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Burning Water
Monday October 18 at 10 pm ET/PT on CBC News Network
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On Christmas Eve 2005, Fiona Lauridsen and her three children got chemical-like burns after taking showers in their home. Tests showed higher than normal levels of methane gas in their water coming straight from the aquifer, along with the presence of man-made chemicals. Where could this have come from? The Lauridsens think it may have been caused by the natural gas drilling that had begun in the region. Encana, Canada's biggest gas company, had just started drilling the underground coal seams on the Lauridsen farm to extract natural gas. The extraction process to release Coal Bed Methane (CBM) is called Hydraulic Fracturing, or "fracking", a process by which the ground is drilled into, pumped with water sand and chemicals in order to fracture the coal or rock; and then releasing methane gas.
Initially, the Lauridsens welcomed the added income that came to them from the energy company. But when their water went bad, they turned to Alberta Environment which began an investigation. During that time, water was trucked to each house with water problems. The Alberta Research Council (ARC) looked at the data and released a report in January 2008 which stated that the gas in the water was naturally occurring. The presence of chemicals in the water was left unexplained. The Alberta government then blamed the water problems on bad well maintenance on the part of the farmer. Water deliveries stopped three months after the report was released.
Burning water from the hoseThe end of water deliveries put Fiona and her family in a dire situation, some of her neighbours left the region, but the Lauridsens were not ready to leave everything they had worked so hard for. They wanted answers and this didn’t make the community happy. Rosebud is a theatre town and the theatre lives off tourism and funding from EnCana. It’s a popular enterprise and their latest hit is a production of “Fiddler on the Roof”. Fiona works part-time in the theatre, but her complaints about bad water cause some friction. The Lauridsens have 900 acres in the valley, but if they don’t have water they’ll have to move. Fiona and husband Peter want to stay, and so she embarks on a journey across Alberta and into B.C. to meet farmers, scientists and politicians in her efforts to extract answers and, at least, an apology for their contaminated water. The film also looks at similar situations in the USA where natural gas exploration causing water contamination led in to charges and convictions of the energy companies involved.
Burning Water was produced by Frederic Bohbot and directed by Cameron Esler & Tadzio Richards for Bunbury Films in association with CBC News Network.
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