FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE New Documents Show Hughes Planned to Frack the Orangetree Well 6 October 2014 Naples, FL -- New public records documents reveal that the Florida Department of Environmental Protection knew on December 23 of last year, and possibly as early as October, that the Dan A. Hughes oil company was planning to hydraulically fracture their Orangetree oil well outside of Naples. The documents were received on Friday, when Hughes dropped their trade secret opposition to a public records lawsuit filed by Preserve Our Paradise, Inc. against the DEP. The first released document is a Halliburton Fracpro 2012 Hydraulic Fracture recommendation to Hughes dated October 21, 2013. The second released document is a Well Proposal dated 23 December 2013 prepared for Hughes by the (unaffiliated) Baker-Hughes oil services company. This was apparently the document that formally notified the Florida Department of Environmental Protection of Hughes intention to conduct fracking-like activities. Although the second document nowhere uses the term hydraulic fracturing, the technical specifications are virtually identical to the earlier Halliburton hydraulic fracturing recommendation. Until the release of these latest documents, the DEP and Hughes had continued to claim that the workover operation conducted at the well was not a fracking operation. Don Loritz, Vice President of Preserve Our Paradise, reiterated the organizations concern that the DEP and Hughes had long planned to secretly conduct the fracking operations at the Orangetree well over the Christmas holidays, while no one would be paying attention. An anonymous phone tip on December 27 alerted Paradise to a fracking convoy heading for the Orangetree well. When information on the convoys activity was not posted on the DEPs website, Paradise filed a court action on April 2 to force the release of public records. Then, on April 7 the DEP filed a consent order imposing a small fine on Hughes and giving Hughes one year to test for possible resulting pollution. On April 18 the DEP revealed the consent order to the press and claimed that it had caught Hughes performing an unauthorized operation on January 1. Since then, the DEP has maintained it had no prior knowledge of Hughes intentions, but the new documents cast doubt on that assertion. Loritz explained, For some reason, these new documents do not include cover letters or the usual DEP timestamps, so we do not yet know when the DEP obtained the Halliburton recommendation. Beyond timestamps, the DEP has released to the public no records of meetings or telephone calls concerning the activities at the Orangetree well. Unfortunately, now that the Collier County Commission has dropped its lawsuit against the DEP, the public may never learn what if any regulatory efforts the DEP made to protect the public health in advance of the fracking-like incident in Orangetree. A chronology of events surrounding the fracking of the Orangetree well is available at preserveourparadise.org/?page_id=3703. The trade secret documents, along with all other public records released to Paradise, are available at ftp://vsymp.org/prr%20fdep%204-2-14/Brookes%2010-3-14. For further information, contact Don Loritz, Vice-President, Preserve Our Paradise, 937-361-0774 Pam Gharabally, Secretary, Preserve Our Paradise, 239-273-6107 Ralf Brookes, Attorney for Paradise, 239-910-5464
Posted on: Tue, 07 Oct 2014 13:05:40 +0000
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