OK Fracking Crimes: You break it: You fix it

Oklahoma City, OK: February 25, 2019: State Representative Zack Taylor (R-Seminole) is proposing House Bill 1379, which is a bill that would hold horizontal oil & gas fracking operators responsible for the damage caused by their horizontal frack jobs. The bill will be heard Tuesday, February 26 at 1:30pm in the House Judiciary Committee.

“Hundreds of Oklahoma vertical wells are being destroyed by massive horizontal frack jobs,” stated the OEPA’s Oklahoma City Attorney and Regulatory Affairs director, Richard Parrish.  “At least 47 or these ‘frack hits’ have been documented by the Oklahoma Corporation Commission as causing environmental pollution.”

The Corporation Commission currently holds the owner of the vertical well responsible for the pollution being caused by the horizontal frack jobs performed by others.

The Oklahoma Energy Producers Alliance supports HB 1379 and is calling the legislation the “Art and Yvonne Platt” bill. Art and Yvonne are lifelong Oklahomans whose forefathers participated in the Oklahoma Land run. They have now lost everything they have as a result of a horizontal frack job that destroyed their wells.  “I’m 80 years old. We were depending on this lease for our retirement. We’ve spent every cent we had trying to fix the damage the horizontal operator in flicted when they fracked into our well,” Art Platt said. Now Art and Yvonne have been forced to leave Oklahoma and move in with their children in Texas.

OEPA Chairman Dewey Bartlett said, “We applaud Representative Taylor for addressing this issue and hope that this legislation will help bring OIPA-OKOGA to the table to hopefully find common ground on this problem.  Horizontal frack events are costing small business oil and gas producers their livelihood and are endangering the Oklahoma environment in the process.”