Native American-inspired luxury lodging property” that formally opened during a ceremony a couple weeks ago. Jared Berrett, president & CEO, persisted over several years in finding financing and jumping through myriad regulatory hoops to prove it can be done. (Hotels.com)
It’s not hard to imagine Bluff’s future radically different from today because this was Sedona in 1952. Unimaginable transformations can take place over decades or just a few years, depending on the “vision” of real-estate developers, their funding sources and simpatico lawmakers. The photo was taken by Herb Ringer, who lovingly documented the post-war West, and published by the Canyon Country Zephyr as part of its series “Zephyr America: A Lens on the Past.” (Canyon Country Zephyr)
The completion and formal opening of the swanky Bluff Dwellings Resort and Spa on March 6 is what an anthropologist might refer to as an artifact in culture displacement and appropriation. I’d call it “deep-sixing” that could substantially alter the character of the town.
If nothing else it marks a departure from the leafy genuineness of Recapture Lodge and roadside funk of Cottonwood Steakhouse (I’d rate the steaks, service and atmosphere there four stars) just down the road, or anything else in San Juan County for that matter. The town is now bookended by high-end motels, the log-lodge-style Deseret Rose anchoring the west end.
And smack dab in the middle is an 8.5-acre parcel listed for $400,000, making it one of the most expensive pieces of prime undeveloped commercial real estate in the county. Somebody’s pricing that patch of sand and noxious weeds as if Bluff were baby Sedona, Arizona. Could it become the town’s commercial center? When (or if) the property sells at its current asking price, the pastoral nature of Bluff could be irretrievably altered.
Jared Berrett (The Wilderness Society)
In a news release, Jared Berrett, Bluff Dwellings CEO, says the resort is about “being true to the landscape, the indigenous people, and the surrounding wilderness. Designing, building, and operating the 13-acre cliff-bound property is a true labor of love. We want to share our passion with visitors so they experience nature in a unique way with uncompromising amenities and guest experiences.”
Berrett’s $6 million enterprise is unlikely to mitigate much of the grinding poverty on the nearby Navajo Nation. The “hospitality” industry generally does not pay much more than poverty wages; employment typically is seasonal.
Bluff Dwellings’ grand opening coincided with increasing public awareness in the United States of the global spread of novel coronavirus, clouding the future of what even Berrett has acknowledged was a financially precarious venture when he sought tax subsidies from the county.
Berrett told the San Juan County School Board in 2018 that without assistance from a program designed to reinvigorate economically blighted areas (Community Reinvestment Areas, or CRAs), the resort which was under construction at the time would become a “vacant project.”
“Honestly, if we don’t get a turning lane,” he said, “I’ll close that thing down, I’ll go bankrupt, and I’ll move somewhere and teach.”
By March 3, the virus had infected more than 90,000 around the globe and killed about 3,000; a real-time tracker reported 143,724 people in the United States had the disease by March 30, more than any other country. The death toll was 2,593 and skyrocketing.
The Navajo Nation, home to a significant percentage of the Bluff workforce, confirmed just under 100 cases, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Already, two Navajo have died from COVID-19, which was believed to have been spread at an evangelical church rally in Chilchinbeto, Ariz., in the northern portion of the reservation, about 90 miles northeast of Cameron, on March 7. There were local reports that one pastor was coughing as he delivered a sermon.
Congregants greeted one another with handshakes and hugs and packed together to hear pastors from around the Navajo Nation. Some pastors who live off the reservation also spoke after traveling hundreds of miles to attend.
San Juan County, Utah, had identified its second case. Both Bluff Dwellings and Deseret Rose resorts had closed. The town’s other motels also closed, as did the restaurants.
Cruising through Bluff was eerie, like stepping
back in time to a pre-tourist farming and ranching oasis; when Anglo-Mormons more or less got along with Navajos living nearby.
Public health officials in San Juan County and counties immediately to the north told residents that visitors pose a health risk. San Juan County Public Health said, “We ask all visitors, potential visitors, and county residents to please stay home. Avoid all unnecessary travel, right now. Avoid all leisure traveling, right now.” Southeast Utah Public Health, which covers Carbon, Emery and Grand (Moab) counties, was more aggressive. The agency closed motels to non-residents of the county on March 16.
The director of the Bluff-based pro-Bears Ears National Monument activist group Friends of Cedar Mesa, Josh Ewing, advised visitors to stay away:
“Our field team has never seen more campers along Comb Ridge and local BLM campgrounds are packed. This has led people to camp in previously undisturbed campsites and impact sensitive areas with archaeological resources. …
“Even prior to this outbreak, Friends of Cedar Mesa noted a growing problem of human excrement in Bears Ears. Due to COVID-19, nearby services at community gas stations and restaurants are limited with many restroom facilities closed — creating even more of a potential problem.”
Turns out, the earlier closures around Moab pushed campers seeking greater “social distance” from possible human carriers of the virus south into Bears Ears country, which nowadays is a relatively familiar destination thanks in part to Friends’ participation in a multi-year, multimillion-dollar national campaign to “protect” the Cedar Mesa region of southeast Utah by creating Bears Ears National Monument. Much of Friends’ funding comes from the industry that outfits those campers.
Ewing’s counsel reflected the consensus of like-minded environmentalists, who personally embrace recreation on public lands and professionally acknowledge its inevitability while attempting to mitigate the havoc:
- National parks are free, but some oppose that amid the virus
- Rangers at risk as parks remain open in pandemic, advocates say
- Latest coronavirus casualty: public restrooms on national forests
- Outdoor meccas are not a social distancing hack
The headline above Ewing’s Tribune op-ed was, “Now is not a good time to visit Bears Ears.” Several San Juan County residents, who have to clean up after those Winnebago-driving, Doritos-munching hordes go back home, responded with a bit of snark: “There is never a good time to visit Bears Ears.”
Jim Stiles, founder of the iconoclastic Canyon Country Zephyr
In a comment posted on the Facebook page of the Canyon Country Zephyr, a publication that’s focused on arts, culture, politics and environment of southeast Utah for 30 years, founder Jim Stiles reflected that sentiment:
“I have to wonder. Had Bears Ears National Monument NOT been created, had efforts been made to protect its antiquities via existing laws like the Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979 (ARPA), had the area NOT been endlessly promoted by the recreation industry and the mainstream environmental community, including Friends of Cedar Mesa (which is primarily funded by the recreation industry), would Cedar Mesa be the crowded mass of tourists and recreationists that it is right now?
“Its constituents are clearly unconcerned about the worldwide pandemic. Instead, it appears it’s simply an opportunity for them to get into Bears Ears for some hikes and climbs, and a party or two.
“Isn’t it finally time that the recreation industry and Utah environmentalists, including well-funded groups like FCM, did a little soul-searching of their own?”
Even a global pandemic did not keep people away from a fragile and sacred landscape and crapping on it. In a strange twist, it lured in more people.
To borrow a line from Pete Seeger about something completely different, “We’re waist deep in the Big Muddy and the big fool says to push on.”
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Many environmentalists (and seemingly most everyone else) are wary of the BLM and its multi-use management of public lands. This image was one of several rotating on the agency’s website to illustrate its mission. (BLM)
Understandably lost amid the opening of a resort that could forever alter the character of a small-town in Utah and concerns of its residents’ related to the global pandemic was news that EOG Resources, Inc. (formerly Enron) had notified the Bureau of Land Management it would pull its plans to drill two oil and gas wells a few miles north of Bluff, that liberal, definitely woke, NIMBYish, even slightly anarchist colony on the northern edge of the Navajo Nation.
“On February 28, 2020, EOG Resources, Inc. advised the BLM that the company no longer intended to pursue two applications for permit to drill (APDs) submitted in 2016 (Recapture 4–34H and Recapture 11–22H),” said Amber Johnson, acting Monticello Field Manager, in an email. “We consider the APDs withdrawn effective from the date of notification. The BLM will not issue a final decision on the environmental assessment for the APDs, as there is no longer an action to consider.”
EOG’s decision came after the Bluff Town Council sent a letter to the BLM in early February opposing the wells. It cited concerns related to possible contamination of its water supply, echoing about 40 comments sent to the agency in 2016 as the application process began to unfold.
“I’ve struggled and struggled and struggled with the conflict between oil and gas money coming into the community,” said Bluff Mayor Ann Leppanen, who was quoted in a KUER report. “But if we don’t have water, we don’t have anything.” She became mayor in 2018 after winning election by three votes as a write-in candidate.
Leppanen has a track record of trying to block energy-producing projects, including a solar farm on land owned by Utah’s School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration, or SITLA, along the highway leading into town.
“If we’re going to have a solar facility here, then it needs to be the right size and in the right place,” said Bluff Councilman Brant Murray, who was quoted in a KUER story last year.
“I’m a little less inclined than Brant,” said Leppanen. “I’m saying really strongly: I don’t want it here. I want it to go somewhere else.”
KUER reported that David Ure, director of SITLA, said the project would generate renewable energy for up to 30 years. For Bluff, with an estimated budget of about $70,000, it would mean revenue of up to $300,000 a year and jobs. For SITLA, the project could bring up to $600,000 annually. The agency sells state land to help fund Utah schools.
“This solar field will bring an awful lot in to them,” he said. “I’m guessing it will be around $500,000 or $600,000 for us.”
Fears of some Bluff residents are reflected in their uncompromising opposition to anything and everything connected to energy development and suspicions of BLM.
Leppanen and others opposed an oil and gas lease sale in southeast Utah last year, suggesting the landscape could be overrun with drilling rigs, new roads and pipelines, turning the area into a “single-use landscape.”
I wonder if they read BLM’s environmental assessment, or “EA” in the acronym-plagued world of the federal government. They would’ve discovered their concerns were addressed —or at least considered — within the 143 pages of analysis required by laws enacted over the past 40 years or so and regulations and policies put in place to administer those laws.
(Editor: Neither Mayor Leppanen or any member of the Bluff Town Council responded to email requests for comment.)
Angst-driven hyperbole of Leppanen and others notwithstanding, it’s much ado over not much. We’re only talking about four wells. “For the analysis of the 19 nominated parcels encompassing 32,067.42 acres, the MtFO (Monticello Field Office) estimated maximum of four wells would be drilled. … Over the last three years, six wells have been drilled in San Juan County. Out of those six wells, only one well was capable of production. Statistically, it is more probable that three wells would be drilled for the nominated parcels (EA page 20).”
EOG’s February decision to forgo drilling north of Bluff leaves questions unanswered. Bluff’s Town Council asked whether BLM had fully analyzed risks associated with the wells, which would’ve used hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” to extract oil and gas. Environmental groups have been critical of the process for several reasons. One is the fact that it involves cracking rock formations deep underground by injecting water (often a lot of foul water), toxic chemicals and sand at high pressure. The technical term is “induced seismicity.”
“The fact that underground fluid injection can trigger damaging earthquakes has been understood since the 1960s, but historically such earthquakes have been very rare,” according to studies cited by the American Geosciences Institute. “The sharp rise in noticeable earthquakes in the central United States from 2008 to 2015 was caused by massive increases in the underground disposal of produced water from the oil and gas industry. Since mid-2015, declining rates of produced water disposal have led to fewer earthquakes in the central United States.”
There are probably around 800 oil and gas operations in Utah using hydraulic fracturing. I haven’t been able to find evidence the process has had any impact on water supplies — at least groundwater thousands of feet above oil and gas targets.
Water wells in Pavillion, Wyoming, might’ve been contaminated with fracking waste stored in unlined pits dug into the ground. It’s a serious issue. Critics of EOG’s proposal, however, did not mention possible problems created by seepage from foul surface water.
In the environmental assessment dated December 2019, hydrologist Ann Marie Aubrey determined that “with the required SOPs (standard operating procedures) and COAs (conditions of approval to drill), surface water and groundwater resources will not be impacted to the degree that would require detailed analysis in the EA.”
Although BLM declined to comment on how Aubrey arrived at her conclusions, they could’ve been derived, at least in part, from the requirement to isolate well fluid from the aquifer using casings (see graphic below); the vertical distance (thousands of feet) between the source of well water, the Navajo Aquifer, and any oil and gas; the porousness or permeability of rock between the wellhead and oil and gas deep underground; use of technologically sophisticated well-pressure monitoring to detect leaks and force operations to shut down; and the fact that it takes thousands of years for the aquifer’s water in the general vicinity of the proposed oil and gas wells to reach sources of water wells in the town of Bluff, according to a U.S. Geological Survey study.
Many residents of Bluff were concerned that proposed oil and gas wells could contaminate their water supply. This graphic illustrates a representative drilling operation in which “fracking” is used thousands of feet below a freshwater aquifer. The graphic below depicts multiple layers of steel and concrete casings required by BLM to prevent drilling fluids from escaping the bore of the well.
Possible consequences of fracking has led to extensive research into the mechanisms, likelihood, and prevention of groundwater contamination:
“Studies of thousands of hydraulic fracturing operations in the Barnett Shale (Texas) and the Marcellus Shale (Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia) have found that hydraulic fracturing operations took place more than 3,000 feet below any aquifers, and that the fractures generated during these operations generally extended upwards for only a few hundred feet.
“A few fractures extended more than 1,000 feet, but in all cases, there were still thousands of feet between the maximum extent of the fractures and the freshwater aquifers. Hydraulic fracturing for oil and gas in most areas therefore does not appear to generate fractures that allow for the migration of hazardous chemicals into freshwater aquifers.”
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Wichita Falls, Texas, the oil town in which I grew up, created Lake Arrowhead in the early 1960s. Civic-minded residents were concerned that their primary source of water at the time, Lake Wichita, was nearing the end of its useful life. It was beginning to silt up.
The site chosen for a new reservoir was above an oil field.
Unease then was similar to that expressed by residents of Bluff now: Is our water supply threatened? City and state officials and various and sundry experts weighed in. Eventually, land was purchased, wells were plugged, a dam backed up water in a slow-running creek and the oil field began to fill up with water.
Although the situations aren’t exactly comparable, the common denominator is a healthy suspicion of the oil and gas industry. Little tar balls rolling onto Gulf Coast beaches for no apparent reason and blue-skies-forever flimflam of official spokespersons irk Texans (It’s a natural process. Nothing to see here). So I asked Daniel Nix to weigh in. His formal title is “Utilities Operations Manager” for the City of Wichita Falls – in other words, the guy charged with ensuring water in that part of North Texas is fit to drink.
Q: Over the past 60 years, has seepage from the plugged Arrowhead wells ever been a significant water quality issue?
We have only experienced one extremely small seepage from an old connector line 10 years ago. It was easily contained with booms and the leak repaired by a diver.
Q: What contingency plan does Wichita Falls have in case of a major leak?
We have multiple reservoirs to pull water from So if a leak occurred, we would isolate Lake Arrowhead and pull from other reservoirs while the repair was made.
I also talked at length with Dustin Doucet, senior petroleum engineer at the Utah Division of Oil, Gas, and Mining. He knew a little more about Utah stuff.
Q: Given what we know about hydraulic fracturing, mitigation technology such as casing and the geology of the area, including permeability of rock layers thousands of feet below the aquifer and the fact that any fluid seeping from the oil wells would take literally thousands of years to reach Bluff water wells, should residents of Bluff have any concerns about possible contamination of their source of water from EOG oil and gas wells?
After considering the question for a moment or two, the engineer responded without exaggeration, embellishment or apocalyptic prose: “No.”
(I never worked the oil rigs of Texas, but was a gandy dancer for a few summers. Laying ribbon rail for Burlington Northern along the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers helped defray costs of a degree in journalism at the University of Montana. And the fly-fishing was darn good.)