At least 89
Texas landowners have had their properties condemned and then seized by
TransCanada. Eleanor Fairchild, a 78-year-old great-grandmother living on a
300-acre farm near Winnsboro, Texas, also protested the seizure of her land.
She and her husband, a retired oil company geologist now deceased, bought the
land in 1983. TransCanada planned to bisected her farm, which includes wetlands,
natural springs, and woods.
In October, Fairchild and activist/actor Darryl Hannah
raised their arms and stood before bulldozers and heavy equipment that were
about to dig up the farm. Both women were arrested and charged with criminal
trespass. Hannah was also charged with resisting arrest.
TransCanada isn't the only oil and gas company that
uses and bends eminent domain laws.
Chuck Paul, who lost about 30 of his 64 acre horse farm
because of required easements by the natural gas industry, told the Fort Worth Weekly, " The gas companies
pay a one-time fee for your land, but you lose the right to utilize it as
anything more than grassland forever. . . .
You can never build on those easements. They took my retirement away by
eminent domain."
In Arlington, Texas,
Ranjana Bhandari and her husband, Kaushik De, refused to grant Chesapeake
Energy the right to take gas beneath their home, although Chesapeake promised
several thousand dollars in payments. "We decided not to sign because we didn't
think it was safe, but the Railroad Commission doesn't seem to care about whose
property is taken," Bhandari told
Reuters. Chesapeake seized the mineral rights and will capture natural gas
beneath the family's homes. Between January 2005 and October 2012, the Railroad
Commission approved all but five of Chesapeake's 1,628 requests to seize
mineral rights, according to the Reuters investigation.
The Texas Supreme Court, in Texas
Rice Land Partners and Mike Latta v. Denbury Green Pipeline--Texas (2012), had previously ruled, " Even when the
Legislature grants certain private entities "the right and power of eminent
domain,' the overarching constitutional rule controls: no taking of property
for private use." In that same opinion, the Court also ruled, "A private
enterprise cannot acquire unchallenged- able
condemnation power . . . merely by
checking boxes on a one-page form and self-declaring its common-carrier
status." However, Texas has no public
agency to set standards for seizing property by eminent domain.
Texas isn't the only state that has a broad eminent
domain policy that allows Big Energy to seize private property.
Most states' new laws that "regulate" fracking
were written by conservatives who traditionally object to "Big Government" and
say they are the defenders of individual property rights. But, these laws
allow oil and gas corporations to use the power of eminent domain to seize
private property if the corporations can't get the landowner to agree to an
easement, lease, or sale. In Pennsylvania, Act 13 allows the natural gas
industry to "appropriate an interest in real property [for] injection, storage
and removal" of natural gas.
Sandra McDaniel, of
Clearville, Pa., was forced to lease five of
her 154 acres to Spectra Energy Corp., which planned to build a drilling
pad. The government, says McDaniel, "took it away, and they have destroyed it."
According
to Reuters, " McDaniel watched from the perimeter of the installation
as three pipes spewed metallic gray water into plastic-lined pits, one of which
was partially covered in a gray crust. As a sulfurous smell wafted from the
rig, two tanker trucks marked "residual waste' drove from the site."
In Tyrone Twp., Mich., Debora Hense returned from work
in August 2012 to find that Enbridge workers had created a 200 yard path on her
property and destroyed 80 trees in order to run a pipeline. Because of an
easement created in 1968 next to Hense's property, Joe Martucci of Enbridge
Energy Partners said
his company had a legal right to "to use property adjacent to the pipeline."
Martucci says his company offered Hense $40,000 prior to tearing up her land,
but she refused. Hense says she had a legal
document to prevent Enbridge from destroying her property; Enbridge says
it had permission from the Michigan Public Service Commission.
This week, heavy machinery rolled onto Julia Trigg Crawford's
farm. Crossing an easement and into a barbed wire enclosure that separates the
land TransCanada seized from the rest of the farm, the bulldozers and graders are
peeling away the topsoil of a 1,200 foot strip. Hundreds of wooden ties, now
stacked like matchsticks a story high, brought by 18-wheelers crossing the agricultural
land that Crawford and her family work, will be placed as tracks for more
equipment.
On the farm is an old and creaky windmill, ravaged by
time and a few shotgun shells. "But it's still standing there," says Crawford
who may be a bit like that windmill. She's a 6-foot tall former star basketball
player for Texas A&M who is now standing tall and proud in a fight she says
"began as a fight for my family," but has now become one "for the people, for
the landowners who wanted to stand up and fight for their rights but didn't
think they could."[Dr. Brasch is an
award-winning syndicated columnist and professor emeritus of mass
communications and journalism. Some of the information in this column appears
in Fracking Pennsylvania, an
in-depth overview of the effects of the fracking process upon health, the
environment, agriculture, and worker safety; the book also has a broad
discussion of the collusion between the energy industry and politics, and
presents the truth about the economic effects.]
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