'Boom!' As Gas Drilling Expands In Tarrant County, East Fort Worth Residents Say They're Paying The Price

Arlington TX

06 March, 2022

6:01 PM

Description

By Haley Samsel and Rachel Behrndt, Fort Worth Report March 6, 2022 The second Teena James stepped outside on Feb. 28, she could see clouds of black smoke filling the clear sky.It was no mystery where the exhaust was coming from: the natural gas drilling site just down the block from James' home, where only a road and a 6-month-old wall stand between residents and fracking. Although the Mount Tabor drill site has stood on 3020 Village Creek Road for more than a decade, TEP Barnett – the Fort Worth branch of French energy giant TotalEnergies – began drilling again in January, this time creating four new gas wells. Loud booms filled east Fort Worth's Stop Six neighborhood at all hours of the night, according to James and other homeowners, and the machines extracting gas from the ground never seemed to turn off. "When they first came in, that's all you were going to hear," said Dereck Collins, whose home is just a few hundred feet from the TEP Barnett property. "Boom! We used to hear this all night. Boom! You can feel it." To read the full article, click here. Fort Worth Report is a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization that produces factual, in-depth journalism about city and county government, schools, healthcare, business, and arts and culture in Tarrant County. Always free to read; subscribe to newsletters, read coverage or support our newsroom at fortworthreport.org.