Last week, Wyoming Gov. Dave Freudenthal criticized the Bureau of Land Management's land-use plan for the area for failing to address the impact of oil and gas development on fish and wildlife. And some 50 people held a sit-in last weekend on the gas fields outside Pinedale to protest the drilling's impact on the environment.
"Our air quality, our water quality and our quality of life are being eroded beyond recognition," says Linda Baker of the Upper Green River Valley Coalition, a Pinedale-based conservation group. "Some days you can't see the mountains. And they're five miles away. [Pinedale] was an idyllic little cow town before this boom started. We're Wyoming, we're not New Jersey. But that's what this place is going to look like."
Kent Spence, a Jackson, Wyo., attorney, has filed a handful of wrongful-death lawsuits against oil and gas companies whose workers have died in rig accidents. Spence believes that oil and gas companies, in their rush to extract more fuel from the ground, have lowered safety standards and hired roughnecks who are undertrained and overworked.
"It's always been a place where companies cut corners on safety," says Spence, who is suing Halliburton on behalf of one worker he claims fell to his death on a rig near Kemmerer after being on the job for 47 straight hours. "They're short-handed, and they want to keep this development going full tilt, because every hole they punch is money."
But a spokesman for the state's oil and gas industry stands by its safety record. Bruce Hinchey, president of the Petroleum Association of Wyoming, believes drilling-rig safety has improved since a training center opened several years ago in Casper, where roughnecks receive at least four weeks' instruction.
Hinchey also believes that complaints about belching smoke from the oil fields are overstated.
"There's always going to be more impact to the air quality as you have more industry move in. But we have to meet all the environmental regulations. We're probably the most heavily regulated industry around," he says. "We've always had abundant wildlife and clean air and water [in Wyoming]. And we'll continue to have that."
