Calvin Tillman: Former Mayor of Dish, Texas
Excerpt from “Shalefield Stories - Personal and Collected Testimonies”
Published by Steel Valley Printers
January 2014
Imagine finding your dream home in the country; a place that you can raise your family in peace and quiet, with room to roam, and raise horses to ride. You invest your life savings into this home, because it is the place you have waited your whole life to own. You spend the next several years remodeling, building fences, constructing barns for the horses, and making this place exactly where you want to spend the rest of your life.
Now imagine a company moving in next door against the will of everyone in the area, including the owners of the property that they are developing. On this heavy industrial site there will be over a dozen massive engines that create massive amounts of noise and odor, so the quiet country community that you moved to, is quiet no more. No more sitting outside for the quiet cool Texas evenings that we enjoyed during the spring and fall, and no more enjoying the beautiful Texas sunsets. Now the only thing you hear outside is the roar of 3,500 horsepower engines roaring 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
If that were all, the situation would be bad enough, but then heavy industrial equipment has to remove the impurities from the natural gas that they process and move out into the pipelines with their massive compressor engines. They take the liberty of releasing these impurities in the air around your dream home, which causes a noxious odor like many could not imagine. If the unbearable noise were not enough, the odor makes it so you can not stand to be outside, and unfortunately the odors creep into the house through the vents, so you have no place to hide. You wake up one day and realize that the quiet country living that you moved to, is now a dirty, noisy, and smelly industrial zone. You may as well be living next to a refinery or chemical factory on the Gulf Coast.
If that were all, the situation would be horrible, but then realize that when the odor is at its strongest your children get massive nosebleeds. Imagine the realization that comes when you realize that the natural gas processing facility and compressor station is releasing carcinogens and neurotoxins, and that is what is causing your children to have nosebleeds. Then comes that moment when you realize that you can no longer live in your dream home. To protect the health of your children, you are forced to move away, take your kids away from their school and friends, and give up your dream.
You think that what I just described could not happen in America, but it does, and it is happening everyday. You will also think that there is no way this will happen to you, but I personally know hundreds of families in the same situation. If you live in the middle of a natural gas field, this will happen to somebody, and it may be you. That is unless you stand up and choose to do something to prevent it.
-Calvin Tillman
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