$3 million verdict for ‘first fracking trial’

By Meredith Clark

A Texas family has won a $2.925 million judgment against an energy
corporation over damage to health and property caused by fracking
operations.

Bob and Lisa Parr sued Aruba Petroleum in 2011 for damages to their
40-acre ranch and for a host of health problems they and their daughter
Emma have suffered from. Aruba Petroleum operate 22 wells within two
miles of the Parr’s property.

“They’re vindicated,” attorney David Matthews said in a blog post on his
firm’s site. “I’m really proud of the family that went through what they
went through and said, ‘I’m not going to take it anymore.’ It takes guts
to say, ‘I’m going to stand here and protect my family from an invasion
of our right to enjoy our property.’ It’s not easy to go through a
lawsuit and have your personal life uncovered and exposed to the extent
this family went through.”

Attorneys for the Parrs said this suit was the first fracking trial in
the United States. Hydraulic fracking is a process used to extract
natural gas from underground. It pumps millions of gallons of water and
toxic chemicals into well drilled deep into shale deposits and pushes
natural gas out through cracks that form. At least 15 million people
lived within a mile of a well drilled since 2000.

During the trial, Robert Parr testified that his family could no longer
drink the water from their well and that his daughter sometimes woke up
covered in blood thanks to debilitating nose bleeds.

While this is not the first lawsuit against an energy company for
damages related to fracking, it is common for plaintiffs to settle.
Those settlements sometimes include strict gag orders, such as one 2013
settlement that barred two young children from talking about fracking
for their entire lives.

Aruba Petroleum plans to appeal the jury’s decision. At the trial, the
company’s lawyers argued that since there are dozens of other drilling
operations in the area, it was not possible to prove that it was its
wells that caused harm to the Parr family. Most of the other companies
sued by the Parrs have settled.

http://tinyurl.com/m8p5hvm

- - -

Pretty small award for the horrors inflicted on this family. But it is
in Texas, where non-corporate life is held cheap, so the likelihood is
that an appellate court there will reverse.