prairie_steppe
Everyone knew Houston’s reservoirs would flood — except for the people who bought homes inside them.
Despite concerns about flooding in and around the Addicks and Barker reservoirs, government officials prioritized development.
by Neena Satija, The Texas Tribune and Reveal, Kiah Collier, The Texas Tribune, and Al Shaw, ProPublica, October 12, 2017
When Jeremy Boutor moved to a master-planned community in Houston’s booming energy corridor, he saw it as idyllic.
Lakes on Eldridge boasted waterfalls, jogging trails and a clubhouse. It was upscale, secure and close to the office. A bus even picked up his two young sons in front of their house and took them to a nearby international school.
“This neighborhood was a paradise,” said Boutor, who moved to Houston from Paris two years ago after his employer, a French-based energy company, asked him to relocate.
Then, Hurricane Harvey changed everything.
As the downpours began and Boutor studied maps flashing on his TV screen, he realized that his home wasn’t at risk of flooding just because of record rainfall; it was also located inside one of two massive reservoirs that had been built west of Houston decades ago to protect the city.
Boutor ended up with more than a foot of water in his house and was forced to wade out of his home in knee-deep water with his 10-year-old son clinging to his back.
He and his neighbors are now coming to terms with the fact that in big enough rainstorms, their neighborhoods are actually designed to flood. And nobody told them about it.
When the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built the two reservoirs known as Addicks and Barker on what was then mostly empty prairie, their chief goal was to protect the center of the city, 20 miles downstream.
The vast basins are dry most of the time, dotted with wooded parks and sports fields, and are contained on their western boundaries by large, earthen dams. During rainstorms, floodwater accumulates behind those dams in areas known as “flood pools” and backs up to the east; how far it goes depends on how big the rainstorm is and where it hits.
That system worked well when the reservoirs were surrounded by prairie and rice fields. But in recent decades, development has encroached from all sides. Today, about 14,000 homes are located inside them. During Harvey, when more floodwater accumulated behind the dams than ever before, 5,138 of those homes flooded.
Subdivisions built within the Addicks and Barker Reservoirs stayed flooded for days as the Army Corps of Engineers gradually released water down Buffalo Bayou.
Grand ParkwayAddicks ReservoirBarker ReservoirBuffalo BayouSubdivisions that contain homes within reservoirsThe Army Corps gradually released Harvey's floodwaters from Addicks and Barker down Buffalo Bayou to the GulfEdge of reservoirEdge of government-owned landBuffalo Bayou watershedTo Downtown Houston →
Some local government officials, like Harris County Commissioner Steve Radack, say they’ve warned residents for years about the risks of living in or around the reservoirs during town halls and other public events.
“It is very difficult to make people believe the unbelievable,” Radack said. “No one ever believed the reservoirs would fill.”
Harris County Judge Ed Emmett, the county’s top elected official, said residents must know they live in the reservoirs — the dams, he said, are right there.
“You’ve got a group that bought homes if not in, then on the very edge of reservoirs behind the dams, so that's pretty obvious,” Emmett said.
But it’s clear after Harvey that it wasn’t obvious to a lot of people. None of the more than half a dozen residents interviewed by The Texas Tribune and ProPublica after the floods say they knew they were living inside Addicks or Barker — many of their neighborhoods are several miles away from the dams.
Several local officials — including Houston’s “flood czar” and a neighboring county executive — said they had no idea the neighborhoods had been built inside the flood pools. Several real estate agents said they didn’t realize they were selling homes inside the pools.
“When I started to rent this house, nobody told me,” Boutor said. “Even the insurance company told me that it was not a flooding area.”
But critics say those officials and developers had to know they were putting people and property at risk.
“They had full knowledge. They knew exactly what they were doing,” said Phil Bedient, a professor of engineering at Rice University who studies flooding in the Houston area. “It’s a huge geopolitical mistake. How are they going to fix it?”
The question of who’s to blame has reignited long-simmering tensions between Harris County and the city of Houston.
In recent interviews, Emmett, the county judge, claimed that the city regulates development inside the reservoirs. But the city’s “flood czar,” Stephen Costello, called that “outrageous” and said the county plays a role, too.
Ultimately, all of them blame Congress. For more than a decade, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has identified a number of major needs for Addicks and Barker — including a comprehensive study of how development affects the reservoirs — but hasn’t gotten enough funding to address all the issues.
No matter whose fault it is, Fort Bend County Judge Robert Hebert — who has a portion of Barker Reservoir in his jurisdiction — said “you can’t take all that developed property off that land. It’s there. Whether it should have been allowed to be built the way it did ... that wasn’t on my watch.”
But now that the homes and streets are there — instead of the prairieland that used to absorb rainwater — scientists, along with Harris County and federal officials, say they are sending more runoff into the reservoirs during heavy storms. That means the reservoirs are getting fuller with each big rain event, threatening not just neighborhoods inside the reservoirs but the integrity of the earthen dams, too. The dams have been considered at risk of failure for years.
As Addicks and Barker reached historic levels during Harvey, the Army Corps sent an unprecedented torrent of floodwater downstream to ease the stress on dams. That caused thousands of additional homes to flood — homes that the reservoirs were initially built to protect.
Ed Taravella, a longtime Houston developer, said he hasn’t seen any credible studies showing that development has sent more runoff into the reservoirs. “Things people say are largely anecdotal,” he said.
Jeremy Boutor at his flood-damaged rental home in one of the neighborhoods flooded in Addicks Reservoir in Houston on Tuesday, Sept. 12, 2017. (Michael Stravato/The Texas Tribune)
But scientists say the impact of replacing prairie with pavement is clear: More water ends up in the reservoirs, rather than being absorbed into the ground. The Army Corps has said as much for years.
“As development continues, we’re going to see more water coming to the reservoirs,” Richard Long, who oversees Addicks and Barker for the agency, told The Texas Tribune and ProPublica last year. “It means we have a harder job to do.”
Long added that the Army Corps doesn’t have the power to control development on land the agency doesn’t own.
“That would require the act of politicians, and they’ve chosen not to do it,” Long said.
For at least six years, the Army Corps has sought $3 million to study the risks that development poses to the reservoirs, but Congress hasn’t approved it — and no local government agreed to sponsor the study until recently. Last week, Texas officials asked Congress to provide $10 billion for a variety of Army Corps projects as part of Harvey recovery efforts.
The Army Corps is now referring media inquiries to the U.S. Department of Justice as it faces mounting lawsuits from residents who live upstream and downstream of the reservoirs. Some also are suing the city and county.
Local officials like Hebert said they never considered the possibility that the reservoirs would hold so much water — until Harvey set national records by dropping up to 50 inches of rain in parts of southeast Texas.
“To be perfectly honest with you, nobody had ever discussed with me the risk of inundation to the degree we had,” he said. “I was vaguely aware that if we got high enough, we could get water in those streets ... It was just something that was incomprehensible.”
He said he still considers it a “unique event” and doesn’t think it’s likely those homes will flood again any time soon.
Before Harvey, the neighborhoods inside the reservoirs had been some of the most desirable places to live in Houston. In Boutor’s subdivision, home prices range from $300,000 to $1.5 million.
But for Boutor, Lakes on Eldridge is not so desirable anymore.
“I don’t want to stay in this community,” he said. “I have to go far away from these reservoirs.”
“Nobody’s in charge”
It’s not clear when local officials became aware of the true risk of building homes within the reservoir basins. Alan Potok, who was assistant director of the Harris County Flood Control District until 2014, said that discussion began after some big floods in the 1990s that pushed water higher than ever before in the reservoirs.
The flooding didn’t reach neighborhoods, but “everybody knew it was going to happen” eventually, Potok said.
Potok pointed out that some of the subdivisions were built in the 1970s, before Harris County had floodplain maps. But many appeared more recently — even after officials recognized that the reservoirs had dodged a bullet during 2001’s Tropical Storm Allison.
Allison dropped almost 40 inches of rain in five days and devastated large areas of Houston — but luckily, district officials wrote in a 2003 report, most of the rain didn’t fall over the reservoirs, or “the damage could have been worse.”
“If the intense rainfall ... had occurred over Barker and Addicks Reservoirs, record flood heights exceeding previous records by five to eight feet would have occurred,” the report said.
The report estimated that as much as 2,000 acres of private land inside the reservoirs — much of it already filled with homes — would have flooded.
But nothing changed. At least 4,000 more homes have been built inside the reservoirs since Allison, according to a Tribune/ProPublica analysis of appraisal data.
Thousands of homes are wedged between government land and the maximum height of Addicks and Barker Reservoirs.
Army Corps of Engineers data shows subdivisions just beyond the edge of federal government land stayed flooded after Harvey’s rains. The maps at left, based on data from Sept. 16 after flood waters largely receded, show damaged subdivisions just beyond government-owned land. At right, those subdivisions on Sept. 3, days after Harvey's floodwaters filled reservoirs nearly to capacity.
Structure damaged in Harvey
Flooding on Sept. 16 Flooding on Sept. 3
2000 ft.Edge of reservoirTwin Lakes SubdivisionGovernment-owned land
2000 ft.Edge of reservoirTwin Lakes SubdivisionGovernment-owned land
2000 ft.Edge of reservoirLakes On Eldridge SubdivisionGovernment-owned land
2000 ft.Edge of reservoirLakes On Eldridge SubdivisionGovernment-owned land
2000 ft.Edge of reservoirKelliwood Greens SubdivisionGovernment-owned land
2000 ft.Edge of reservoirKelliwood Greens SubdivisionGovernment-owned land
By 2015, the flood control district had issued a warning in a new report that concluded: “Addicks Reservoir does not have the capacity to accept additional runoff anticipated from land development activities.”
That report went to both Harris County and the Texas Water Development Board. Still, development hasn’t stopped, although Harris County recently adopted slightly stronger flood mitigation rules in the area.
The finger-pointing over who allowed that development was going on long before Harvey. And there is certainly plenty of blame to go around.
You could start with the Army Corps, which bought only about 24,500 acres back when it built Addicks and Barker in the 1940s — even though the agency knew at the time that about 8,000 more acres could actually flood in a large enough rainstorm.
“There was only cattle, hay crops and a few rice crops out there at the time,” Long, the Army Corps’ reservoir overseer, said in 2016.
So if private property flooded, it wouldn’t be a big deal.
But Houston kept growing, from less than 400,000 people in 1940 to more than 2 million today. And the areas that had been intended for flood control — the reservoir basins and the fringes of Buffalo Bayou downstream — became desirable land for developers.
In an interview last year, Long said the Army Corps has little to no control over development and that its hands have been tied by local politicians and other factors — including the whims of various presidents and congresses with differing views on how much land the government should own and who controls the Army Corps budget.
If the agency could go back and start over, knowing what it knows now, “our battle lines would definitely be different,” he said.
Hebert, the Fort Bend County judge, said he can’t believe the Corps didn’t buy more land back when it built the projects. In the ‘40s, he said the county bought land for the reservoirs for just $12 an acre, or $170 per acre in today’s dollars.
“We can’t cry over spilled milk right now,” Hebert said. “But a lot of folks have tears, and a lot of milk has been spilled.”
Others say the Army Corps doesn’t deserve the brunt of the blame. After all, local officials are the ones who allowed development on all that non-government-owned land.
Those local officials are now engaged in an intense round of deflection and blame games.
“It’s too easy to look back and say ‘shoulda, woulda, coulda,’” said Emmett, the Harris County judge. “We need to find out what everybody’s role was and then make sure this kind of thing doesn’t happen going forward.”
Emmett said because the reservoirs are inside the city of Houston’s jurisdiction, the city — not Harris County — is responsible for approving “plats” that clear the way for constructing new neighborhoods.
“That’s an outrageous statement,” said Costello, the city’s “flood czar,” who said that Harris County has to approve the plats for new construction, too.
Should the city have rejected the initial plats and stopped the development before it started?
“I don’t have a response to that question, and I won’t respond to that question,” Costello said.
An engineer who used to the work for the Army Corps’ Galveston District and often discloses that he “made a good living working with developers,” Costello said he wasn’t aware the reservoir “flood pools” were that large until a few weeks ago, when he first saw a copy of an Army Corps operating manual.
All the deflection makes it clear to Bedient, the Rice University engineering professor, that local government policies need to change.
“It should be treated as a regional flood problem. The city doesn’t talk to the county. The county certainly doesn’t know how to deal with the Corps of Engineers ... Nobody’s in charge,” he said.
“Nobody looks at a plat”
Harris County officials may not have realized the true risks of development around and inside the reservoirs until Tropical Storm Allison. But there is evidence that officials in neighboring Fort Bend County were worried a lot earlier.
Back in the 1990s, when development in Barker Reservoir was really ramping up, Larry Dunbar remembers getting a call from Fort Bend County officials.
Dunbar, an engineer and lawyer who has long consulted on water issues, said officials told him they felt uncomfortable allowing so much development in the reservoirs’ flood pool. So he gave them a few options, he said.
“One option was, don’t allow any development there. And it was like, well, politically we probably can’t do that,” Dunbar remembered. “So I said, another option is, make all the developers elevate the homes above the design pool” — the land behind the dams the Army Corps knew it might have to flood. Dunbar said county officials told him “that may not be practical.”
In the end, over significant opposition from developers, the county agreed to put a one-sentence disclosure of possible “controlled inundation” for plots of land in neighborhoods inside Barker. But the sentence was buried in the plat documents, which are not typically shown to homebuyers.
“It’s not like waving a big red flag,” Dunbar conceded, but it was better than nothing.
Dunbar and a colleague recently filed a class action lawsuit against the Army Corps on behalf of a resident who lives inside Barker’s flood pool.
Hebert, the county judge, said he’s not even sure those small notices on the plats are legal. Anything that could cause property values to drop — and a disclosure that a house is inside a reservoir would fit that category — is a possible governmental “taking” of private property without compensating landowners.
“In my opinion, that was the right thing to do,” Hebert said. But “I think we’re subject to being sued by the property owners.”
By all accounts, neither Harris County nor the city of Houston has required such a disclosure, but Radack, the Harris County commissioner, said he thinks “there should be every kind of disclosure known to man.”
Asked why the county hasn’t done so during his three decades in office, Radack scoffed and pointed to what he considers a more meaningful move by the county: It requires anyone building there to elevate homes six inches higher than Fort Bend County’s regulations.
“Nobody looks at a plat,” he said. “Nobody knows where to go to even see a plat.”
Selling the reservoirs as amenities
Officials didn’t simply sit back and let development occur inside the reservoirs. They actually encouraged it through other key actions — including the construction of a third highway loop around the city that would skirt the western edges of both of the emergency lakes.
Talk about building the Grand Parkway began decades ago, back in the 1980s. Some described the Parkway as visionary because it anticipated Houston’s rapid growth. When completed in 2021, the new loop will be large enough to fit the state of Rhode Island inside of it.
But proponents of sustainable development — including the environmental group Sierra Club, which sued to try to stop its construction — said the Parkway would encourage more suburban sprawl and wetland loss and would worsen flooding problems.
Several years after Allison flooded large swaths of Houston, it was time to build a crucial western segment of the giant loop, known as Segment E. During the litigation, the Sierra Club obtained documents that showed the Army Corps and state agencies also were worried about paving over more wetlands that could absorb floodwaters in the Addicks and Barker watersheds.
Development encroaching on the north side of Addicks Reservoir in Houston on Sept 7, 2016. (Michael Stravato/The Texas Tribune)
The documents included emails from Long, the Corps’ reservoir overseer, who wrote that constructing a new segment of the parkway “further compounds issues and problems that already exist with Addicks and Barker.” Even with flood mitigation, he said, “negative impacts will occur to the reservoirs.”
But Long was overruled by another Corps official, who concluded, “No impacts to the Addicks and Barker Reservoirs are expected.” That conclusion wound up in the Army Corps' final permit allowing Segment E to be built.
The court documents show that the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, the state’s environmental regulatory agency, also expressed concerns about that segment of the highway, writing that “permeable surface [prairie and wetlands] loss will contribute to flooding problems” and that “flooding impacts need to be addressed.” Other state and federal agencies, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, raised similar concerns.
The Army Corps received more than 70 requests to hold a public hearing about the project but decided not to. “It is unlikely that new information would be gained by holding a public hearing. Therefore a public hearing will not be held,” the agency wrote in documents made public in the lawsuit.
Houston lawyer Jim Blackburn, who filed the suit on behalf of the Sierra Club, said the documents made clear that the Army Corps “prioritized building the Grand Parkway over fixing the issue with Addicks and Barker development.”
“This is not dumb, bad planning,” he said. “This is very well-thought-out, bad planning.”
Segment E spurred more growth in what’s called the Energy Corridor, a narrow sliver of land along Interstate 10 located smack in the middle of the Addicks and Barker reservoirs.
For people moving into the area, the reservoirs aren’t billed as a disadvantage or threat. Quite the opposite.
In 2001, the Texas Legislature created The Energy Corridor Management District to oversee and promote growth in the area. It touted the reservoirs as “two of the largest unspoiled natural areas of any metropolitan region in the U.S.” — and the parks and sports fields within them as amenities that support an “active, healthy lifestyle.”
Nowhere on its website does the district mention flood risks.
A spokesman for the district declined an interview request, saying it is “more concerned now with getting life and business back to normal and then pursuing our master plan vision for the District that is guiding our efforts to make a more livable, walkable/bikeable and connected place.”
“The District also does not deal with development regulations, which is the City of Houston's purview,” he added.
No end to development
Local officials say it’s too late to go back and tear up all of the development in the reservoirs. But they’re divided on what should be done now that Harvey has exposed the flood dangers.
Hebert said he’s not sure what can be done to restrict further development in Barker. Because Fort Bend County doesn’t have zoning power, it could try to buy out homes in the reservoir, but that would cost hundreds of millions of dollars; the average value of the 3,000 homes that flooded is $360,000, Hebert said.
And he’s not sure drastic measures are needed. “There were woolly mammoths roaming around the last time that we had rain like this,” he said.
Meanwhile, Harris County has taken some steps. Last year, officials strengthened flood control regulations for developments inside and near Addicks and Barker reservoirs that are within county boundaries.
For the first time ever, some new developments will have to put in detention ponds, which temporarily hold water and then slowly discharge it into nearby streams. They’ll also have to install some form of “retention” that can store the water more permanently. That way, excess water won’t end up in the reservoirs during big storms.
Emmett has also called for more changes to development regulation, though it’s unclear what that would involve. “We need to start over,” he said, “and look at everything.”
Bedient, the Rice University engineering professor, said those regulations will help, but they’re too little, too late. He said the only thing that can really help solve the problem is to build a long-discussed third reservoir upstream of Addicks and Barker to hold excess floodwater.
County and city officials have called loudly for such a project, which would cost at least $300 million, to be funded as part of a federal Harvey recovery package. U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul, a Republican whose district includes part of the greater Houston region, also is championing the project.
But it’s still not clear exactly where a new reservoir would be located. When Potok was assistant director of the Harris County Flood Control District, he tried to get landowners to the table, but “when push came to shove, quite frankly, everybody had to give up something,” he recalled. The effort stalled and hasn’t been revived.
Emmett said he thinks it's a good idea, but he’s not sure there’s enough undeveloped land left for a new reservoir. “What's in [that land] now?’” he said. “You could have whole subdivisions already built.’”
Meanwhile, there’s no indication that development in the area will slow — even after Harvey.
Houston Realtor-broker Sam Chaudhry, who also serves on the government affairs committee of the Texas Association of Realtors, said he’s decided not to sell homes in neighborhoods inside the reservoirs anymore.
And he said he would never have sold homes there in the first place if he had known about the risks — information he said the city and Army Corps knew but “didn't disclose.”
“I found that out from TV, actually,” he said. “I was like, are you kidding me?”
But he’s probably the exception. For-sale signs proliferate in flood-ravaged neighborhoods inside the reservoirs. Chaudhry said many of them will be snapped up by “an army of investors.”
One five-bedroom home in Lakes on Eldridge, the same subdivision where Jeremy Boutor lives, was listed for $678,000 about two weeks before it flooded during Harvey.
The seller’s agent, Moira Holden, tried to put a positive spin on things when she updated the online listing that decreased the asking price by $10,000. “Unfortunately this stunning home did flood and is being refurbished to the highest spec!” it says. “Fabulous chance to choose your finishes!”
When asked if she would disclose to potential buyers that the home was inside Addicks Reservoir, Holden didn't have a clear answer. “I will obviously disclose whatever we are required to disclose,” she said, pointing out that the home wasn't in a floodplain. “I would hope that the buyer's Realtor would do their due diligence on that.”
Edna Meyer-Nelson, a developer who calls herself a “sixth-generation Houstonian,” said she didn’t know that the shopping center she recently bought was in Addicks Reservoir. She said the development didn’t flood during Harvey but that she’d be willing to submit to stricter building regulations as long as everyone else buys in, too.
“We’re filling up everything with cement, and then we expect [the water] to go somewhere,” she said. “There’s nowhere for the water to go. We need to build more retention ponds.”
But she resisted the idea that development inside the reservoirs needs to stop or slow down.
“We’re going to cover every inch of the land that we can cover,” she said. “I think we need to get more ingenious, but I don’t think we need to stop.”
ProPublica and the Texas Tribune are looking into home buyouts after Hurricane Harvey. Has your home flooded repeatedly, and have you volunteered for a buyout? E-mail harvey@propublica.org.
Map sources: US Army Corps of Engineers, Texas Water Development Board, FEMA, Harris County Appraisal District, Fort Bend Central Appraisal District, USGS Orthoimagery. Note: Our graphics do not capture peak flooding between August 26 and Sept. 2 because the Army Corps only posted inundation data beginning on Sept. 3.
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The water under Colorado’s Eastern Plains is running dry as farmers keep irrigating “great American desert.”
Farmers say they’re trying to wean from groundwater, but admit there are no easy answers amid pressures of corn prices, urban growth and interstate water agreements.
By BRUCE FINLEY | bfinley@denverpost.com
WRAY — Colorado farmers who defied nature’s limits and nourished a pastoral paradise by irrigating drought-prone prairie are pushing ahead in the face of worsening environmental fallout: Overpumping of groundwater has drained the High Plains Aquifer to the point that streams are drying up at the rate of 6 miles a year.
The drawdown has become so severe that highly resilient fish are disappearing, evidence of ecological collapse. A Denver Post analysis of federal data shows the aquifer shrank twice as fast over the past six years compared with the previous 60.
While the drying out of America’s agricultural bread basket ($35 billion in crops a year) ultimately may pinch people in cities, it is hitting rural areas hardest.
“Now I never know, from one minute to the next, when I turn on a faucet or hydrant, whether there will be water or not. The aquifer is being depleted,” said Lois Scott, 75, who lives west of Cope, north of the frequently bone-dry bed of the Arikaree River.
A 40-foot well her grandfather dug by hand in 1914 gave water until recently, she said, lamenting the loss of lawns where children once frolicked and green pastures for cows. Scott has been considering a move to Brush and leaving her family’s historic homestead farm.
“This will truly become the Great American Desert,” she said.
The agricultural overpumping from thousands of wells continues despite decades of warnings from researchers that the aquifer — also known as the Ogallala, the world’s largest underground body of fresh water — is shrinking.
Even if farmers radically reduced pumping, the latest research finds, the aquifer wouldn’t refill for centuries. Farmers say they cannot handle this on their own.
But there is no agreement among the eight affected states (Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Wyoming, South Dakota) to try to save the aquifer. And state rules allow total depletion.
In fact, Colorado officials faced with legal challenges from Kansas over dwindling surface water in the Republican River have found that their best option to comply with a 1942 compact is to take more water out of the aquifer. The state bought wells from farmers during the past decade and has been pumping out 11,500 acre-feet of water a year, enough to satisfy a small city, delivering it through a $60 million, 12-mile pipeline northeast of Wray to artificially resuscitate the river.
The overpumping reflects a pattern, seen worldwide, where people with knowledge that they’re exceeding nature’s limits nevertheless cling to destructive practices that hasten an environmental backlash.
The drawdown
The depletion of the High Plains Aquifer has been happening for decades, according to bulletins U.S. Geological Survey has put out since 1988. Colorado farmers this year pumped groundwater out of 4,000 wells, state records show, siphoning as much as 500 gallons a minute from each well to irrigate roughly 580,000 acres — mostly to grow corn, a water-intensive crop.
The depth where groundwater can be tapped has fallen by as much as 100 feet in eastern Colorado, USGS data show. That means pump motors must work harder to pull up the same amount of water, using more energy — raising costs for farmers. The amount of water siphoned from the aquifer since 1950 to irrigate farm fields across the eight states tops 273 million acre-feet (89 trillion gallons) — about 70 percent of the water in Lake Erie.
On one hand, the industrial center-pivot irrigation techniques perfected after World War II have brought consistency to farming by tapping the “sponge” of saturated sediment that links the aquifer to surface water in streams and rivers. America’s breadbasket produces $35 billion of crops a year. On the other hand, intense irrigation is breaking ecosystems apart.
Overpumping has dried up 358 miles of surface rivers and streams across a 200-square-mile area covering eastern Colorado, western Kansas and Nebraska, according to U.S. Fish and Wildlife-backed researchers from Colorado State University and Kansas State University who published a peer-reviewed report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers also determined that, if farmers keep pumping water at the current pace, another 177 miles of rivers and streams will be lost before 2060.
“Intermittent streams are more likely to be dry. Permanent streams are more likely to become intermittent. Large streams are more likely to be small. Everything has changed,” said KSU conservation biologist Keith Gido, one of the authors. “We have almost completely changed the species of fish that can survive in those streams, compared with what was there historically. This is really a catastrophic change.”
Disappearing fish species — minnows, suckers, catfish that had evolved to endure periodic droughts — signal to biologists that ecological effects may be reaching a tipping point.
The amount of water held in the aquifer under eastern Colorado decreased by 19.6 million acre-feet — 6.4 trillion gallons — from 1950 until 2015, USGS records show. That’s an average loss of 300,000 acre-feet a year. Between 2011 and 2015, records show, the water available under Colorado in the aquifer decreased by 3.2 million acre-feet — an annual average shrinkage of 800,000 acre-feet. Climate change factors, including rainfall, play into the rate of the drawdown.
If all pumping stopped immediately, it would still take hundreds of years for rain-fed streams and rivers to recharge the aquifer, Gido said.
“We’re not living in as sustainable a fashion as we need to be. Much of the damage has been done,” he said, “and restoring what we’ve lost could be difficult.
“It is happening all over the world in places such as Pakistan. It causes conflicts. As human populations grow, the demand for water is going to be greater. Conflicts are going to increase — unless we become more efficient in using the water we have.”
Farmers locked
For farmers, weaning themselves off groundwater is proving difficult.
They say they’re trying. They’ve reduced the land irrigated in eastern Colorado by 30,000 acres since 2006. They plan to retire another 25,000 acres over the next decade, said Rod Lenz, president of the Republican River Water Conservation District, who for years has advocated use of technology to grow more crops with less water.
“We have come to realize that, yeah, we are overmining it. We are acutely aware of that now. There’s a definite attitude to make more than just the natural progression as far as efficiency,” Lenz said, noting state officials monitor pumping and determine how many acres owners can irrigate.
“We’re constantly trying to find ways to stay in compliance,” he said. “We’re looking at serious conservation.”
For years, agriculture experts have pointed to drip-irrigation technology to do more with less. Federal agencies in the past dangled help for farmers who invest. But few in eastern Colorado have installed these systems, largely because they are expensive.
Farmer and cattleman Robert Boyd, a leader of the Arikaree Groundwater Management District, said the federal government should intervene to ensure survival of High Plains agriculture.
“Do you want us to be sustainable? Or not? It may come to a point where no one can actually irrigate,” Boyd said.
He pointed to proposals to divert water from the Missouri River Basin and move it westward through pipelines across the Great Plains.
“If the federal government wants agriculture to be sustainable, they need to pump water back toward the mountains. They need to figure out how to get water back toward the higher parts of the rivers,” he said. “The federal government needs to step in and make the states work together to make agriculture — and urban areas — sustainable.”
For now, farmers struggle, increasingly weighing water uncertainties in calculations that include corn prices falling to around $3.50 a bushel in recent years from $7. But drawing down the aquifer does not violate any law in Colorado. The state engineer’s office monitors well levels and requires permits for wells, limiting the number of acres a farmer can irrigate. But there’s no hard limit on how much water can be pumped.
In contrast, state rules limit groundwater withdrawals from the Denver Basin Aquifer — a source for many of Denver’s southern suburbs, including Castle Rock and Parker — to less than 1 percent a year. This is meant to help natural recharge keep pace with human demands.
But on the High Plains, the situation is like mining intended to fully exploit diamonds or gold.
“If you want to have it all back the way it was 150 years ago, you would have to remove everyone from the area. I’m not sure how we could do that today,” deputy state engineer Mike Sullivan said in an interview.
Sullivan and state engineer Kevin Rein emphasized that thousands of acres no longer are irrigated. “And there need to be some more retirements of land to get us into a more balanced situation,” Sullivan said.
They defended Colorado’s practice of pumping more groundwater out of the aquifer, saying this is necessary to comply with the Republican River Compact. Disputes over river flows have risen as far as the U.S. Supreme Court and Colorado’s legal obligations to deliver water to Nebraska and Kansas are clear.
“What we do with the pumping does help the streams,” Sullivan said. “It does provide a wet stream. … We could not meet our (legal) obligation without that today, even if we turned off all the wells.”
But there’s no end in sight for the drawdown of groundwater.
Nature exhausted
And for farmers who built their world on the High Plains Aquifer, the environmental fallout is increasingly painful. In the rural view, it is a problem that cannot be addressed by farmers alone without help from people in cities. All of the industrial agriculture is done with urban residents in mind — the people who consume the crops and cows that farmers grow.
“The world population is going to double. And we’re not going to be able to grow more farmland. We’re losing farming ground every day to development,” said Cody Powell, manager of 21st Century Equipment, the John Deere dealer in Burlington, an agricultural hub. “You take away farm ground for development, bring in more people. Who’s going to feed them? The only way to do that is to put water on crops.”
People in cities increasingly demand environmentally correct crops, which requires more water. “If they want natural grain-fed cattle, and non-GMO (genetically modified organism) crops — all that good stuff — it is going to take water,” he said.
A farmer can grow more by using pesticides and genetically modified seeds, he said. “With the same amount of water, you could get twice as much corn.”
He knows too well the perils of losing water. He grew up in southern Colorado’s Arkansas River Valley at a time when Aurora and other Front Range suburbs were buying up rights from farmers. This buy-up to slake growing suburban thirsts ended up killing agriculture across hundreds of thousands of once-irrigated acres.
And now when Powell goes back, he sees communities “overrun with thugs” near where his grandmother lived. “It makes me feel sick,” he said.
In eastern Colorado, the problem now is that few can afford to invest in high-efficiency water technology, such as irrigation drip tubes and tape installed underground to eliminate evaporation losses, and soil-sensor systems that let farmers irrigate only when absolutely necessary.
Federal programs to subsidize installation of this technology have withered. And the overpumping continues.
“The fear out here now is not that the aquifer is going to get ruined,” Powell said. “The fear is that the state is going to shut off wells.”
And prairie residents practically cringe to see the pipeline northeast of Wray that Colorado uses to convey groundwater away to Nebraska and Kansas to prevent future lawsuits.
The interstate compact was negotiated back when there was more water and far fewer people, they say.
“Now we just have weeds. We are feeling the effect of losing the water that Kansas is enjoying,” Scott said from her farmhouse. “It is robbing families of life. That’s what is happening to us. We should be entitled to the water underground.”
Past becomes future
The depletion means water scarcity increasingly dictates survival.
It is no surprise to historians. In the 1860s, John Wesley Powell’s surveys for the U.S. government warned that the land west of central Kansas was practically a desert. His report “On the Arid Lands of the Western United States” warned that the only way for people to live here would be by irrigating land. Otherwise, he wrote, the place could not support permanent communities. Tribes for centuries used the Great Plains seasonally as a hunting ground.
Settlers flocked in during the 19th century, initially relying on dryland farming. This led to massive soil erosion, culminating in the Dust Bowl environmental disaster of the 1930s.
Industrial irrigation took off during the 1960s, with tens of thousands of wells drilled through the 1980s.
But now, if people keep pumping, the dry-out will intensify, CSU senior research scientist Kevin Bestgen said.
“I appreciate it that people now are trying to reduce pumping. The reality is that the bucket they are pumping from does not refill. It is finite. And in order to allow recharge of that aquifer, farmers are going to have to get much more severe reductions in pumping levels. It has been going down and down and down,” he said. “People are getting what they can. This will turn out to be a tragedy. It is in the culture at this point. People want to grow corn now.”
Groundwater levels
The map shows the change in groundwater levels for various management districts in the Northern High Plains Basin over the last 10 years. The water level data is collected from wells in the areas. Click an area to see the changes in groundwater levels for 1-, 5- and 10-year periods.
Bruce Finley
Bruce Finley covers environment issues, the land air and water struggles shaping Colorado and the West. Finley grew up in Colorado, graduated from Stanford, then earned masters degrees in international relations as a Fulbright scholar in Britain and in journalism at Northwestern. He is also a lawyer and previously handled international news with on-site reporting in 40 countries.
Follow Bruce Finley @finleybruce
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Texas company seeks to renew permit to look for Big Cypress oil.
The NRDC, the Conservancy of Southwest Florida, the National Parks Conservation Association and the Center for Biological Diversity have asked the Florida Department of Environmental Protection to not renew the Burnett Oil Co.'s state permit.
By Eric Staats, eric.staats@naplesnews.com; 239-263-4780
A Texas company has asked state environmental regulators to allow crews to resume their hunt for oil beneath Big Cypress National Preserve despite deep muddy ruts and damaged trees left behind by the company's earlier work in the spring.
"It was a mess, as we suspected," said Allison Kelly, an attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The NRDC, the Conservancy of Southwest Florida, the National Parks Conservation Association and the Center for Biological Diversity have asked the Florida Department of Environmental Protection to not renew the Burnett Oil Co.'s state permit.
Burnett was unable to finish the survey in the spring before the start of the rainy season, and the company's permit expired July 15.
"These groups are recycling the same kinds of claims that have been rejected by the National Park Service and the federal court," Burnett spokeswoman Alia Faraj-Johnson said, referring to the groups' failed 2016 lawsuit to try to stop the work.
DEP spokeswoman Dee Ann Miller said the agency's deadline for making a decision on the company's permit renewal is Oct. 24.
The DEP plans to send inspectors along with the National Park Service when work to repair the damaged wet prairies is underway, but that won't happen until the landscape flooded by Hurricane Irma dries out, Miller said.
In letters to the DEP, environmental groups contend Burnett violated its earlier permit by working into the rainy season and not repairing damage.
A lawyer for Burnett, in his own letter to the DEP, said the groups have their facts wrong and don't understand the law.
The company blamed unusually heavy rains for it having to work into the wet season to remove equipment, something the groups contend violated the first permit.
Ruts have not been repaired, as the permit requires, because the National Park Service told crews to wait for drier conditions, Burnett's letter says.
In the letter, Burnett says it "made major efforts to minimize potential damage," including having ecologists with each survey truck to steer them clear of wetter areas and wildlife.
However, National Park Service employees raised concerns that the work was progressing too quickly for ecologists to do proper monitoring.
The problem was serious enough that the National Park Service put out a call for monitoring help from other preserve staff and even from other regional public land managers.
In its approval of the survey work, the Park Service found that any environmental harm from the oil surveys would be minimal and required crews to follow a list of 47 conditions.
Those included avoiding wading bird colonies, using existing trails when possible, repairing ruts and limiting the size of trees that could be cut down.
Burnett used special trucks with large steel plates to vibrate against the ground and send out seismic signals that would indicate whether underground formations might hold oil or gas.
The seismic surveys are being used to study a geologic formation called the Sunniland Trend. That formation already has proved to hold oil and has been tapped in the preserve since the 1970s.
Burnett plans to cover 70,000 acres of the preserve with its current survey but has indicated future surveys could cover more than 200,000 acres.
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Goodbye - and good riddance - to livestock farming.
The suffering inherent in mass meat production can't be justified. And as the artificial meat industry grows, the last argument for farming animals has now collapsed.
What will future generations, looking back on our age, see as its monstrosities? We think of slavery, the subjugation of women, judicial torture, the murder of heretics, imperial conquest and genocide, the first world war and the rise of fascism, and ask ourselves how people could have failed to see the horror of what they did. What madness of our times will revolt our descendants?
There are plenty to choose from. But one of them, I believe, will be the mass incarceration of animals, to enable us to eat their flesh or eggs or drink their milk. While we call ourselves animal lovers, and lavish kindness on our dogs and cats, we inflict brutal deprivations on billions of animals that are just as capable of suffering. The hypocrisy is so rank that future generations will marvel at how we could have failed to see it.
The shift will occur with the advent of cheap artificial meat. Technological change has often helped to catalyse ethical change. The $300m deal China signed last month to buy lab-grown meat marks the beginning of the end of livestock farming. But it won’t happen quickly: the great suffering is likely to continue for many years.
The answer, we are told by celebrity chefs and food writers, is to keep livestock outdoors: eat free-range beef or lamb, not battery pork. But all this does is to swap one disaster – mass cruelty – for another: mass destruction. Almost all forms of animal farming cause environmental damage, but none more so than keeping them outdoors. The reason is inefficiency. Grazing is not just slightly inefficient, it is stupendously wasteful. Roughly twice as much of the world’s surface is used for grazing as for growing crops, yet animals fed entirely on pasture produce just one gram out of the 81g of protein consumed per person per day.
A paper in Science of the Total Environment reports that “livestock production is the single largest driver of habitat loss”. Grazing livestock are a fully automated system for ecological destruction: you need only release them on to the land and they do the rest, browsing out tree seedlings, simplifying complex ecosystems. Their keepers augment this assault by slaughtering large predators.
In the UK, for example, sheep supply around 1% of our diet in terms of calories. Yet they occupy around 4m hectares of the uplands. This is more or less equivalent to all the land under crops in this country, and more than twice the area of the built environment (1.7m hectares). The rich mosaic of rainforest and other habitats that once covered our hills has been erased, the wildlife reduced to a handful of hardy species. The damage caused is out of all proportion to the meat produced.
Replacing the meat in our diets with soya spectacularly reduces the land area required per kilo of protein: by 70% in the case of chicken, 89% in the case of pork and 97% in the case of beef. One study suggests that if we were all to switch to a plant-based diet, 15m hectares of land in Britain currently used for farming could be returned to nature. Alternatively, this country could feed 200 million people. An end to animal farming would be the salvation of the world’s wildlife, our natural wonders and magnificent habitats.
Now it is time for a new revolution, almost as profound as those other great shifts: the switch to a plant-based diet.
Understandably, those who keep animals have pushed back against such facts, using an ingenious argument. Livestock grazing, they claim, can suck carbon out of the atmosphere and store it in the soil, reducing or even reversing global warming. In a TED talk watched by 4 million people, the rancher Allan Savory claims that his “holistic” grazing could absorb enough carbon to return the world’s atmosphere to pre-industrial levels. His inability, when I interviewed him, to substantiate his claims has done nothing to dent their popularity.
Similar statements have been made by Graham Harvey, the agricultural story editor of the BBC Radio 4 serial The Archers – he claims that the prairies in the US could absorb all the carbon “that’s gone into the atmosphere for the whole planet since we industrialised” – and amplified by the Campaign to Protect Rural England. Farmers’ organisations all over the world now noisily promote this view.
A report this week by the Food Climate Research Network, called Grazed and Confused, seeks to resolve the question: can keeping livestock outdoors cause a net reduction in greenhouse gases? The authors spent two years investigating the issue. They cite 300 sources. Their answer is unequivocal. No.
It is true, they find, that some grazing systems are better than others. Under some circumstances, plants growing on pastures will accumulate carbon under the ground, through the expansion of their root systems and the laying down of leaf litter. But the claims of people such as Savory and Harvey are “dangerously misleading”. The evidence supporting additional carbon storage through the special systems these livestock crusaders propose (variously described as “holistic”, “regenerative”, “mob”, or “adaptive” grazing) is weak and contradictory, and suggests that if there’s an effect at all, it is small.
The best that can be done is to remove between 20% and 60% of the greenhouse gas emissions grazing livestock produce. Even this might be an overestimate: a paper published this week in the journal Carbon Balance and Management suggests that the amount of methane (a potent greenhouse gas) farm animals produce has been understated. In either case, carbon storage in pastures cannot compensate for the animals’ own climate impacts, let alone those of industrial civilisation. I would like to see the TED team post a warning on Savory’s video, before even more people are misled.
As the final argument crumbles, we are left facing an uncomfortable fact: animal farming looks as incompatible with a sustained future for humans and other species as mining coal.
That vast expanse of pastureland, from which we obtain so little at such great environmental cost, would be better used for rewilding: the mass restoration of nature. Not only would this help to reverse the catastrophic decline in habitats and the diversity and abundance of wildlife, but the returning forests, wetlands and savannahs are likely to absorb far more carbon than even the most sophisticated forms of grazing.
The end of animal farming might be hard to swallow. But we are a resilient and adaptable species. We have undergone a series of astonishing changes: the adoption of sedentarism, of agriculture, of cities, of industry.
Now it is time for a new revolution, almost as profound as those other great shifts: the switch to a plant-based diet. The technology is – depending on how close an approximation to meat you demand (Quorn seems almost indistinguishable from chicken or mince to me) – either here or just around the corner. The ethical switch is happening already: even today, there are half a million vegans in the land of roast beef. It’s time to abandon the excuses, the fake facts and false comforts. It is time to see our moral choices as our descendants will.
• George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
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That rotten stench in the air? The smell of deadly gas and secrecy.
As the number of shale oil wells has soared in Saskatchewan, the risk of hydrogen sulphide leaks has multiplied. A year-long investigation reveals what the government and industry knew — and kept from the public.
NewsWorld
That rotten stench in the air? It’s the smell of deadly gas and secrecy
As the number of shale oil wells has soared in Saskatchewan, the risk of hydrogen sulphide leaks has multiplied. A year-long investigation reveals what the government and industry knew — and kept from the public.
Documents and information from whistleblowers disclose findings of failures in performance by oil and gas companies, including serious infractions, failed safety audits, daily H2S readings beyond provincial air quality standards and a death in 2014. (MARK TAYLOR FOR THE TORONTO STAR)
A gas flare tower west of Oxbow, now a common sight in the province. (MARK TAYLOR / FOR THE TORONTO STAR)
By ROBERT CRIBBStaff Reporter
PATTI SONNTAGMICHENER AWARDS FOUNDATION
P.W. ELLIOTTUNIVERSITY OF REGINA
ELIZABETH MCSHEFFREYNATIONAL OBSERVER
Sun., Oct. 1, 2017
OXBOW, SASK.—The two-storey cedar home where Shirley Galloway lives with her family was a solitary dot on the Saskatchewan prairie when they moved here 21 years ago.
The view from the front porch, once a landscape of rolling hills, horse pastures and lush river valley, has been transformed.
Today, Oxbow is surrounded by bobbing, black steel pump jacks and flare stacks burning off hydrogen sulphide and other dangerous gases that rise with the oil and trail off in ribbons of flame over green fields.
Late in the afternoon of Oct. 30, 2012, Galloway, a 53-year-old registered nurse, heard screams from the front yard.
Galloway dashed out to find a teenage family member vomiting and the air thick with the rotten-egg smell of sour gas — hydrogen sulphide (H2S).
Article Continued Below
Galloway, who trains oil workers to survive these same events, knew what to do.
She pulled the teen inside, grabbed an air monitor and held it out the door. The reading was off the dial — more than 100 parts per million — a level immediately dangerous to human health.
Saskatchewan’s oil boom has brought jobs for many. For others, it has brought fear, injury and one death.
The number of “fracked” wells in the Bakken shale oilfield alone increased from 75 in 2004 to nearly 3,000 in 2013, according to a 2016 paper by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. The promise of prosperity, similar to its southern neighbour North Dakota’s Bakken boom, has been embraced by a province struggling to diversify its economy.
A national investigation by the Toronto Star, the National Observer, Global News and journalism schools at Regina, Concordia, Ryerson and UBC has uncovered failures by industry and government to respond to — and warn the public about — the serious and sometimes deadly threat of H2S gas wafting across Saskatchewan.
Documents obtained through freedom-of-information requests and from whistleblowers — internal correspondence, meeting minutes, presentations and inspection reports — disclose findings of failures in performance by oil and gas companies, including serious infractions, failed safety audits, daily H2S readings beyond provincial air quality standards and a death in 2014.
Yet regulatory standards remain largely unchanged and H2S incidents and risks remain hidden from the public.
The teen overcome in Galloway’s yard eventually recovered but missed school for several days with nausea and headaches.
H2S can be an insidious killer.
Heavier than air, it tends to settle in ravines and valleys.
Registered nurse Shirley Galloway knew what to do when she found a family member vomiting amid the smell of sour gas. Galloway trains oil workers to survive these leaks. (DEREK PUTZ / GLOBAL NEWS)
Just above the level Galloway’s monitor detected — 100 parts per million — H2S causes olfactory paralysis, leaving a victim unable to detect the rotten-egg smell. Continued exposure at that level may cause death within 48 hours.
A person exposed to a highly concentrated plume of the gas — at 1,000 parts per million — may die rapidly from respiratory paralysis, or over the course of days, from an inflammatory reaction in the lungs.
Victims effectively suffocate.
The government issued no public warning after Galloway reported the plume at her home because “there was no evidence that this was a widespread failure.” But inside government and industry offices, documents indicate the seriousness of H2S issues that led to years of meetings, audits and proposed regulatory reforms.
On April 7, 2014, government and industry officials deliberated about releasing data that showed H2S “hotspots” across southeastern Saskatchewan.
“Government may be accused of hiding information,” the notes read. “Public will want to know: 1. What are the areas? 2. How is it managed? 3. How is the government making sure it’s managed?” one unnamed official told the meeting. “Are we creating a risk by not releasing this data immediately?”
Despite acknowledging “significant” public health risks from H2S, at least some officials present expressed concern about “sensitivity in this data (because) there are residents living in these areas.”
No release followed.
Three weeks later, government-proposed fines for emission breaches — up to $1 million in penalties — were rejected by two major industry groups. In a letter to the ministry dated April 29, 2014, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) and Explorers and Producers Association of Canada (EPAC) called the proposed penalties “unsuitable.”
A former ministry official, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of losing his current job in the industry, says “almost every amendment was being rejected.”
EPAC officials declined comment.
Terry Abel, CAPP’s spokesperson, said the letter was intended to explain that, “in some cases, fines aren’t appropriate at all … If there’s an unsafe operation, it should be shut down. It shouldn’t be operating. That’s the best way to ensure the public safety is protected.”
The proposed fines were dropped.
The next month, Michael Bunz, a 38-year-old salesman supplying chemicals to oil and gas facilities, lay in a shack 80 kilometres from the Galloway house, dead after being exposed to H2S.
The official incident report filed with the Ministry of the Economy, which regulates Saskatchewan’s oilfields, makes no mention of Bunz’s death.
The story of the Bunz family, who lost their son after he was exposed to H2S gas in Saskatchewan as well as others who have made narrow escapes.
These regulators “are really thinking about the economic health of the province,” says Emily Eaton, a professor at the University of Regina who has studied the relationship between the oil industry and the government. Eaton is a member of the Corporate Mapping Project.
A shift in 2012 — from the Ministry of Energy and Resources to a new Ministry of the Economy tasked with regulating natural resource extraction and promoting economic development — changed the ministry’s role from watchdog to partner, she says.
“They’re thinking about returns on investment … The industry should really be regulated by those that have the interests of the environment first.”
Ministry field staff raised this concern at a meeting on July 1, 2015, between government and industry.
“The role of the regulator needs to be adjusted,” the meeting’s minutes read. “The regulators are acting as consultants in some situations. The role of the regulator is to enforce the rules and if the rules are clear and if enforcement is consistent and clear then, ‘cultural’ changes can be made.”
In its statement, the ministry rejects criticisms of conflict of interest or lax enforcement.
“Within the Ministry of the Economy, the petroleum and natural gas division carries out industry regulation,” wrote the department’s spokeswoman, Deb Young. “It is not involved in investment attraction, royalty and tax assessment and land sales. It is solely focused on well, facility and pipeline regulation.”
That regulation has not included fines or prosecutions.
The ministry has not issued a single fine against any industry company “for well over a decade,” Doug MacKnight, assistant deputy minister responsible for petroleum and natural gas, said in an interview.
“Generally, we don’t have to resort to that,” he said. “It’s usually just a notice to the operator to bring themselves into compliance.”
Prosecutions have also not been part of the ministry’s enforcement practices because non-compliance was dealt with “through other enforcement actions,” reads the ministry’s statement.
Other enforcement actions include increased inspections and staff, high-tech equipment for detecting emissions and a $69-million inspection reporting database (which can’t be accessed by the public).
Still, complaints of illness from residents and workers continue.
Lori Erhardt, a minister and musician, believes various health problems are related to gas in the area neare her home in Oxbow, Sask. (MARK TAYLOR FOR THE TORONTO STAR)
“I will sometimes get faint, like I will fall over and I have to find a seat quickly,” says Lori Erhardt, a United Church minister and musician living near Oxbow who believes her chronic illness is related to emissions.
“I have had a variety of diagnoses, most of them end with “i-t-i-s,” which means inflammation … If something gets inflamed, if it’s blood vesicles, you feel it through your body.”
Among the five years’ worth of documents obtained by this investigation is an April 2012 PowerPoint presentation to CAPP members by the director of the province’s petroleum and natural gas division. It includes a map of southeastern Saskatchewan showing a bloom of red and orange circles, labelled “critical sour gas locations.”
Sources say ministry staff pushed to make the data public but senior government officials said “there’s no goddamn way that is going to be released,” according to the former ministry source.
“There’s an institutional reluctance to make this information public,” he said. “The public should be able to see all the information that legislators have identified as public information such as sour gas and inspection reports.”
"'I will sometimes get faint'"
LORI ERHARDT
UNITED CHURCH MINISTER AND MUSICIAN LIVING NEAR OXBOW WHO BELIEVES HER CHRONIC ILLNESS IS RELATED TO EMISSIONS
The ministry statement says the map was never approved for release because some data was out of date, not comprehensive and “could provide the public and industry with a false understanding of risk associated with a particular well or facility.”
After the Galloway incident, the ministry inspected 11 oil and gas facilities. All failed “with serious infractions,” including releasing H2S at lethal levels “that may be exceeding 150,000 (parts per million),” Brad Herald, CAPP’s Saskatchewan operations manager, wrote to the board of governors in December 2012.
Those levels are 150 times the amount that could cause instant death.
Among the causes: “It is believed that inadequate training on the installation and operation of equipment is … contributing to the air quality issues.”
CAPP’s Abel said in an interview the “unsafe” facilities responsible for those breaches should not have been operating.
“They should have been shut down,” he said. “When you follow the rules, processing and production of sour gas is absolutely safe. If you don’t follow the rules, it can pose a health risk. So ultimately, those operators at those facilities were responsible.”
Neither CAPP nor its industry partners made the health risks public. And no ministry fines or prosecutions followed.
Internally, CAPP quickly mobilized to develop a public relations and damage control plan:
“There are growing public concerns regarding the air quality issues in southeast Saskatchewan,” Herald wrote, noting a petition and a Facebook page.
“The Ministry fields one to two public complaints concerning odours per week and the issue is garnering increasing political attention . . . This has the potential to become a broader industry reputation/social license concern and warrants immediate attention by operators in the region . . . Communications is preparing key messages in the event that there is media profile.”
CAPP received a warning the next month after consulting a scientist with expertise on managing toxic substances, internal emails show. The scientist expressed disappointment noting that H2S failures were “so easy to avoid.”
The scientist urged the industry lobby group to develop and implement a new code of practice to control dangerous emissions and get ahead of the problem by publicly denouncing unacceptable practices. The scientist also recommended that the industry group pressure the province to step up inspections.
The ministry, in meetings with industry, proposed similar reforms.
In a letter sent in March 2013 then-energy minister Tim McMillan — now president and CEO of CAPP — warned companies to meet “compliance obligations” or face “escalated enforcement, penalty and/or prosecution.”
Ministry and industry met four times between 2012 and 2014 to plot strategy, including emergency planning zones, a public communications document, a code of practice and a licensing regime for high-risk, single-well batteries.
Those plans were never adopted, a ministry statement confirms.
“Instead, the Ministry chose to take a risk-based approach to managing the sour gas issue that included increased field inspections and improved data collection.” Eighteen wells that had been venting sour gas were ordered to be “shut-in” in 2012/2013.
Michael Bunz, who died from exposure to H2S gas. (DEREK PUTZ / GLOBAL NEWS)
From 2013 to the summer of 2014, the ministry began implementing “an aggressive inspection and enforcement schedule to reduce sour gas emission” that included suspension orders against 30 facilities owing to “H2S management issues,” the statement reads.
During that effort, H2S would claim its most high-profile victim in Saskatchewan.
Michael Bunz, a salesman for Nalco Champion, died on May 22, 2014, while taking samples in a shed located in a provincial park between Carlyle and Kipling. A valve on the tank broke and oil, water and H2S spewed into his face.
An incident report submitted by the tank’s owner, Harvest Operations Corp., states simply: “Spill occurred as a result of a failed valve.”
Dianne and Allan Bunz visit the gravesite of their son, Michael, who was killed by H2S gas while working near his home in Wawota, Sask. "We knew aout H2S but I wasn't aware that he was going on site and doing the testing," Dianne says. (MARK TAYLOR FOR THE TORONTO STAR)
Nowhere does it mention Bunz’s death.
Instead, his death is marked by a gravestone in a small cemetery near Wawota, where the father of two young daughters lived a few doors away from his parents, Dianne and Allan.
The black, polished stone, with an image of Bunz wearing his Saskatchewan Roughriders jersey and hat, calls him “Bunzy” and reads: “In loving memory of Emma and Olivia’s Daddy.”
“He didn’t really talk about those dangers,” Dianne says. “We knew what it’s like to work in the oil industry. My husband did for 20 years. We knew about H2S but I wasn’t aware that he was going on site and doing the testing.”
The summer before he died, Allan drove his son to the Nalco office to quit. Michael’s brother-in-law, who had worked there, had left and “things had been pretty tough,” Michael said, marked by long days and heavy workload.
“He was going to hand his company truck in, and his boss was there … he talked (Michael) out of it,” Allan says. “This company wanted him because he never ever phoned in sick or anything. He’d just go to work. And they offered him more money, so he stayed.”
Nalco Champion is facing three charges under the province’s occupational health and safety legislation for failing to provide Bunz with a respirator and to ensure he entered a dangerous situation with a second worker. A conviction would result in a fine.
The family says they were told by Nalco that the concentration of H2S in the fluids was estimated at 40,000 parts per million, more than enough to bring near-instant death.
The company sent reporters a written statement, declining further comment.
“We remain deeply saddened by the loss of our colleague, Michael Bunz. The safety of our associates, customers and communities is vitally important, and we remain committed to our robust safety policies, protocols and training programs, which include those related to hydrogen sulfide,” it reads.
Allan, who spent most of his working life in the oil industry, says he learned more about H2S protection when he worked on a pig farm.
“Every person had to wear an H2S monitor. And I’m talking about the pig industry,” he says. “To me, they were protecting us … more at this simple small hog operation in Saskatchewan than the oil industry ever did the entire time I was working out there.”
The couple reviewed the records documenting years of discussions between government and industry about public health risks and failed audits that were never made public. The couple called it “devastating.”
“I go to work every day and I drive down the highway and I talk to my son sitting beside me,” says Allan. “I say to him “tough day there, son” and I tell him how I feel . . . I feel him sitting there beside me.”
Trina Hansen was clearing a pipeline near Carlyle, Sask., when she breathed in H2S. “Your first reaction is to inhale. When it hits your face, you breathe it in." (DEREK PUTZ / GLOBAL NEWS)
How often H2S incidents happen or happened in Saskatchewan remains a mystery.
Officially, ministry officials count one death and five “documented incidents where a member of the public was exposed to unsafe levels of sour gas near a well or facility site.”
None of them triggered a public statement by the government.
“There was no need for public notification since the incident was quickly dealt with at the site,” reads the ministry statement.
But after dozens of interviews it is clear that H2S incidents involving residents are more common but go unreported or are not recorded properly. This is also true for workers in the oilfield.
Only months after Bunz died, Trina Hansen, an oilfield worker and part-time voice actress, was clearing a pipeline near Carlyle, Sask.
“I could have died,” she says. “It’s almost like you could feel like a heavy air hit your face. It’s a really weird feeling. Your first reaction is to inhale. When it hits your face, you breathe it in. It’s the weirdest thing. You don’t think to hold your breath. It happens so fast. I stumbled backwards. I was so shocked.”
Disoriented, Hansen got back in her truck and drove a couple of kilometres until she noticed she was losing her peripheral vision.
“There were white sparkles, iridescent, swirly, super-shiny and bright. I jumped out and started feeling nauseous and couldn’t breathe very well. I was trying to catch my breath and dry heaving. My head started pounding.”
"'I could have died'"
TRINA HANSEN
AN OILFIELD WORKER AND PART-TIME VOICE ACTRESS EXPOSED TO H2S
Hansen, suffering debilitating headaches, nausea and sickness, lost her voice for two weeks.
“This happened three years ago and I still have a hard time catching my breath if I talk too fast. I’m very short of breath. I’ve never in my life felt like that. It was horrible.”
Her voice has changed for good — it is far deeper and lower than before.
“I do a cartoon on APTN network and they said my voice totally changed. It changed two octaves pretty much. It used to be high and now it cuts out.”
Hansen never reported the incident, fearing she would lose her job.
“Nobody wants to say anything. We know it’s bad and dangerous. But no one wants to raise a fuss. And being a woman and trying to prove yourself out there, I never claimed WCB (Workers Compensation Board). The economy went down and I have to pay off debt with my trucking money.”
Four months after Bunz’s death, a secret ministry report listed 161 facilities “that may be in violation of (the ministry’s) sour gas emission control.”
The catch: “time and resources required to investigate and verify violations would take all available field officers over a year.”
In 2014, inspections of 60 suspicious wells in 2014 turned up 36 — more than half — that were leaking so badly they had to be shut down.
Another audit found 11 out of 12 facilities failed inspection “due to H2S venting” and found 29 locations that are too close to facilities with high levels of H2S concentrations. Of the 1,352 active sour gas facilities, only 421 — 31 per cent — had “proper emission control systems.”
“Almost every site had improper gas measurement,” the report reads. “Discovered major contamination at two facilities as a result of spill which were not reported” to the ministry.
The ministry believes that the H2S issue is under control, saying air quality standards are being met and that inspections confirm that companies’ sour gas management practices have improved. Today 27 full-time inspectors are responsible for the province’s 126,000 wells and its estimated 118,000 kilometres of pipelines and flowlines, operating with a budget of $3.9 million.
In 2016-17, ministry staff inspected 18,340 wells, facilities and pipelines.
Last month, a team of researchers from Harvard and Northeastern Universities collected data in collaboration with this investigation using the same instruments employed by ministry inspectors to detect emissions invisible to the naked eye.
“In my experience measuring oil and gas activities in Texas, what struck me was that about a third of the sites we looked at had what we believed to be fugitive emissions and the high density of pump jacks,” says Lourdes Vera, a doctoral student in environmental sociology at Northeastern University.
Drew Michanowicz, a post-doctoral researcher at Harvard University’s School of Public Health who led the survey in Saskatchewan, said about one in five of the facilities they visited showed black smoke rising from the flaring stacks of production facilities.
“If there is black smoke, there is particulate matter that if inhaled is certainly associated with human health effects,” he said. “If sources of these air pollutants are constantly impacting individuals where they live, work and play, there is the worry that they are experiencing health effects.”
A pump jack is surrounded by batteries near Roche Percee., Sask. (MARK TAYLOR FOR THE TORONTO STAR)
In interviews with landowners and records in the government database, this investigation has found recent H2S accidents, including three people who say they were sickened by H2S clouds near their homes in the past year. One said they required hospitalization after a near-fatal incident.
In January, more than four years after the H2S incident in Galloway’s front yard, she and her husband were driving home when they encountered a plume of what she believes was H2S gas.
She fell ill and stayed home for three days.
“I’ve had arrhythmias, really wicked headaches … I’ve had bouts of nausea. I wake up at night and have heart palpitations.”
Galloway wrote to public officials demanding a response.
There were no consequences or fines as a result. And no official report of an incident anywhere near the Galloway property that day was filed.
That, says Galloway, is just the way it works in Saskatchewan.
“As a person living in the middle of the oilfield, you have no protection. The government doesn’t care. Your MLA doesn’t care. The oil companies don’t care.”
Unprecedented collaboration behind the project
During the past nine months, an unprecedented collaboration of more than 50 journalists and editors from three Canadian media outlets, four journalism schools and a think tank have worked to chronicle the hidden price of oil in Canada.
Collectively, reporters examined thousands of industry and government documents, analyzed terabytes of data and delved into dozens of freedom-of-information requests.
“The project started with the people,” says Patti Sonntag, a managing editor in the New York Times’ news services division, who launched the project with a grant from the Michener Awards Foundation. Following a tip from a colleague at the Corporate Mapping Project, she did some research and reporting in Saskatchewan last fall.
Working with the previous year’s Michener winner, Toronto Star journalist Robert Cribb, Sonntag created a team of students at the Ryerson, Concordia and UBC journalism schools. Concordia University’s Department of Journalism volunteered to act as host and headquarters for the project.
University of Regina students reported on the ground locally, shot video and developed sources, while students at the other universities aggregated and analyzed data and interviewed experts.
“We’re pulling these four different schools from across the country and looking at it from all different aspects,” says Janelle Blakley, a University of Regina student reporter whose team mapped spills data and met local farmers and residents. “This collaboration allowed us to really dig into it, where all schools were pulling apart different pieces of it and then coming back and putting it all together.”
The significance of the data quickly drew intrigue. What emerged was a picture of a few dedicated regulators — and even some industry leaders — who tried to introduce greater accountability, but these efforts were ultimately overwhelmed by larger forces.
“You start to understand these figures really do play a huge role in dictating the direction of the Canadian economy and that plays out in the lives of everyday Canadians,” says Lauren Kaljur, a graduate of UBC’s master of journalism program who has been investigating the concentration of corporate power in Saskatchewan’s oil and gas industry since the beginning of 2017.
To Matthew Gilmour, a recent journalism graduate at Concordia University, after spending months populating spreadsheets and ledgers, “there’s the human moment where you realize it’s not just a pocketbook story. It’s a human story. And people’s lives are affected.”
The work continued past the end of the semester in April 2017, with students working alongside veteran reporters at the Star, the National Observer and Global News to shape the stories, seek comments from all sides and publish hundreds of pages of government and industry records, detailing concerns about potentially deadly gas emissions for the first time.
Writers/Reporters:
Robert Cribb, The Toronto Star
Patti Sonntag, Michener Fellow
P.W. Elliott, University of Regina
Elizabeth McSheffrey, The National Observer
Data and documentation journalist:
Michael Wrobel, Concordia University
Researchers:
Jennifer Ackerman, University of Regina
Madina Azizi, University of Regina
Janelle Blakley, University of Regina
Cory Coleman, University of Regina
Mike De Souza, The National Observer
Josh Diaz, University of Regina
Brenna Engel, University of Regina
Matthew Gilmour, Concordia University
Celine Grimard, University of Regina
Jared Gottselig, University of Regina
Lauren Kaljur ,University of British Columbia
Rebbeca Marroquin, University of Regina
Matthew Parizot, Concordia University
Katie Doke Sawatzky, University of Regina
Michaela Solomon, University of Regina
Kyrsten Stringer, University of Regina
Caitlin Taylor, University of Regina
Steph Wechsler, Ryerson University
Faculty Supervisors:
P.W. Elliott, University of Regina
Trevor Grant, University of Regina
Series Producer:
Patti Sonntag, Michener Fellow, based at Concordia University
Institutional Credits:
Concordia University, Department of Journalism
Ryerson University, School of Journalism
University of British Columbia, Graduate School of Journalism
University of Regina, School of Journalism
Global News
The Michener Awards Foundation
Corporate Mapping Project
Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives
Parkland Institute
University of Victoria
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
Watch the televised investigation: Sunday and Monday on Global National at 5:30 CT/MT/PT & 6:30 ET/ATRobert Cribb can be reached at rcribb@thestar.ca
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Many homeowners unaware they lived in reservoir 'flood pools.'
31,000 property owners learned during Harvey's mass evacuations that their homes lie in what the federal government considers emergency lake beds behind the Barker and Addicks dams. Engineers call them "flood pools."
The two earthen dams were erected by the Army Corps of Engineers in the 1940s to protect downtown Houston after flooding wrecked the city in 1935. Unlike traditional "lake-forming" dams, the reservoirs are not clearly defined and are dry much of the year. The water they impound during heavy rains sprawls west across flatland into what was once open prairie. The flood pool grows depending on rainfall and on how much water the Army Corps releases through the dams' gates.
At least 4,000 houses, apartment buildings and businesses west of the Barker Reservoir were damaged during Harvey, according to preliminary estimates by county officials. In the hardest-hit neighborhoods, floodwater rose more than 5 feet and did not recede for a week or more. Authorities have not yet released damage estimates for the area around Addicks.
Homeowners in the reservoir area, many of whom do not have flood insurance, worry about what the next downpour will bring.
The threat to these suburban subdivisions has been years in the making, a Chronicle review found.
Harris and Fort Bend counties and the city of Houston approved construction of thousands of homes near the reservoirs, even though county leaders and engineers have known since the 1990s that the properties could be inundated by flood pools in a major storm, according to public documents and interviews.
Subdivisions kept sprouting even as bigger and more frequent storms created ever-larger flood pools. Of the 11 biggest pools ever recorded at Addicks and Barker, 10 have occurred since 1990, according to Army Corps records. Harvey generated the biggest pool ever.
Yet public awareness of the danger has been minimal. If a home is within the 100-year flood plain, bank rules and insurance policies require a prospective purchaser to be told. Banks typically will not grant a mortgage for a home within the 100-year-old floodplain unless the buyer takes out flood insurance.
A flood pool is different. The Army Corps doesn't require home buyers to be notified of the risk. Nor does Texas law. Nor do federal flood insurance rules. Nor do mortgage lenders' disclosure practices.
Fort Bend County officials began adding small-print warnings about reservoir flood pools to subdivision maps beginning in 1994. But few home buyers consult or even know about the maps, known as plats. Harris County, which has far more properties at risk from the flood pools, never added warnings to its subdivision maps.
"We had no idea - we were not told," Soule said. "Why did they build a house here if they knew it was inside a flood pool? If we would have known, we would not have purchased this house."
Shocking discovery
The Army Corps can control the size of the flood pools by releasing water through the dams' gates. But the overriding purpose of Addicks and Barker, as Corps documents make clear, is to protect the center of Houston. Even limited releases damage properties downstream.
Over the years, the Army Corps permitted parks, public roads, baseball fields, golf courses, a small zoo, paved parking lots and other amenities to be built on government land within the two reservoirs. This effectively disguised the real purpose of this rustic acreage and made the area more appealing to developers and home buyers.
In other states, the Corps has acquired easements near dams and levees to compensate property owners for areas where it expects to divert or store floodwaters. A class action lawsuit filed in federal court on behalf of homeowners affected by the Barker and Addicks flood pools contends that the Corps should have done the same here.
In a 2009 master plan, the Corps acknowledged that parks as well as public roads and a YMCA camp located on and next to government-owned land in the two reservoirs could be subject to long-term flooding. The master plan included maps indicating that privately owned land around Barker and Addicks could also be inundated for as long as 49 days in a 100-year flood event.
That report did not list any neighborhoods by name.
The specific subdivisions most at risk were identified only at the height of Harvey, when Harris and Fort Bend county officials released a list of more than 100 neighborhoods subject to "voluntary evacuation" because of the Army Corps' decision to limit releases from the reservoirs. By then, streets already had flooded in many neighborhoods, making it impossible to get out by car.
The evacuation orders affected more than 31,000 homes and more than 140,000 people, the Chronicle estimated by studying flood pool maps and census data.
Many of those residents were shocked to discover that their properties were within reach of a reservoir flood pool. That's partly because Texans are accustomed to using the 100-year flood plain to define the geography of risk.
The flood plain is determined in large part by elevation and proximity to creek beds and rivers. Flood pool boundaries depend more on Army Corps decisions about how much water to release and how much to hold back. Pools can grow quickly and without warning, depending on weather conditions and Corps decisions.
Kanani Hoover learned the difference during Harvey. She lives in Bear Creek Village, on the north edge of Addicks Reservoir. She evacuated early, because she knew she lived in the 100-year flood plain. She and her 15-year-old son and their dog had gotten trapped in a bedroom by rising water during the Tax Day floods of April 2016. "I didn't want to put my son through that again."
The three were staying in the Wyndham Hotel off Texas 6 on Sunday, Aug. 27, when Harris County officials posted online a map of streets that could be submerged by the Addicks Reservoir pool. Hoover pored over an image that showed streets shaded in a rainbow of colors. Her sister, Tiffany, lived in the same neighborhood. Her entire block appeared in red - a danger zone.
Hoover texted her sister to get out.
U.S. Rep Ted Poe, R-Texas, who represents Bear Creek Village, said he learned about the danger posed by flood pools after the Tax Day flood, when constituents complained to him that reservoir water had spilled into their homes and streets. Poe has a mailing list of hundreds of affected homeowners and has pushed for studies and dam improvements.
At a town hall organized by Poe last year, Richard Long, supervisory natural resources manager for the Army Corps' Galveston District, drew gasps when he told homeowners that it was not a matter of if Addicks Reservoir would flood their homes, but when
After Harvey, about 400 frustrated Bear Creek area residents crowded into an elementary school cafeteria for another town hall organized by Poe, this one featuring Col. Lars Zetterstrom, commander of the Corps' Galveston district.
Zetterstrom told the crowd that the reservoir's flood pool had never before damaged homes.
"In the 70-year history of the Addicks dam and reservoir, Hurricane Harvey was the first time water was retained inside the reservoir that impacted anyone's structures," Zetterstrom replied.
The crowd erupted: "No!" "What?"
Zetterstrom said previous flooding was caused by water flowing through the Addicks watershed, not by water impounded in the reservoir. Many in the crowd were unconvinced.
Corps officials did not respond to questions about the Corps' decisions during Harvey or its management of the reservoirs. The agency canceled an interview with Long and referred questions to a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Justice, who declined comment.
Before Harvey, few homeowners near the reservoirs knew they faced any risk from the flood pool.
Poe said rules about notification have to change. "I think we have to, as a community, understand that there needs to be some kind of notice about the flood pool. First of all, they don't know they may get flooded. And second, they don't know the reservoir is there not to protect them but to protect the city of Houston downstream," Poe said.
$100,000 in repairs
Sherry Mack, 69, didn't know about flood pools either - and she's been in the real estate business for three decades.
Mack picked her 1,800-square–foot bungalow because it's next to Bear Creek Pioneers Park, on the northern border of Addicks. Mack, who can't swim and depends on an electric wheelchair to get around, was asleep when water entered her house during the 2016 Tax Day flood. She managed to escape as water surrounded the hospital bed she uses at home.
By August 2017, Mack, a researcher for a title company, had spent $100,000 to repair that damage and modify her entire house so she could live comfortably with her disability. Mack lost the ability to walk after contracting a rare retrovirus more than a decade ago.
A day before Harvey hit, she evacuated to a friend's home on higher ground.
How Addicks, Barker dams keep Houston safe
Water flows downward into creeks and streams in Addicks and Barker watersheds, kept behind large earthen dams. The dams control flow into Buffalo Bayou, which keeps downtown Houston from flooding. Too much water on both sides, and the flow is impacted. That’s complicated by the Houston Ship Channel, which is actually pushing water into Buffalo Bayou backwards. This week rising pool levels in Barker Reservoir and Addicks Reservoir spilled over into adjacent subdivisions that sit against the dams, shown below.
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Niki Ashton has a plan to fix Trudeau's 'patchwork' of green funding.
It's time for direct federal government intervention to drive Canada's transition to a greener economy, says NDP leadership candidate Niki Ashton.
It's time for direct federal government intervention to drive Canada's transition to a greener economy, says NDP leadership candidate Niki Ashton.
After six months of campaigning, Ashton is entering the final stages of her bid to lead Canada's New Democrats against three leadership rivals: Quebec member of Parliament Guy Caron, Ontario MP Charlie Angus and Jagmeet Singh, a member of the Ontario legislature.
Online voting began Sept. 18 and the 1st ballot results are to be announced this Sunday, Oct. 1.
Ashton, who spoke to National Observer on Monday morning at Planet Coffee in Ottawa, has called for the creation of a new crown corporation called Green Canada that would direct federal funding to invest in climate change adaptation and an economic transition.
"We are where we are in terms of climate change because of the kind of economic system that we have," Ashton said, after ordering a cookie and juice at the popular coffee shop in Ottawa's ByWard Market in the middle of a late-September heat wave.
"It’s clear to me as we sit here in 30+ C weather, and given the summer we’ve had where we’ve seen extreme weather phenomena, that the time is now to act. We need to pull out all the stops, and that includes significantly upping not just federal investment, but also making a clear role for federal investment through a crown corporation."
She said that guiding a green transition was too important a job to be left to the private sector — or even an existing federal organization such as Sustainable Development Technology Canada. These "patchwork approaches to funding" aren't working, she said.
In the wide-ranging interview, Ashton also weighed in on the German election, on Singh and a recent controversy surrounding Manitoba NDP leader Wab Kinew, and on the issues of populism, free tuition, public ownership, tax reform, systemic racism and gender-based violence.
The following interview has been edited for length and style:
One of your key messages is talking about a bold vision, the need to reject the status quo. People describe populism as centering on big, bold claims and rejecting the establishment too. As we saw in Germany this weekend, populism continues to be on the rise. Yet something tells me you don't identify with this movement. How do you champion a bold vision while staying away from populism?
“I come from the prairies, and there is such a thing as prairie populism. Tommy Douglas and our pioneers really adhered to that philosophy. What we’re seeing today, though, is a very dangerous, divisive kind of politics.
"We saw in the German election, the far right has gotten the most support its ever gotten since the end of the Second World War. It’s extremely troubling to see that. There is a silver lining in seeing the way in which Die Linke, the left-wing party, has received a fair bit of support.
"But still, what’s clear here is the rise of the right in a number of countries — the U.S., the U.K., Germany, elsewhere — and I think it’s something that we are apt to seeing here [in Canada]. To a certain extent, we saw the way in which the Conservative leadership race was inspired by Trump-like politics and Trump-like ideas.
"I believe that that’s all the more reason for us in the NDP to put forward a bold vision that takes on the big challenges of our time — inequality, climate change — but brings people together, rather than dividing them or scapegoating, or using the politics of hate and division, which Trump uses.
“He [Trump] will talk about economic inequality, but then he’ll blame immigrants, or Muslims, or he’ll use the politics of hate. I think that’s why it’s really critical that we speak to these issues that clearly are on the minds of people, and are clearly affecting their day-to-day lives. But that our vision is one that’s inclusive, that’s tolerant, that’s unifying."
Would you call yourself a prairie populist?
“I’m definitely inspired by prairie populism, the kind that we saw in the [Co-operative Commonwealth Federation] and the NDP. We put out an email yesterday that did a version of Mouseland for our campaign. It’s really premised on the fact that Tommy Douglas talked a lot about bold ideas. We took the language and inserted some of our messages.
"It’s safe to say that we’re the campaign that’s talked the most about getting back to our roots, reconnecting with our principles, reflecting on the past and building from there to head into the future."
An image from the version of Mouseland, the fable famously told by Tommy Douglas, that was put out by Niki Ashton's campaign. Mouseland is about mice who keep trying to solve their problems by electing two different kinds of cats to lead them, until one mouse wonders why they don't elect fellow mice instead. Image via Niki Ashton Facebook
Your plan has three big themes — economic justice, social justice, environmental justice. Starting with economic justice, let’s talk about your campaign’s support for free tuition. Ontario and New Brunswick already have policies in place for lower-income families. How is your idea different?
“What we’re proposing is universal, so not income-based. The model we’re looking at is what you have in a number of European countries.
"For us, [it’s about] two things: one is the recognition that education is a right, and secondly that the costs of education are a major contributor to the kind of inter-generational inequality we’re seeing today.
"As a millennial, I’ve spent a fair bit of time talking about the rise of precarious work, but also inter-generational inequality facing millennials, and there’s no question that sky-high tuition fees and high student debt figure prominently in the kind of instability that our generation is facing.
"When two-thirds of jobs in Canada today require a post-secondary education, we shouldn’t be indebting a generation for simply doing what we’ve asked of them. So what our campaign has said is, if we’re going to tackle inter-generational inequality, a key piece is eliminating tuition fees."
Not income-based, and every province — free for everybody, then?
“Yes. We’ve said that the framework would be a post-secondary education act, like the Canada Health Act, and formalizing clear federal transfers in pursuit of free tuition. What we’re saying is, it needs to be universal.”
NDP leadership hopeful Niki Ashton on Sept. 17, 2017. Ashton wants to see a post-secondary education act similar to the Canada Health Act that would "formalize" federal transfers to fund universal tuition. Photo by Andrew Meade
You also talk about more public ownership. Could you give some examples of what you’d like to see owned by the public?
“First of all, one of the things we’ve said is if we’re going to talk about economic justice, one of the areas we need to tackle is the neo-liberal agenda, which has pushed privatization, deregulation and outsourcing. It has clearly not contributed to greater wealth redistribution.
"What we’re saying is, yes, we need to fight privatization, but that’s also not enough. We also need to propose public ownership. We’ve proposed public ownership in three key areas.
"One, in the banking sector, through the creation of a postal bank. Secondly, in the health sector, through the creation of a crown corporation that can be involved in the purchasing and distribution of pharmaceuticals, and that would be in conjunction with [a national] pharmacare program.
"The third would be in the energy sector — 20 years ago people would talk about nationalizing oil. What we’re saying is, there needs to be a public entity when it comes to investing in the green transition.
"That’s actually part of our environmental justice platform: we’ve proposed a crown corporation called Green Canada, that would direct funding towards the green transition and work with citizens’ advisory boards, to best invest in adaptation and transition.”
We'll talk more about Green Canada in a bit. First — when we talk about economic justice, we often talk about tax fairness. I’m interested in what you think of the Liberals’ tax reform agenda?
“First, I would say that our tax reform plan has been recognized as one of the most progressive in a generation. There’s no question that if we’re going to tackle inequality, we need significant tax reform.
"Working-class and middle-class Canadians are paying their fair share of tax. It’s the rich and corporations who are getting away without paying their fair share, legally or otherwise. I do believe that the Liberal proposal is a beginning at addressing tax reform. It is problematic in certain aspects.
"But what’s most problematic is that they’re not going after the big tax cheats. They’re not closing the stock-option loophole. The KPMG scandal points to the fact that they’re not going after the kind of tax-evasion that so many Canadians are enraged about.
"They’re not upping the corporate tax rate — a lower corporate tax rate as we’ve seen in Canada hasn’t actually brought the sort of wealth creation that (former prime minister) Stephen Harper promised us it would.
"Really what I’d say is, it misses the major point, and as more and more Canadians are feeling squeezed, there’s a real sense of, if we’re going to be fair, let’s make sure that those that are getting away [without] paying taxes, particularly those that are getting away in nefarious ways are being held to account.”
NDP leadership hopeful Niki Ashton on Sept. 17, 2017. Ashton says she wonders why Finance Minister Bill Morneau hasn't talked as much about stock-options and tax evasion as he has about tax fairness when it comes to income sprinking. Photo by Andrew Meade
You talk about the Liberals “out-lefting” the NDP. Is this an example of something where the Liberals are trying to capture left-wing votes that should belong to the NDP?
“I think that it’s definitely a more populist way of doing politics.
"But again, some of the rhetoric you hear from the Liberals, even on this proposed tax plan, there’s a fair bit of — how can we say — I mean, you hear [Finance Minister] Bill Morneau talk about it, he’s very focused on this. He feels very strongly about it. I wonder why he doesn’t feel as strongly about closing the stock-option loophole, or going after major tax evaders.
"So I do believe a fair bit of it is a feigned kind of outrage when in fact we’re leaving the wealthiest off the hook."
You brought up Green Canada. You obviously know about Sustainable Development Technology Canada, which does seem to do similar things as what you’re proposing. How will Green Canada be different?
“One of the things that we recognize is that the federal government is not pulling its weight when it comes to investment in the green transition.
"We have a government that talks a good talk on climate change, and yet goes and approves pipelines that will take us further away from meeting our climate change commitments. We’re also not seeing the kind of partnerships [we need] in the green transition.
"So what we’ve said is there needs to be a clear body that directs that funding, and it should not be left up to the private sector. We are where we are in terms of climate change because of the kind of economic system that we have.
"So instead, we ought to have a crown corporation that’s publicly controlled, but again with an advisory capacity for grassroots involvement, and that would in turn work with other entities, whether it’s provinces, municipalities, First Nations, to invest in climate change adaptation and transition.
Why the belief in crown corporations? Some people are a bit hesitant to go all in, given some past problems, but you seem to have a fundamental belief in them.
“Where I come from, in Manitoba, we have a lot of strong crown corporations. Crown corporations allow for us to provide a public good, all the while benefiting the public in their economic model. It’s not a for-profit situation.
"I think in the case of climate change, we’ve seen the way in which leaving it up to foundations, patchwork approaches to funding isn’t actually working.
"I would argue that there are many on the ground — whether it’s First Nations; I know this from my constituency, or provincial governments, like Ontario, Alberta and others — that are keen to move full-steam ahead, that require a strong federal partner, and we’re not seeing that right now.
"I believe that a crown corporation would be a way of clearly formalizing that capacity, and ultimately the goal of this entity would be to move full-steam ahead, investing in the transition."
Some say the market is functioning abnormally because of artificial factors — an example that's often raised is fossil fuel subsidies — and that if you fix those, the market itself will accelerate the low-carbon transition because it will make the most economic sense. You don’t seem to believe that.
“I definitely agree we should get rid of fossil fuel subsidies, another example of the way in which our tax and subsidization policies are not working. But I believe that we need to go a lot further.
"It’s clear to me as we sit here in 30+ C weather, and given the summer we’ve had where we’ve seen extreme weather phenomena, that the time is now to act. We need to pull out all the stops, and that includes significantly upping not just federal investment, but also making a clear role for federal investment through a crown corporation.
Finally, on social justice. Several of your policies are focused on police, like talking about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and restorative justice, having the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls investigate police, or providing training for police for racial justice. Why such a focus?
“That’s a particular focus in our racial justice program. We do have a pretty extensive social justice platform — we were the first ones to have a gender justice, LGBTQ justice. I think we might be the only ones with a disability justice platform.
“But in terms of racial justice, we focused on three areas: one is policing, another is public safety and another is immigration. What’s clear to me is that — as I’ve worked with many racial justice activists — systemic racism is alive and well in all those three areas. That’s why we wanted to have a clearly comprehensive platform in taking on systemic racism in those three areas.
“I would say that in terms of the policing piece, there’s a lot more that we ought to be doing. I will acknowledge that the police — I’m talking about the RCMP here — that there has been an openness to dealing with sexual harassment for example, but we need to go a lot further on that front, and we also need to be giving a clear directive on the need to address systemic racism within the force.
“I find it unacceptable that the [Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women] Inquiry does not include involving the police and investigating the role of the police in contributing to violence against Indigenous women. It’s also clear to me — and I’ve been an advocate for the Inquiry for a long time — but also an advocate on issues around sexual harassment and the police — the reporting mechanism needs to be far more impartial and accessible.
“We’ve made a very clear call for putting an end to carding, which is a tool to intimidate and obviously target racialized communities, Indigenous communities, and there’s a huge movement afoot to put a stop to it in city police forces, but we’ve said we should be looking at that nationally as well."
I believe survivors. Leaders should step up and do the same. https://t.co/iADwnj3p38
— Niki Ashton (@nikiashton) September 20, 2017
You told The National Post that you were “troubled” by a quote you read from Jagmeet Singh speaking positively of Wab Kinew’s commitment to fighting gender-based violence. Do you think Singh doesn’t believe survivors?
“I guess what me and many are saying, and I’ve been in touch with a number of young women on this issue, is it’s not enough to just say that gender-based violence matters. We need to deal with it — we need a platform.
"When an issue is in front of us, it’s absolutely essential that we make a clear statement that we believe survivors. I’ve done that; I think there’s a disconnect in celebrating, as he has done, Wab Kinew’s — well, there’s a disconnect between what he was quoted as saying in the media, where he was very positive about Wab Kinew’s approach to gender-based violence, and I found that to be a very clear statement.
"I then heard that he’d indicated that he believed survivors. There’s a disconnect between those two things. Because as we know, Wab Kinew has consistently denied Tara Hart’s experience.
"There’s a difference between using the general message of, I believe survivors, and actually in the moment, when the issue is in front of us, doing so. As I’ve said on numerous occasions, I believe Tara Hart, and I believe survivors that come forward.
"I will say that Tara Hart and her family are from my constituency, and the issue of violence against Indigenous women is something that I feel very strongly about — violence against all women.
"And I don’t believe there’s room to equivocate on these issues. I understand that he’s gone on to say a few more things — I haven’t followed all of it. But in that one instance, or that one interview, I felt, and others have felt as well, that there was a significant disconnect
What do you think about the narrative now that this has become a wedge in the leadership race?
“I don’t know about a wedge. I think, in the post-Jian Ghomeshi era, the question of believing survivors has become central to how we move forward on sexual violence and on gender-based violence, and for the NDP, a progressive party, a party that believes in feminist values, this is central to who we are.
"I’m a proud feminist, I’ve been a feminist activist for a long time, and when the issue comes up, it needs to be brought up, people need to take a stand.
"I would say that there’s a lot of other issues in this leadership [race], and I have found at times that there isn’t much focus on policy — in my case much more focused on my pregnancy than policy.
"But on something like this, like I said I think it’s important that people know where their leadership candidates are."
A promotional banner for Niki Ashton's 2011 NDP leadership bid. Her campaign used the slogan "new politics" to describe a progressive, diverse vision of the NDP that brings Canadians together. Internet Archive screenshot
You’re the campaign veteran in this race. How have you seen the campaign so far, in relation to the last campaign?
"I have found a much greater appetite, within this race, amongst members, prospective members, to talk about policy and vision. I think in the last race there was a lot of pressure to be back in Parliament, fighting Stephen Harper, winning government, as we were Official Opposition.
“This time around, it’s clear to me that many on the ground feel like the NDP lost its way, the 2015 election was very troubling, and there’s again incredible interest in getting the party back on track.
"And I’ve seen, and we’ve seen it through our campaign, by putting forward a bold and principled agenda, that people have gravitated, mobilized, been inspired, gotten involved — both members, people that left the NDP for a long time, and also young people who signed up for the first time.
“I would say that that’s something that I didn’t see in the same way in the last leadership [race], but I think has made for a very inspiring race, and very dynamic as well. The fact that we get to talk about ideas, that we get to talk about vision and a way forward, that’s what this should be all about I believe.
That’s interesting. On one hand, you’re suggesting that overall, the race has been more policy-driven, but on the other hand, you’ve found there sometimes isn’t much focus on your campaign’s policy.
“Yes. I would say the mainstream media — maybe with the exception of National Observer — but if you Google, the ratio of articles about me being pregnant, to any and all policies that we’ve put forward — I would say that there’s almost been parallel [campaigns].
"The mainstream media’s focused a fair bit on pregnancy, and I would say even like Jagmeet Singh’s outfits, some of the superficial stuff. Whereas grassroots members want to get in there and have a discussion about what we believe in, the kind of vision we want to put forward, and how we take on the two biggest challenges of our time, growing inequality and climate change.
“One of the things that I’ve also seen is, not just in terms of vision, but also movement-building. Yes, it’s important to win elections, but we have to look beyond just our work in Parliament, we have to look at building a movement for change, working with social movements, working with activists on the ground.
"That’s something that’s been really important for our campaign from the beginning. That’s a long-term commitment, and I’m seeing a lot of people that share NDP values wanting to be a part of that."
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