Category: Fracking

3rd July from Scc­NEWS Con­voys of trucks car­ry­ing equip­ment descend­ed on West New­ton yes­ter­day, where Rath­lin Ener­gy are com­menc­ing their explorato­ry frack­ing drilling. As the first major activ­i­ty at the East York­shire site kicked off, a hand­ful of pro­test­ers and many more anx­ious locals could only watch in hor­ror as the frack­ing trucks made their way along the long sin­gle track lane towards the well.

The con­voys were pro­tect­ed by hun­dreds of police and riot vans, while local res­i­dents were blocked from access­ing their own homes and one elder­ly res­i­dent burst into tears at the scale of what was hap­pen­ing.

West New­ton is one of two loca­tions in East York­shire that Rath­lin are attempt­ing to frack. At both West New­ton and Craw­ber­ry Hill, Rath­lin have had plan­ning per­mis­sion for explorato­ry drilling since 2012. Ear­li­er this year they also got Envi­ron­ment Agency per­mits that last until Sep­tem­ber, in the case of Craw­ber­ry Hill, and longer in the case of West New­ton. “We knew they were due to do the tests at either site at any time”, says our source from cam­paign group HEY Frack Off.

Small protests camps were set up at both loca­tions in May. Craw­ber­ry was the larg­er, with num­ber aver­ag­ing at 20: Not only was it look­ing like­li­er that Rath­lin would hit there first as the per­mits ran out soon­er, but it’s near­er urban cen­tres like Bev­er­ley and Hull. Cru­cial­ly, it is in the area of the mas­sive under­ground aquifer that is relied on for drink­ing water for much of the pop­u­la­tion of Hull and East York­shire: “If that were to be con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed it would be an absolute cat­a­stro­phe”. So far, Craw­ber­ry Hill has yet to see any sig­nif­i­cant activ­i­ty.

Over at West New­ton, the pro­tec­tion camp has been tiny but dogged­ly per­sis­tent. The vil­lagers in the very rur­al area have been slow on the uptake but now seem to be wak­ing up to what’s about to hap­pen on their doorsteps. At first, they’d been bizarrely anx­ious about the camp and upset about the pro­test­ers’ pres­ence, rather than their vil­lages sur­round­ing a hell­mouth of the envi­ron­men­tal armaged­don.

“It’s an unbe­liev­ably con­ser­v­a­tive area. Some peo­ple did­n’t even want to con­tact HEY Frack Off because of our ‘con­tro­ver­sial’ name!”, says our con­tact. “Most of the local res­i­dents have swal­lowed Rath­lin’s line and their PR hook, line and sinker.”

But recent well-attend­ed pub­lic meet­ings, and indi­vid­ual con­ver­sa­tions, have shown aware­ness is slow­ly start­ing to sink in. Maybe the locals are slow­ly start­ing to organ­ise?

Just to show how much they respect the local res­i­dents, when the con­voys came onto site at West New­ton yes­ter­day, they “ran roughshod” over the plan­ning con­di­tions that had been agreed between the local coun­cil (East Rid­ing of York­shire) and Rath­lin Ener­gy to sweet­en the frack­ing pill for local res­i­dents.

First­ly, they failed to give the stip­u­lat­ed 14 days notice before any activ­i­ty com­menced. Sneaky, but not sur­pris­ing giv­en the momen­tum the anti-frack­ing move­men­t’s been gain­ing. Sec­ond­ly, they spec­tac­u­lar­ly flout­ed the traf­fic man­age­ment plan which promised local res­i­dents no more than one truck every ten min­utes. Yes­ter­day saw two mas­sive con­voys of lor­ries – around 65 vehi­cles enter­ing the site. Need­less to say, the well pad was crowd­ed.

In terms of polic­ing, our con­tact reports: “Police have said they have learned from the mis­takes of Bar­ton Moss and Bal­combe where they allowed peace­ful protest in the form of slow walk­ing in front of vehi­cles down pub­lic high­ways. It’s been made quite clear in East York­shire that any­one who gets in the way of a vehi­cle on the pub­lic high­way will be arrest­ed imme­di­ate­ly.”

Police have even admit­ted to cam­paign­ers that it’s a “game of num­bers”, and that if there were as many pro­test­ers as police they’d have to review their tac­tics.

The loca­tion of the West New­ton site is so rur­al that keep­ing up com­mu­ni­ca­tions – from sim­ple phone calls to live stream­ing – is dif­fi­cult. The cam­paign is encour­ag­ing any poten­tial pro­tec­tors to get in touch. The camp phone num­ber is 07773739937.