Reuters By Michelle Conlin
Thu Dec 12, 2013 9:46am EST
1 of 8. Drilling wells are pictured in Los Angeles, California December 11, 2013.
Credit: Reuters/Mario Anzuoni
(Reuters) – When Gary Gless bought his sleek, modernist house in Los Angeles in 2002, he thought he had hit a “gold mine.” The world’s largest inner-city park – featuring a lush, 18-hole golf course – was about to get built across the street. Gless’s balcony was set to overlook the clubhouse and first tee.
Today, instead of golf carts and fairways, Gless looks out on to drilling wells and oil pads. The park plan was ditched, and Freeport-McMoRan Oil & Gas LLC now operates 700 wells there – and 400 more are on the way. All the drilling, Gless says, has caused house foundations to crack and swimming pools to start to slide down hills.
Gless, who holds the mineral rights to his land but collects no royalties, would move if he could. But he is stuck.
“Who would want to live here?” says Gless, who says his house has lost at least 80 percent of its value. “I wouldn’t even buy my own home.”
Freeport-McMoRan, part of Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc, said that, for the past three years, its surveys of the oilfield and surrounding communities have found no connection between its activities and “localized claims of property damage.” It said it would continue to evaluate the issue.
The United States has a long history of keeping industrial activity out of middle and upper-middle-class residential neighborhoods. But that is starting to change with the spread of new technology for oil and gas drilling, such as horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.”
The new techniques have allowed once-unreachable reservoirs of energy, trapped beneath the forested suburbs and bustling urban centers of places like Los Angeles, Denver and Cleveland, to be pumped out for the first time. As a result, millions of American homeowners now find themselves living within a mile of drilling activity that they say is deflating the value of their homes, making it hard for them to move.
To read entire article, please click http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/12/us-fracking-homeowners-analysis-idUSBRE9BB0GS20131212
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