ERIE — Angela Waldrop was cooking Thanksgiving dinner when the rumbling sound from the drill rig just beyond her backyard started. Soon the vibrations were making a plate on her kitchen table dance. The round-the-clock noise from the Encana Corp. drill site near her Weld County subdivision rattled windows and left many of Waldrop’s neighbors sleep-deprived for weeks.
“The noise was like a high-power generator, but it was the vibrations that really took a toll,” said Waldrop, 38, who lives with her husband and two daughters, ages 2 and 4, in a home about 700 feet from the well site. “They just never stopped.”
The state has issued nearly 5,000 Front Range drilling permits in the past two years — most in Weld County.
Powered by the ability to drill 2-mile-long horizontal wells and release oil from hard shale with hydrofracturing, or “fracking,” drilling rigs are pushing closer to homes.
At the same time, suburbs are sprawling onto the plains — the six Front Range counties where drilling has occurred added nearly 105,000 residents between 2010 and 2013 — and at the edges, houses and drill rigs collide.
In some communities, such as Lafayette and Fort Collins, the clash has led to drilling bans and industry lawsuits to overturn them. In others grassroots groups are opposing drilling projects.
Local governments, such as Erie, have sought to address residents’ concerns, and drillers are searching for ways to limit their impact. Ultimately, whether communities and drillers coexist or remain in conflict depends on whether they can find some common ground.
“Oil and gas drilling is part of our town,” said Erie Mayor Tina Harris. “But it has to be done right.”
An oil and gas task force created by Gov. John Hickenlooper is trying to come up with recommendations for state rules or laws to aid the effort.
The task force was part of a compromise Hickenlooper crafted to keep two citizen-backed initiatives off the November ballot that would have bolstered local control of drilling and required rigs be 2,000 feet from homes — four times the state setback.
The panel’s report is due Feb. 27.
Perhaps no story underscores the conflicts and the challenges the governor’s task force faces than that of Erie, where the drilling boom and the housing boom are meeting head-on.
The town, 27 miles north of Denver, has struggled for years to find ways to manage oil and gas development.
“This is extremely frustrating,” said Mayor Harris, 40, a middle school teacher. “We have no control over something in our backyard. And when something goes wrong, there is nothing we can do to fix it.”
For 27 days, the residents of the Vista Ridge development suffered with noise and vibrations so fierce they drew violation notices from the state.
Once drilling hit the oil and-gas bearing zone, the well had to be finished for safety reasons, even as the sound problems continued.
“That was my fault,” Matt Lepore, the executive director of the Colorado’s oil and gas commission, told trustees in January. “I shouldn’t have let it get that far.”
Just before Christmas, with the well drilled, Encana moved to shut the Pratt site down. “We decided we wouldn’t continue until we could deal with the sound problems,” Jessica Cavens, an Encana senior manager, said.
“It didn’t go as planned,” she said. “We tried hard to fix it.”
* * *
The story of the wells next to Vista Ridge began months earlier when Encana sought town permits to drill.
Encana officials appeared at a packed town trustees meeting in August to get local permits to drill.
The plan was to put 13 wells on two pads between the Vista Ridge and Vista Pointe developments, home to nearly 7,000 people.
Encana already had its drilling permits from the state and an agreement with the landowner, Susan Pratt, for use of the site.
Miracle Pfister, Encana’s regulatory manager, said that the oil, gas and wastewater would be carried by underground pipelines to a $46 million centralized processing facility 1½ miles away, reducing truck traffic, tanks and the size of the well pads.
That technique is used by several Front Range drillers, including Anadarko Petroleum Corp., which said it has laid 336 miles of pipeline.
Encana also told the Erie board it was going to use a cleaner natural-gas-powered rig.
Still, many residents urged the trustees to block the drilling.
Waldrop told the board it was risky for an industrial activity prone to leaks, fires and accidents to be near homes.
Waldrop’s neighbor Joe Zintel, 75, called locating a drilling rig behind his house the equivalent to “a rock concert light show,” which he noted the town would not permit.
But Harris told the crowd that under the town’s ordinance there were only four elements they could consider: did the setbacks comply with law, fencing, road access and the color of tanks.
The Pratt site covers 40 acres and Mayor Pro Tem Mark Gruber asked why the drilling pad couldn’t be moved farther from homes.
The drill site was where the landowner, the Pratt family, wanted it, Encana officials replied.
In December, Pratt filed a preliminary sketch plan to develop nearly 600 homes around oil and gas well pads.
“We have tried to be respectful of the neighbors,” said Melinda Hammers, a member of the Pratt family. “We hope the town of Erie will be respectful of our property rights.”
Encana has been a good partner and will work to resolve the problems, Hammers said.
“This is the problem local officials face,” said Gruber, 63, a retired corporate executive. “The oil companies negotiate an agreement with a landowner, get their permits from the state and then come to the community.”
“We come in late and end up picking up the pieces when there is very little we can do,” he said.
To drill, a company needs mineral leases and a surface-use agreement with a landowner, said Doug Hock, an Encana spokesman.
The agreements are private, but they include a signing bonus and a percentage of the oil and gas sales from the property.
For use of the surface, drillers are paying an average of $25,000 for each horizontal well on the land, said attorneys who represent landowners in these deals.
Landowners often have a say on where and when wells are drilled.
“Sometimes what the landowner wants and what the town wants are different and we are caught in the middle,” Hock said.
While Encana and the Pratts held fast on the well location next to Vista Ridge, some operators faced with local protests look for alternative sites.
In Greeley, protests followed a plan by Synergy Resources Corp. to drill 16 wells on a site surrounded by homes, Northridge High School and an apartment building.
Platteville-based Synergy purchased a site 2 miles away for $2 million from which it will drill 12 horizontal wells to the oil reserve, Synergy’s chief operating officer Craig Rasmuson said.
That would leave only four wells to be drilled on the city site.
“There is a changing attitude in the industry,” Rasmuson said. “There is an effort to work with communities and other operators.”
The Greeley planning department has not approved Synergy’s plan, and some residents say even four wells and tanks near the apartment house are too many.
“There are some sites that are too close to homes and just can’t be remediated,” said Sara Barwinski, a member of the community group Weld Air and Water.
In Erie, the trustees had no choice but to approve the Pratt site well permits.
“Our hands are tied,” said trustee Waylon Schutt before he cast his vote.
The board then unanimously voted to renegotiate the voluntary operating agreements reached in 2012 with Calgary, Alberta-based Encana and Anadarko, based in The Woodlands, Texas — the town’s two biggest operators.
The goal, trustees said, was to add more protections for residents in the memorandums of understanding, or MOUs.
While negotiating an agreement is voluntary, once signed they can become part of the state drilling permit requirements.
“The oil and gas companies have to give up a little to the people who live there,” Gruber said.
* * *
The calls and complaints from Vista Ridge residents began pouring in to Erie officials and the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission right after Thanksgiving, and they kept coming.
“It just blew-up in e-mails, on social media and phone calls,” Erie trustee Jennifer Carroll said.
A Facebook page was started by one resident and became a clearinghouse for complaints and information. It has 378 members.
Zintel’s home was closest to the 128-foot high, light-studded rig, which was surrounded by a 30-foot, brown cloth sound wall.
“It just pounded your head,” said Zintel, who bought a sound meter and recorded 80-decibel levels in his backyard, about 680 feet from the rig.
Zintel and his wife, Rebecca, covered their bedroom windows with 4-inch thick upholstery foam. “That dampened the noise some,” he said.
An oil and gas commission inspector came out and took sound readings inside Tiffany Taskey’s house and also found the noise above the 65-decibel limit, she said.
The low-level vibrations spread as far as 2,500 feet from the site, where they rattled the bathroom ceiling fan in Robert Nichols’ home on Indian Paint Brush Way.
“We were getting inundated with citizen complaints, but all we could do was call the COGCC,” Mayor Harris said.
Under state law, the oil and gas commission regulates drilling, including where rigs are and their operation.
Local governments, under their land-use powers, can regulate things such as traffic access and landscaping, but not location.
This has been one the biggest points of contention between local officials and the state and industry.
“We don’t have the right to say ‘Not here’,” Erie’s Gruber said.
Lepore concedes that large-scale drilling is creating pressures on suburban communities that are not met under the existing regulatory system.
In testimony to the oil and gas task force, Lepore suggested a comprehensive planning process involving the state, industry, local government and the community before state permits are issued.
But if there is a dispute on siting a rig, the state has the final say, Lepore said.
When the city of Longmont adopted its own oil and gas ordinance in 2012, including a ban on drilling in residential areas, it was sued by the state and the industry for exceeding its authority.
As part of the Hickenlooper ballot compromise, the state’s lawsuit against Longmont was dropped.
* * *
After Vista Ridge residents started complaining, inspectors were sent to Erie eight times between Dec. 1 and Dec. 22, Lepore said.
Four sound surveys also were taken by the agency.
Encana was found in violation of the noise limit, but there is no penalty in the state rules for exceeding the standard.
“We are going to change that,” Lepore said.
Under the rules, as long Encana was trying to remedy the problem the company could keep going.
“We thought we’d identified the problem as the shale shakers, and we sound-proofed them,” said Encana’s Cavens.
“But that wasn’t it,” she said. “And then we thought it was the generators, and we sound-proofed them.”
The noise continued. Another layer was added to the sound wall.
“It was louder than we expected,” Cavens said. “We’re still trying to figure it out.” Encana said it spent $250,000 trying to remedy the problem.
This is little comfort to Vista Ridge residents.
“The state has regulations it didn’t enforce,” Zintel said. “The town has an MOU with Encana, which turned out to be unenforceable. So it went on and on.”
* * *
The agreements with Encana and Anadarko that Zintel criticized were the product of Erie’s first dust-up with oil and gas drilling when Encana announced it was going to drill eight wells between Red Hawk and Erie elementary schools.
More than 100 people were at the trustees’ January 2012 meeting demanding the town block the plan.
“This is when we had to start educating ourselves around oil and gas,” Gruber said.
In March 2012, the trustees passed a one-year drilling moratorium to give Erie time to negotiate agreements with Encana and Anadarko that included noise standards and the use of vapor recovery units to cut air pollutants up to 98 percent.
“At the time it was cutting-edge,” Gruber said. “But now many of the things in the MOU have become standard in the industry.”
Erie was the first community to negotiate this type of agreement. ” Erie was a pioneer,” the oil and gas commission’s Lepore said. Since then 11 other towns and counties have used the approach.
Once the agreements were struck, Erie rescinded its drilling moratorium in August 2012. Encana went ahead and drilled across the street from the Red Hawk Elementary.
* * *
Driving west into Erie from Interstate 25, signs for new subdivisions, one after another, pop into view — Collier Hills, Flatiron Meadows, Sunwest.
In the past three years the town, which straddles Boulder and Weld counties, has issued an average of 229 home building permits a year.
” It is a strong market, said Jon Lee, executive vice president of Boulder-based Community Development Group which is building five subdivisions in Erie.
“It is an easy commute to Boulder or Denver, and you can get a nice home at a decent price,” Lee said.
Homes in Lee’s Erie developments start in “the low $300,000s.”
“It draws a lot of families,” Lee said. “It still has a small-town feel.”
The town’s median age is 36, and the median income $107,000.
“So many people moved to Erie to raise their families,” said Vista Ridge resident Taskey, 41, who has daughters ages 9 and 12.
“There is a lot to like: mountain views, open space,” Taskey said. “Unfortunately the oil and gas industry loves it out here too.”
Erie sits on the edge of the Denver-Julesburg Basin, where fracking has unlocked oil from the Niobrara shale.
In 2014, 56 percent of the drilling permits issued in Colorado were in the basin, according to state data.
“All of us would rather not have oil and gas around us,” Lee said. “But the mineral rights are owned by others, so we have to deal with it.”
In Colorado, the ownership of the surface and the minerals is often split, and much of the conflict is fueled by mineral owners trying to get at their reserves.
Near Berthoud, 36 homeowners, who still have their mineral rights, hired a lawyer and negotiated with Denver-based Extraction Oil and Gas.
The Larimer County homeowners were able to get Extraction to move its proposed well farther from homes.
“Our relationship with the industry has been bumpy but satisfying,” said Mark Parsons, 63, one of the Larimer County landowners.
In most Front Range towns, such as Erie and Windsor, homeowners do not hold those mineral rights.
“Getting the gas wells drilled before the houses are built, that is a major focus,” Lee said.
If the wells come first, they can be screened, landscaped and integrated into open space, Lee said. More importantly, a homebuyer can decide whether or not to live next to a well.
“There are a lot of people who aren’t offended by a gas well,” Lee said. “It makes it a different buyer pool, but we haven’t seen a significant change in values of houses backing on to a well.”
In the 1990s Erie was still a remnant of an old coal mining town with unpaved streets and 1,200 residents. Today it has 21,500 residents, with plans to reach 40,000 in the next decade.
“We’ve planned,” Mayor Harris said. “We are ready for growth. We have to figure out how to do it around oil and gas.”
* * *
In January, the Erie trustees received the final draft of a renegotiated MOU with Encana.
“It didn’t have much of what we wanted,” said trustee Carroll, a 28-year-old electrical engineer. “There wasn’t much support for it on the board.”
In place of voting on the memorandum, the board decided to vote on a one-year moratorium.
The goal was to buy time to renegotiate the MOUs, overhaul the town’s drilling ordinance and await the recommendations of the governor’s task force.
“Since we negotiated the MOUs (in 2012) the game has changed,” Gruber said. “We are now looking at horizontal drilling and well pads of as many as a dozen wells instead of three of four.”
The result is that drilling can go on in people’s backyards for months instead of a few weeks, Gruber said.
And while Erie was an MOUs pioneer, other communities have pushed farther in seeking local controls.
In 2013, the city of Broomfield signed an agreement with the local driller, Denver-based Sovereign Oil Co., that goes beyond state rules for air quality, water quality and safety.
Broomfield also updated its oil and gas ordinance, including the right to inspect well operations. The city hired its first inspector Feb. 2.
The city of Brighton is drafting an oil and gas ordinance that will increase local protections.
When Brighton passed a four-month moratorium to work on the ordinance last March, oil industry workers boycotted local business. A month later the moratorium was repealed, as local businesses protested.
“We are working diligently with the oil and gas commission and the industry to get everything right, so that things are agreeable,” said Brighton Mayor Richard McLean.
As word of the proposed Erie moratorium spread, Encana filed an additional nine permit applications.
It was all about protecting interests, Jason Oates, Encana’s manager of regulatory affairs, explained at a board meeting.
“You have to protect yours; we have to protect ours,” Oates said.
In the weeks running up to the vote, two industry-financed groups, Coloradans for Responsible Energy and Protect Colorado, launched door-to-door canvassing operations in Erie lobbying against the moratorium.
The trustees said a national industry group bombarded them with spam e-mails and phone calls.
Mayor Harris said the industry onslaught was “disrespectful.” Trustee Scott Charles called it “bullying.”
The board voted 4-3 on Jan. 26 not to impose a moratorium. By then Encana and Anadarko were willing to renegotiate the agreements. Encana said it would put the nine permits it had filed on hold.
“The threat of the moratorium improved our negotiating position,” Gruber said.
Among the possible elements raised by trustees are 1,000-foot setbacks of rigs from homes, use of quieter electric rigs, enhanced air pollution controls and monitoring and getting to participate in the negotiations between landowners and drillers.
The board has a meeting slated for Feb. 17 to decide the elements to be sought in the MOU.
“When you are drilling in the middle of Weld County, no one cares,” Carroll said. “But when you are drilling where people live, the rules of the game have to change.”
* * *
Encana has consulted acoustical experts from Japan to Israel about the noise, Cavens said. “We still don’t know what caused it,” she said.
“Our goal is always to get in and out as quickly as possible and mitigate the impacts,” she said. “But you are not going to have an oil and gas operation that you don’t know is happening.”
The oil and gas commission will require Encana to drill several preliminary wells at the Pratt site without problems before allowing the company to again drill deep enough to produce oil, Lepore said.
Cavens said Encana won’t go back to the Vista Ridge site until it has solved the noise problem.
“But you know,” Waldrop said, “they are coming back.”
Mark Jaffe: 303-954-1912, mjaffe@denverpost.com or twitter.com/bymarkjaffe
MANAGING THE BOOM – a 3-part Denver Post Special Report:
Day 1: Colorado’s housing and oil and gas booms are colliding in Front Range communities
Day 2: Energy and agriculture exist on top of one another, leading to a nuanced relationship
Day3: Towns have reaped economic benefits but worry about changes to their small town life
