At first glance the small town of less than 8,000 inhabitants looks like typical country America, the kind of place that John Updike might once have written about. Except Cushing, in north-east Oklahoma, is very different.
Now, more tanks are being built in Cushing as storage companies seek to increase stocks at lower oil prices.
Dr Riki Ott has seen most oil-related disasters at first hand. A campaigner for energy transportation reform since the Exxon Valdez, she sees the same convergence of risk and lack of preparedness in Cushing that she once saw in Prince William Sound:
“It has all of the ingredients for a major disaster. Government and industry officials are misleading the public and hardly anyone knows about it.”The oil is in Cushing because the town sits at the convergence of several of the largest pipelines in the country and has been a hub for oil transportation and storage since the early 20th century.
One of those pipelines is essentially the southern leg of what has come to be known as the Keystone XL, perhaps the most controversial energy development of the last 20 years. In total, there are about 14,000 miles of pipeline in Oklahoma.
Oil is stored in vast quantities at Cushing in above-ground storage containers that litter the fields surrounding the town. This is a place where “oilfield” has nothing to do with drilling, in a state where the oil and gas industry has become as powerful as it is anywhere in the United States.
Now, thanks to fracking, it’s also one of the most active seismic areas in the entire United States.
Ironically it is
the fracking industry that created this very real and little-discussed threat to Cushing which, according to Oklahoma Sierra Club’s director Johnson Bridgwater, has
“the potential for producing one of the worst environmental catastrophes in American history.”More information in the article...
[
link to www.independent.co.uk]
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