Industry fueling region’s transformation

[white cloud]

“The land is our land, not gas land.”

Those words appear on a sign staked defiantly outside a home in Flower Mound, a hotbed of natural gas drilling and production activity.

The message may work as a rallying cry, but it’s not true. For better or worse, North Texas — like a growing number of urban areas across the country — is a land deeply changed by gas extraction.

In Flower Mound, a town known for its careful urban planning, prairie is disappearing under gas wells, compressor stations and a maze of other industrial equipment.

In Dish, residents including the firebrand mayor are moving out, weary of the toxic fumes that leak from a network of gas compressors and pipelines so vast that the tiny town is often called the Grand Central Station of the Barnett Shale.

As wells and production equipment continue popping up alongside subdivisions across the region, more and more people in cities such as Denton, Argyle, Bartonville and Fort Worth are learning what it’s like to have gas drilling as a neighbor. An industry that once operated largely out of view is now in their backyard, beside their children’s school, next to their church. For some, fears of explosions, noxious emissions and tainted groundwater no longer seem so distant.

http://www.dentonrc.com/sharedcontent/dws/drc/localnews/stories/DRC_overview_0327.2237a1554.html