What do you do, as a drilling company, when you're facing fierce resistance to your plan to build fracking wells next to a majority-white Colorado charter school? You bow out and choose a school in a poorer area, of course.
In May 2016, Extraction Oil and Gas filed a new application. This time, Extraction selected a site even closer to another school: Bella Romero Academy. The student population at Bella Romero is more than 87 percent Latino or Hispanic, African American, or other people of color. More than 90 percent of students at Bella Romero qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. (At Frontier, 77 percent of students are white, and about 20 percent qualify for free or reduced-price lunch.)
Locating potentially dangerous or polluting industries in poor and minority neighborhoods is, of course, What America Does. It is how industry reduces the possibility that residents will have the power to resist a new development or, when constructed, to police the site's pollution practices. There are few chemical plants in America located in million-dollar neighborhoods. Poorer communities, in the meantime, are told they should be damn grateful for the development.
Construction on the new site is now underway, and there's apparently a neat trick in how the fracking company got approval for the site. While state regulations require fracking sites to be 500 feet away from homes and 1,000 away from schools, Mother Jones reports that there apparently is some debate as to what constitutes a "school."
The 24 wells will be built only 509 feet away from a home and 1,360 feet from Bella Romero. And, according to the lawsuit, Bella Romero’s playground and athletic fields sit in between the school and the proposed wells, meaning students will be playing less than 1,000 feet away from oil and gas facilities. (Extraction contended that the site is 1,250 feet from the nearest playground.)
Well, the good news there is that if there is a Texas-sized explosion inside this new industrial might-possibly-explode site, it will only be the kids playing in the outfield that will be incinerated. We're meeting you halfway here, community.
As suggested by the above quote, there is indeed a lawsuit over the new site, though it's not clear it will be successful. You would think that there were enough places to drill in Colorado that you could, with a little looking, find somewhere not directly adjacent to a public school, but no. Oil and gas seems to collect mostly underneath poor communities, but rarely ever under rich ones, and these things just can't be helped.