Slick Water by Andrew Nikiforuk

Author:Andrew Nikiforuk
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-1-77164-077-0
Publisher: Greystone Books
Published: 2015-08-17T16:00:00+00:00

TEN

The Police Come Calling

LONG BEFORE THE Alberta government officially dismissed the methane contamination of water wells as a natural event, Jessica Ernst had decided to sue. The EUB’s 2005 banishment letter convinced her of that costly necessity. Someone, she thought, had to hold “these hideous men” accountable. “What are they hiding, and how many people are they treating this way?” she wondered. Originally, she had planned to sue over the compressor noise. Now that she had stumbled upon the cover-up of widespread water contamination, she felt emboldened to go further.

Ernst had no doubts about who she’d have to sue: the two regulators who worked for the Alberta government, one of North America’s most powerful petrostates, and Encana, one of the continent’s largest shale gas miners. (The company was by then fracking, or preparing to frack, shales in Wyoming, Louisiana, Texas, Colorado, British Columbia, and Michigan.) It seemed equivalent to taking on ExxonMobil and the Texas Railroad Commission at the same time. However, “if you don’t try to do the impossible, the impossible will never be done.”

Therapy had taught her that lesson fifteen years earlier, when a psychiatrist at Holy Cross Hospital instructed Ernst to banish from her life the idea of being nice. There was only one way to avoid getting caught as a victim again, and that was to stop being meek and quiet. Most of the landowners she had helped were nice, trusting people. Ernst had abandoned that social costume long ago. On many a job site, workers had called her a bitch. The acronym, Ernst would reply, means “Being in Total Control of Herself.”

In her mind, Ernst had carefully previewed the case before her. A powerful company, a pioneer in the fracking of unconventional resource plays, had clearly broken the law. The company had fracked into aquifers at Rosebud with impunity and then diverted water without a permit. Two provincial regulators had failed to investigate the law-breaking. Instead, they had conducted a farcical water investigation that included sampling water from wells with dirty equipment—tainted by gopher shit, no less. The regulators had also failed to follow their own enforcement rules. Rather than penalize Encana for fracking into groundwater, the EUB had attempted to intimidate and punish Ernst for comments she had made about the regulators’ incompetence, both publicly and privately. In doing that, the EUB had infringed upon her right to freedom of expression as guaranteed by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The provincial government was covering up the methane contamination of water caused by the industry that had employed Ernst for nearly thirty years. She knew she would need one helluva lawyer.

For Ernst, the time for restitution had arrived. The cycle of abuse she and other landowners had experienced at the hands of regulators had brutally revived memories of her abuse as a child. The parallels did not rest easily with the scientist. The guilty parties were blaming the victims by trying to shame them into obedience and silence, so that more victims could be abused easily.

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